Kiswahili Communication Strategies in Response to Covid-19 in Tanzania

Abstract

When life circumstances change, language use will definitely change to reflect those new developments. Over 2020–2021, strategies adopted by Kiswahili users in Tanzania resulted in new linguistic features of the nation’s lingua franca in response to COVID-19. New communication strategies were necessary for two reasons: the contagion was novel; and the pandemic was presented as an unprecedented threat to human life that necessitated, politically and socially, unprecedented warnings and prohibitions. As a result, at some point political persuasions and alliances affected the way people talked about the contagion. Due to structural and procedural changes imposed by the pandemic, there emerged some new expressions and an increase in the frequency of use of other expressions.