“Let’s ride this out together”: unpacking multilingual top-down and bottom-up pandemic communication evidenced in Singapore’s coronavirus-related linguistic and semiotic landscape

1 Introduction

Communicating health risks multilingually is vital during an emergency (Ahmad and Hillman 2021; Al-Shehari 2022; Declercq and Federici 2020), which highlights the need to take diversity and multilingualism seriously (see Piller 2020). While Singapore’s anti-COVID experience has been explored from various perspectives (Das and Zhang 2021; Fearnley and Wu 2023; Woo 2021), the pandemic has thus far been less examined from the perspective of (multilingual) communication. In particular, there is a lack of sociolinguistic and linguistic landscape studies focusing on this (super)diverse multilingual nation, despite a growing body of research from around the world focusing on COVID-scape, or COVID-related linguistic and semiotic landscape, from different perspectives and angles (e.g. Ahmad and Hillman 2021; Bagna and Bellinzona 2023; Baranova 2023; Coluzzi and Riget 2022; Gu 2023b, 2023c; Hopkyns and van den Hoven 2022; Lees 2022; Milak 2022; Ong 2022; Zhou 2022; Zhu 2021).

To address this gap, this study examines the (multilingual) communication practices enacted on Singapore’s publicly displayed COVID-scape in both top-down and bottom-up signage (cf. Ben-Rafael et al. 2006). More specifically, this study aims to explore which language(s) are represented on Singapore’s COVID-scape and which are left out, and the power relations between different languages in both top-down and bottom-up signage. This study also aims to shed some light on how various (multimodal) elements might combine to help convey COVID-related messages.

2 Access to language as a basic human right in crisis and emergency communication

Having sufficient access to information for every human being is enshrined as a basic human right in Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948). This is particularly important during a crisis or emergency. At times of crises, emergencies, and disasters, communicating only in official languages is not enough. Minority groups’ linguistic needs are often not met and they are often subject to disaster linguicism or language-based discrimination (Uekusa 2019). This can lead to marginalization and exclusion (Tan and Ben Said 2015) and can be risky and even fatal (Al-Shehari 2022; Piller 2020) in linguistically and culturally diverse societies during a once-in-a-century pandemic like COVID-19.

This highlights the importance of multilingual communication in making sure that vital public health information (e.g. about mask wearing and vaccination) is accessible to all groups. Given the “we are in this together” nature of the pandemic and the need for unity, the successful dissemination of information multilingually is instrumental in raising awareness, building trust, and improving conformity to anti-COVID rules. Multilingual public health communication can take different forms (e.g. interpreter-mediated press conferences, subtitled videos, and multilingual signs). Translation, no doubt, plays a major role as part of crisis and emergency communication (Federici and O’Brien 2020; Gu 2023b, 2023c).

3 Singapore’s historical, demographic, and sociolinguistic profiles: a brief account

Singapore is a young and modern Southeast Asian nation yet also one that is steeped in history and with great ethnolinguistic diversity. Due to its strategic location, the broader area including present-day Singapore and Malaysia has traditionally been relatively diverse, having been influenced by different cultures, languages, and even religions. For historical reasons, the Chinese, Malays, and Indians represent three major established ethnic groups. This explains why Chinese, Malay, and Tamil are recognized as three official languages in addition to English. Malay serves as a (symbolic) national language in the city state for the maintenance of ties with neighbouring countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei. Since Chinese Singaporeans constitute the ethnic majority (approximately 75 % of the population), Mandarin Chinese and other Chinese dialects/varieties (e.g. Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, and Hainanese) are widely spoken. Additionally, Tamil (the language of the Tamils brought to present-day Singapore and Malaysia as indentured labourers from South India during the colonial period) is also spoken. This Dravidian language is the only Indian or South Asian language officially recognized in Singapore, despite the fact that other South Asian languages such as Malayalam, Telugu, Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, and Bengali can also, to varying degrees, be heard (Jain 2021). English is the unchallenged and dominant code in Singapore, uniting different groups.

