Lingual expressions in the covid-19-related ecolexicons in Indonesian online-media coverage

Language may represent everything related to COVID-19 and, at the same time, being a tool to recognize and prevent the virus. This current research applied the ecolinguistic theory and a qualitative descriptive approach, aiming at researching new terms or lexicons related to the COVID-19 pandemic that existed in Indonesian online mass media. The technique used to collect the data was observation. The results showed that COVID-19 news triggered the emergence of exciting language dynamics. COVID-19 was depicted through dynamic forms of language. Reality coding also occurred dynamically. It was found out that the new health ecolexicons were in the forms of English terms (e.g., lockdown, swab test), synonym forms (e.g., isolasi, karantina), Indonesian abbreviations (e.g., PPE, KLB), and English abbreviations (e.g., WFH, PCR), and acronym forms (e.g., COVID-19, Sars-Cov-2). The identified ecolexicons could be grouped into physical/biological reality, social reality, and symbolic/ideological reality.