Discourse of Socio-political Crisis and the Pandemic: A Linguistic Analysis of Jordanian Arabic Cartoons on COVID-19

Abstract

COVID-19 has affected the lifeways of people all over the world. Hence, this study is mainly concerned with the discourse related to COVID-19. It investigated the way cartoonists represented this pandemic in Arabic and whether such a representation reflects the contemporary attitudes and values of the society. For this purpose, 150 cartoons were selected from Alghad, an online Jordanian daily in Arabic, published between the years 2020-2021. Data was analysed through a multimodal analysis. The study revealed ten themes related to COVID-19 and used by Arabic cartoonists including the quarantine and the lockdown, economic devastation, political discourse, social relationship discourse, wishes and occasions, greetings for medical staff, travel and tourism, work and education, health awareness, and dissatisfied citizens. Our study was in agreement with the results of Joubert and Wasserman (2020). They stated that editorial cartoons are important not only because they disseminate information during a public health pandemic but also because they are considered a great source of data to measure public perceptions and sentiments. Keywords: cartoons, economic devastation, health awareness, political discourse, quarantine, social discourse