Thus, in postcolonial Singapore’s linguistic ecology since its independence from British rule in 1965, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English are the four important, official languages, with English dominating as the unchallenged lingua franca and unifying code with great instrumental value. This sociolinguistic profile has shaped and continues to shape language policymaking and ideology in modern Singapore, an international financial centre and dynamic global city, in the twenty-first century. Despite the fact that English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil are the four official languages, the actual ethnolinguistic reality on the ground is far more diverse and complicated. As a (super)diverse global city, immigrants, expatriates, and foreign migrant workers from various sociolinguistic backgrounds are found in the city state as a result of globalization and the increased movement of people. This has given rise to a few ethnic enclaves/areas in the city. For example, the Peninsula Plaza and surrounding areas are known as “Little Burma”. Also, within the broader area and ethnic enclave of “Little India”, there is a thriving Bangladeshi community informally called “Little Bangladesh”. Similarly, Thai people tend to gather and socialize around the Golden Mile Complex and surrounding areas. Nicknamed “Little Manila”, Lucky Plaza is the stomping ground of Singapore’s Filipino community. Much of this sociolinguistic and cultural diversity relates to foreign migrant workers, usually from the Global South, who are in Singapore (and also in other places such as Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) as part of a transnational migration scheme (Muniandy 2020). Given the transient, precarious, and unstable nature of their employment and the marginalized nature of their social existence, they are often described as invisible “ghost labour” (Muniandy 2020) or servants of globalization (Parreñas 2015). In sum, despite being small in size, Singapore is big in language. This makes it interesting to study Singapore's pandemic communication.

4 Linguistic landscape as an entry point into a place’s linguistic vitality, diversity, and multilingual repertoire

Linguistic landscape (LL) is establishing itself as a rapidly maturing area within (socio)linguistics and applied linguistics. This line of research often draws on real-world linguistic data and has an interdisciplinary orientation, focusing on the description of authentic and naturally occurring language use in various contexts in our urban spaces and beyond (e.g. Backhaus 2007; Coluzzi 2016; Gu 2024; Landry and Bourhis 1997; Scollon and Scollon 2003). As the classic definition provided by Landry and Bourhis (1997: 23) suggests, LL research attends to the “visibility and salience of languages” on monolingual and multilingual signage (e.g. shop and restaurant signs, street signs, advertisements, posters, commercial billboards, public notices, and even graffiti and murals), which may be emplaced in a top-down or bottom-up manner (Ben-Rafael et al. 2006). The “presence (or absence) of language displays in” our society (Shohamy 2006: 110) may communicate a message and this may have far-reaching ramifications on a broader scale.

Interdisciplinary in nature, LL research intersects with such areas as sociolinguistics, semiotics, language planning and policy, translation studies, multilingual and intercultural communication, world Englishes, anthropology, advertising, marketing, and tourism. So far, scholars have examined LLs in a range of sociopolitical, cultural, and geographical contexts from different perspectives (e.g. Alomoush 2023; Angermeyer 2017; Backhaus 2007; Ben-Rafael et al. 2006; Coluzzi and Riget 2022; Gu 2023a; Gu and Almanna 2023; Hopkyns and van den Hoven 2022; Landry and Bourhis 1997; Lee 2022; Lees 2022; Shohamy 2006; Song 2022; Zhang et al. 2020). These empirical LL studies have shown how looking at naturally occurring signs may reveal and help index other linguistic, demographic, economic, institutional, political, ideological, sociocultural, and even religious dimensions of our increasingly diverse and complex (urban) spaces.

This is particularly true at a time of a global pandemic. A close examination of a locale’s COVID-scape promises to reveal the language ideology and policy of a place, its demographic and sociolinguistic profiles, its overarching anti-COVID strategies, and its multilingual repertoire (Gu 2023b). The languages that are included on or excluded from signage can illuminate issues of social inclusion, access, social justice, and linguistic human rights. The ways in which different languages are used can also shed light on issues of linguistic hierarchies and power relations.

5 Data collection

The analysis is based on a corpus of authentic COVID-related signs on Singapore’s publicly visible COVID-scape. This corpus includes 128 signs (71 top-down and 57 bottom-up signs), as presented in Table 1. Top-down signs are understood here as official signs authored by the government or governmental bodies as well as formal signs in major public spaces and high-profile national projects or infrastructure (e.g. subway, airport, and parks). Bottom-up signage here refers to signs enacted by individuals at a grassroots level and by businesses. Distinguishing between the two types of signage is relatively straightforward in most cases; where necessary, the researcher’s discretion was used.

