JERRIBEL V. REYES
Bachelor of Arts in English Language Studies
Isabela State University-Cauayan Campus
ABSTRACT
Challenges of communicating in the multilingual sector heightened with the unprecedented occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Minoritized groups speaking native languages are the most vulnerable, not until the issues of frontline workers laboring to communicate with challenges to multilingualism are exposed. Three multilingual communication challenges; unfamiliarity and limited knowledge of language use, extreme reliance on official languages, and issue with code-switching are the multilingual challenges faced by frontline workers in Cauayan City. These challenges influenced frontline workers’ roles during the pandemic. Incorporating Briggs and Hallin’s concept of biocommunicability, three roles emerged based on the transmission of information and services. Frontline workers in the public health and emergency management sectors are the source of health information and the regulator of actions, parallel to the roles in charge of dissemination of information in the biomedical-authority and patient-consumer models, extracting the characteristic of linearity of communication. Participation of citizens in decision-making resembles the concept of the public sphere model. The predicaments with the multilingual initiatives were also identified using the 4A’s model, which revealed that little attention paid to the challenges faced by the frontline workers affect the framing of initiatives. Thus, refocusing on the multilingual issues of frontline workers laboring to communicate with the presence of the multilingual communication challenges is equally critical to the role of native languages during a crisis