Kurdish Media: A Platform for Public Health Advocates in the Coronavirus Pandemic Era

The present paper adopts a sociolinguistic perspective to study the role and importance of the Kurdish language in media that broadcast knowledge on how to restrict the pandemic development in Kurdistan. It is an interdisciplinary study, integrating public health, media, and linguistics to answer how the Kurdish language can be used in the agenda of Kurdish media advocacy to communicate the information on the novel Coronavirus containment in Kurdistan and to absorb the decision-makers` attention in this regard. In so doing, the researcher cast light on the parallel application of Kurmanji and Sorani dialects in Kurdish media in the era of COVID-19. In this regard, different TV channels have simultaneously used the two Kurdish dialects and presented numerous programs on different aspects of the pandemic. This linguistic coalescence, along with the medical, educational, and traffic measures, has led to people`s social consciousness about the contagion. Furthermore, these media productions can be regarded as part of media advocacy aiming to improve public health in the region, by which some practitioners have the chance of direct contact with people and the policymakers to promote what is crucial to be taken at this tough time. Fortunately, as a result of partial media advocacy, the majority of Kurdistan`s population has taken protective measures to decelerate the pandemic development. Nevertheless, it should not be unnoticed that the public health advocates and their broadcast protective measures would be ineffective- and might never be widely heard- without the crucial intervention of the Kurdish language at the forefront of the war against the viral disease.

In any society, a language exists in a few dialects of which it is in one way the sum. Likewise, Kurmanji and Sorani are the two dialects formally used in the adjacent areas of Iraqi Kurdistan. As the main purpose of sociolinguistics is to dig out the functions of language in society (Wardhaugh, 2006), it is important to realize how the Kurdish language has played a role especially after making the international endeavor to fight Coronavirus pandemic. In this regard, studying the linguistic functions in media, in the process of covering pertinent news and events, is interesting. This is because one of the most considerable linguistic manifestations occurs in media, and the mass communication about how to deal with a social crisis- like an epidemic disease- is possible through media broadcasts.

While the novel COVID-19 outbreak is rapidly developing across the world, its attack rate in Kurdistan is low. Of course, different factors- including medical, educational, military, and economic among many others- are involved in decelerating this rate in Kurdistan. However, these mechanisms would be ineffective if they were not properly disseminated in the at-risk society. Kurdish media has mainly communicated the KRG-enforced Coronavirus containment policy. Kurdish media, as a powerful force, is shaping how people experience the world and themselves. Besides, it conveys a sense of unity against any kind of threat due to the application of both Kurdish dialects.

However, the unseen part of the story is much more thought-provoking; that is, along with the outbreak of the disease, the media advocacy has to some extent caused the society`s public health improvement, and it can achieve its goals by taking few considerations mentioned here. Before that, let’s see what media advocacy is. According to Wallack,

“Media advocacy is defined as the strategic use of mass media to advance public policy initiatives. Media advocacy is rooted in community advocacy and has as its goal the promotion of healthy public policies. … Media advocacy shifts the focus from the personal to the social, from the individual to the political, from the behavior or practice to the policy or environment. While traditional media approaches try to fill the ‘knowledge gap,’ media advocacy addresses the ‘power gap.’ Improvements in health status are believed to come about primarily from gaining more power over the policy environment rather than simply gaining more knowledge about health behaviors.” (1994, p. 420)

What is perceived from the above statement is that, although the dissemination of knowledge of taking care of health and protecting against the contagions can be traditionally expected from media, advocates of public health exploit media to make urgent appeals to authorities to implement effective disease containment strategies. Therefore, the parallel application of both Kurdish dialects in Kurdish media is helpful for simultaneously achieving the traditional and modern goals of media; that is, first, using each dialect in media makes the products much more attractive for those who speak that dialect, and they get knowledge more effectively; second, it lets the decision-makers, organizations, and at-risk populations actively collaborate in adopting and applying protective measures. Now, this query emerges:

How can the practitioners of public health apply the Kurdish language and appear in media to decelerate the pandemic development in the Kurdish society?

To answer this question, relying on Dorfman and Krasnow (2014), the following technical requirements should be pragmatically fulfilled in the Kurdish media: agenda setting, framing (for content and access), and default frames. Moreover, the layers of media advocacy strategy, the overall strategy, and media bites should be illuminated. Of course, the localization of the scholars` framework, while emphasizing the linguistic aspect, needs a detailed explanation that extends far beyond the current space limit.

Therefore, it is enough to emphasize that meeting these requirements and clarifying the strategies of public health advocates on-air necessitate them being linguistically communicative and appealing. In sum, media can provide a platform for public health practitioners to communicate directly with people and authorities, to impress them to care much more about the health issues, and to inform them about the needed protective measures (e.g., self-care, self-isolation, physical distancing, and maintaining personal hygiene, among many others), hence the society can defeat the novel Coronavirus.