Language and health: a revisit of language in the medical context

1 Rationale for the special issue

Throwing us into the whirl of loss and pain, the pandemic also reminds us of the immense and multifaceted value of health communication. Essentially, it is far more than just disseminating health information. Instead, it is a critical tool for saving lives, improving public health, empowering individuals, and fostering a more efficient and equitable healthcare system. As the study and use of communication strategies to inform and influence individual and community decisions, health communication integrates principles from public health, communication, psychology, and sociology. From a perspective of language use, the value of health communication lies in the meticulous and strategic use of language as a tool to achieve health outcomes. It’s not just what is said, but how it is said. Linguistics provides the analytical framework to understand why some health messages succeed while others fail. Even though there have been some special issues initiated by Health Communication or Language and Dialogue around language in the medical context, this special issue distinguishes itself in terms of the ensuing three aspects. First, our special issue is uniquely framed around a broad concept of health or “Enlarged Health” that includes not just physiological but also psychological health and social adaptability. It brings together novel linguistic research and reviews that explore this entire spectrum, making it more interdisciplinary than typical studies focused on a single aspect of health communication. Second, a key distinguishing feature is its methodological approach. It conducts a detailed, text-anchored analysis of health-related language from four distinct lingua-cultures (Chinese, English, and Korean) within medical contexts, using grounded theory to map out patterns that are difficult to capture with more abstract methods. Third, the issue successfully sets itself apart from prior scattered research on the topic through its exceptional diversity. This is reflected in its wide range of data sources (from literary works to online consultations), its variety of methodological approaches, and the interdisciplinary nature of its contributions.

Taking all these into account, we hold that it is of emergent need to observe, analyze, and evaluate how language in use contributes to health communication in a diverse set of lingua-cultures. This special issue is to illustrate the complex relationship between language and health in the medical context in a broad sense. Based on the social context of “Enlarged Health”, which consists of physiological health, psychological health, good social adaptability, etc., and with the main purpose of disseminating cutting-edge research related to the intersection between language and health, this special issue is interdisciplinary and consists of novel research and reviews related to language and health, especially interdisciplinary linguistic studies. Accordingly, this special issue covers studies on health-related language use in the field of health and medicine, and explorations of health and medicine from the perspective of linguistics, with topics including language and physical health, language and mental health, language and social adaptability, health and metaphor, with genres ranging from literary works to online consultation.

Specifically, this special issue aims to conduct a text-anchored analysis of health-related data, i.e. data drawn from Chinese, English, and Korean. With the help of grounded theory, all papers will focus on health-related language use in various contexts like online or fictional space to map out the interactional veins of health communication in diverse lingua-cultures and contexts, and as such it is directly applicable to the study of data types that are difficult to precisely code by using other more abstract typologies. A key feature of this special issue lies in its diversity of data, perspectives, and approaches. Put it differently, the objects, methodologies, and contributions for this special issue are diverse and interdisciplinary, which successfully distinguishes itself from the prior scattered articles around the topic of health and communication.

2 Contributions of the special issue

In addition to this introduction, the special issue consists of eight research articles. Huang et al. (2025) analyzed metaphors for anger and sadness in Korean counseling versus casual conversation by focusing on a wider variety of anger metaphors. It is found that while sadness metaphors were similar in both contexts, counseling showed a balanced use, whereas conversation primarily framed sadness as an illness. Moreover, counseling also employed more diverse source domains (e.g. liquid, fire, enemy) compared to the limited domains (liquid, object) in casual talk. The research highlights the metaphor’s role in articulating emotion and bridges metaphor studies with psychological counseling, offering insights for health communication in Korean culture. Also, Guenier et al. (2025) analyzed the metaphor of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in the UK context, with a focus on the metaphors used in the expression of pain, emotion, infertility, cancer, and obesity. This research aims to examine medical metaphors cross-culturally so as to promote a deeper understanding of the human dysfunction that metaphors suggest.

Quite different from the research of Huang et al. (2025), Ping and Syed (2025) utilized the emoji categories in Emojipedia to examine types of emoji used by doctors and patients and adapted the emoji illocutionary effect typology to explore their functions. Interestingly, they found that the most prevalent emoji types in online medical consultations were smileys, people, and symbols. Patients’ emojis were mostly negative (67 %), whereas 70 % of emojis used by doctors were positive or neutral. This study is a very timely one that contributes to the literature on communication in online medical consultations, providing insights into the nuances of emoji use, which may be useful for e-health professionals.