Of the 128 signs, 95 were collected during the researcher’s field trip to Singapore in 2022 when international travel became easier/possible. Photographic data were documented with a good camera, following a “walking ethnography” approach (Hopkyns and van den Hoven 2022) as commonly seen in LL research. This approach involves walking in the urban environment and gaining ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and cultural insights through taking photographs to document real-world data. The main areas frequently visited by locals and visitors (such as Chinatown, the Central Business District, Orchard Road and adjacent areas, and Little India) were covered in a targeted way, as these arguably form the “core” of Singapore. In addition to these major and high-profile areas covered purposefully, a random sampling approach was also taken. That is, where possible, the researcher also walked around randomly in other places beyond the main and high-profile areas, and relevant photographic data were included in the corpus so that signs that “fell through the cracks” previously could be added. A combination of the two approaches led to a total of 95 top-down and bottom-up signs. Given the time of the researcher’s visit, while many signs from the early periods remained, many understandably reflect the middle and latter parts of Singapore’s anti-COVID journey, when COVID restrictions were gradually easing after the rollout of vaccines. To triangulate and better understand Singapore’s entire pandemic communication evidenced on its COVID-scape (including the early days), 33 top-down and bottom-up signs found on the internet were included in the analysis. This adopted method of using materials from the cyberspace to help retrieve data from the early periods of the pandemic was due to pragmatic considerations (e.g. lockdowns and travel restrictions). This is partially aligned with the methods adopted by Bagna and Bellinzona (2023) and Zhou (2022). In this process, keywords such as “COVID signs Singapore” and “coronavirus signs Singapore” were searched on Google, which constitutes an invaluable corpus itself. The results containing these COVID-related signs in Singapore were then carefully checked to make sure that they were from the early periods of the pandemic. Signage with the same design was only included once.

While the data are not exhaustive (given the pervasive nature of COVID-related signs and the ongoing and evolving nature of the pandemic), the signs collected may offer some useful insights into Singapore’s multilingual COVID-scape and multilingual crisis communication with a diachronic perspective. This multi-layered data collection method also has decided advantages over other methods that, for example, only look at one or two streets.

Once collected, the data were analysed based on whether they are top-down or bottom-up signs and the language(s) involved, and so on. Since some signs may involve multimodal and visual elements, where relevant, multimodal discourse analysis (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010; Kress and van Leeuwen 2001; Scollon and Scollon 2003) is adopted. Rather than religiously following one school, multimodal discourse analysis is employed in a general way (see e.g. Bagna and Bellinzona 2023) to highlight the most salient multimodal features and elucidate how various elements combine in conveying COVID-related information.

6 Data analysis and discussion

During a public health crisis, the COVID-scape of a place might be understood as a narrative site (Bagna and Bellinzona 2023) or discursive event, telling a vivid story about that location’s anti-pandemic journey. Inevitably, important public health information is (re)contextualized or localized in a specific place based on the prevailing public health policies locally and internationally, the locale’s demographic profile, (multilingual) repertoire, and other sociopolitical and cultural realities on the ground (Gu 2023b, 2023c). The top-down and the bottom-up signage evidenced in a locale’s COVID-scape can provide a window into different dimensions of that particular location.

It does need to be noted that as part of Singapore’s pandemic communication, several videos and posters are or were available virtually – for example on the Ministry of Manpower’s website (see Figure 1) with a small number of languages involved (e.g. Bengali, Tamil, and Chinese). These, however, will not form the main focus here, as they are far removed from the general public’s first-hand experience of pandemic communication, and a special effort is often required to find this multilingual information (e.g. searching on certain websites). Instead, the main focus here is on publicly displayed signs that were visible to the public. The visibility of these signs (e.g. on the streets) makes them more representative and vivid examples of Singapore’s COVID-related public health communication. Regarding the themes of the signage, as expected, most of the signs, both top-down and bottom-up, relate to mask wearing, social distancing, hand washing, and vaccination, and so on.

Figure 1:

An awareness-raising video about COVID-19 pandemic with multilingual subtitles.

6.1 Top-down signage in Singapore’s COVID-scape

Attention is first focused on the 71 top-down signs (see Table 2). In Singapore’s COVID-scape, there are two dominant strategies when it comes to top-down signage. The vast majority of top-down signage (95.8 %) involves either English monolingual (66.2 %) or quadrilingual signs featuring Singapore’s four official languages (29.6 %). The former scenario (English monolingualism) is the most visible.

