Language in the Pandemic: COVID-Related Expressions

The pandemic is shaping language: in Japanese, as well, different kinds of traces created by COVID-19 can be detected, be it newly formed words and expressions or already existing expressions that are now more intensely used than before, therefore gaining a strictly Corona-related connotation. Let’s look at some examples:

First, there are COVID related words, that pretty much sound like their English counterpart, for example: korona コロナ (Corona) or also rokkudaun ロックダウン (lockdown). However, there are also new phenomena that have been assigned their own names, such as on-nomi オン飲み – a combination of the words onrain オンライン (online) and nomu 飲む (to drink), which describes the event of people meeting up online to drink virtually together as an alternative to real life meetups. Similar to this structure is the expression uizu korona ウイズコロナ (with corona') – it refers to a kind of mindset, namely trying to continue with one’s life as good as possible despite COVID still turning the world (more or less) upside down.

Then, as mentioned in the beginning, there are also some expressions that have already existed pre-Corona, such as kaishime 買い占め (buying up). Due to the pandemic, this expression is now more related to the phenomena of actual ‘panic buying’ – we all remember the empty toilet paper shelves.

Last but not least, the winner of the 2020 ‘Words of the Year’ in Japan was the word sanmitsu ３密 – a concept for the protective measures which helps remember what three things to avoid most during COVID. The element mitsu 密 means minuteness or carefulness, and the three mitsu mentioned here are: mippei 密閉 (shut thightly as in closed space), misshū 密集 (crowding together) and missetsu 密接 (close contact). In English, the counterpart to this concept are the Three Cs are: ‘Avoid confined spaces, crowded places and close-contact settings’. The sanmitsu concept has gained popularity through the governor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike.

Written by Jannick Scherrer