Similar to the online scenario of Ping and Syed’s (2025) research, Zhao and Mao (2025) reported on the speech acts and interactional dynamics of patient questioning in online medical consultations (OMCs) through the lens of the finite typology of speech acts. The findings indicated that patient questioning was a complex interactional act, realized through a cluster of speech acts, presenting different interactional dynamics in the opening, core, and closing phases of OMCs. These findings are very meaningful for the enhancement of the current understanding of how patient questioning functions within OMCs and underscore the importance of effective communication to facilitate patient-centered care, providing valuable insights that can empower patients with effective questioning strategies, thereby contributing to the overall efficiency of OMCs.

While the other studies in this special issue depart on the dataset of Western medicine, Wei et al. (2025) focused on Traditional Chinese Medicine. Their study analyzed the selected posts of dampness elimination in the Chinese social platform RedNote (小红书, Xiaohongshu) based on Matthiessen’s social-semiotic processes in the contexts of health and healthcare. Results showed that netizens portrayed themselves as symptom identifiers through the “expounding” process and as advice givers through the “recommending” process in their experience-sharing posts. According to their research, netizens not only acted as actively responsible individuals through self-care and self-medicine but also contributed to three levels of the discursive construction of Yangsheng (养生, ‘life-nurturing’) practice in social media, both of which facilitate the understanding of TCM from a self-health perspective and reveal how individuals integrate their personal experiences into the holistic treatment of TCM. Also in the Chinese context, Ai and Zhou (2025) examined the linguistic features, thematic characteristics, and emotional disclosure of “depression talk”, aiming to enhance social understanding of individuals with depression through the lens of self-disclosure.

Despite a multitude of previous research focusing on the role of micro linguistic structures in diverse task-oriented discourses, few studies have probed into the usage of backchannels during online medical consultation. As such, with the help of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, Wang and Mao (2025) in this issue endeavored to explore the role of backchannels through analyzing the forms and functions of backchannels employed by Chinese doctors in online medical consultation. The analysis showed that doctors’ use of lexical backchannels and non-lexical backchannels is predominantly oriented towards the e-patient’s utterances, responding to the e-patient’s questions, expressing unexpected agreement, and introducing empathic moves. These findings not only shed new light on the felicitous use of backchannels for doctors both online and offline in Chinese medical consultation scenarios but also provide insights into rapport management by doctors during Chinese online medical consultation.

Health communication is not only the concern of linguistic or communicative researchers, but also that of literary scholars. For example, Zhao et al. (2025) collected hearing impairment logs published by the Chinese hearing-impaired community on social media platforms as the corpus. Using qualitative research methods, their study analyzed the trauma-related linguistic features, narrative structures, and emotional expressions characteristic of their discourse on these platforms. The study indicated that the trauma narratives in the online discourse of the Chinese hearing-impaired group exhibited certain linguistic and structural features, including frequent use of psychological vocabulary, pronouns, tense shifts, and negations. The findings fed some food to digest for the expansion of health discourse studies, but also reflected the role of humanities and social sciences research in supporting vulnerable groups’ integration into society, aligning with the language strategies of the Healthy China Initiative.

3 Conclusion

As indicated above, the value of health communication is transformative. It is a cornerstone of modern public health and clinical care, which is particularly true when language in use sheds light on this. It moves beyond simply telling people what to do and focuses on engaging, empowering, and equipping them to make healthier choices for themselves and their communities. In a world flooded with information (and misinformation), its role as a beacon of clarity, trust, and evidence-based guidance has never been more critical. It is, quite literally, a lifesaving discipline when explored from a linguistic vantage.

Moving forward, the articles in this special issue suggest several promising avenues for further scholarly exploration in health communication through the lens of language in use. First, future research should prioritize cross-cultural and cross-medical comparisons – such as between Western biomedicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine – to better understand how cultural and epistemological differences shape communicative behaviors and conceptualizations in therapeutic settings. Second, as generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into digital health platforms, there is an urgent need to examine how AI-mediated communication influences authenticity, trust, and empathy in patient-provider interactions. Special attention should be paid to the ethical and pragmatic implications of AI-generated health content. Lastly, methodological innovation remains crucial. Multimodal discourse analysis, computational linguistics, and network-based approaches can provide deeper insights into how health communication functions across various media, modalities, and relational contexts. Such efforts will not only advance theory but also support equitable and effective health communication practices worldwide, inviting scholars from a diverse set of disciplinary backgrounds to engage with the empirical insights and methodological innovations presented in this special issue.