Table 2:

Details about top-down signage.

Scenario	No.	Percentage
English monolingual signs	47	66.2 %
Quadrilingual signs (English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil)	21	29.6 %
Others	3	4.2 %
Total	71	100.0 %

A few examples of top-down signage involving English monolingualism can be seen in Figure 2. These English-only top-down signs are visible in public spaces (e.g. parks) and public transportation (e.g. buses). These signs sometimes involve multimodal elements to facilitate pandemic communication. A combination of textual elements and images constitutes a dynamic semiotic assemblage or “multimodal ensemble” (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). In some cases, bright and attention-grabbing colours (e.g. red) are strategically used, thus reinforcing the messages and conveying a sense of importance and urgency (Ong 2022) in pandemic communication (Zhu 2021). Regarding the themes covered, social distancing and mask wearing are some of the main topics. Interestingly, in the sign at the bottom left about social distancing on public transportation, the words “SG UNITED” and “Let’s ride this out together” are visible, indicating a sense of unity and “togetherness” in Singapore’s anti-COVID efforts. The slogan-like “Let’s ride this out together” constitutes a pun, both literally and metaphorically. An image of two passengers observing the social distancing rule is made central/prominent (Scollon and Scollon 2003) in this message. When combined, these different discursive modalities (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) promise to facilitate communication in a useful and clear way.

Figure 2:

Examples of English-only top-down signs.

English-only signs are also found in high-profile sightseeing spots vital to the small city state. The pictures in Figure 3 are such examples, found in the Marina Bay area (on the left) and Gardens by the Bay (on the right). Again, multimodal elements (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001) are prominent. In the sign on the right in Figure 3, notably, the text “Mask up! Please wear a mask even when taking photos!” featuring exclamation marks indicates great urgency. This message is further accentuated by the illustration, showing an adorable animal wearing a mask. The strategic combination of the different multimodal elements or discursive modalities (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010) communicates information holistically as an ensemble (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001), contributing to the better and more effective conveyance of the crucial messages about the pandemic.

Figure 3:

Examples of English-only top-down signs.

One important type of monolingual English top-down signage involves contact tracing (see Figure 4), where people were asked to scan certain QR codes when entering and leaving premises (e.g. restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels). There were different variants of this kind of signage, which were usually posted on doors or near entrances. These signs usually bear the logos “SafeEntry”, “SmartNation”, “GOVTECH”, and “the Ministry of Health”. Clearly, this contact-tracing technology was under the auspices of the Singaporean government. The practice of contact tracing has been an important part of Singapore’s relative success in its anti-COVID efforts, especially in the early periods.

Figure 4:

Monolingual top-down signage in English about contact tracing.

English monolingualism has been rather prominent in Singapore’s LL in general, even before COVID. English has a special place in Singapore’s postcolonial linguistic ecology. Although English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil are supposed to enjoy equal status, in reality, there is a pecking order (Gu and Manan 2024) and English predominates in education, commerce, and the LL (Tang 2020). The dominance of English is also recognized by Zhang et al. (2020), who highlight that English even has a dominant presence in Singapore’s Chinatown. Monolingual English top-down COVID-related signage seemingly conveys a sense of officialness, level-headedness, and surface-level fairness in a multicultural context. That is, English-only signage affords an image of authority and power, and all ethnic groups in Singapore are expected to follow the COVID-related information in English without exception (see Coluzzi 2016 for discussions on English as an impartial/neutral language in neighbouring Brunei’s LL in a postcolonial context). However, this indiscriminate approach may ignore other minority groups’ and migrant workers’ COVID-related linguistic needs.

In addition to English monolingual signs, multilingual top-down signage is relatively pervasive in Singapore’s COVID-scape as well, manifesting almost exclusively in quadrilingual signs. Compared with English monolingualism, quadrilingual signage featuring the city state’s four official languages (29.6 % of all top-down signs) to some extent considers the linguistic needs of broader segments of the society. The juxtaposition of these languages often declares a sort of equivalence, correspondence, and arguably translation (Song 2022). This gives a sense of neatness, organization, and coordination (Lee 2022). Figures 5, 6, and 7 contain such top-down quadrilingual signs. The four languages are usually equally prominent. However, there are also cases where English is the most prominent with the biggest font size. These signs are enacted by the National Environment Agency, Singapore Food Agency, and other agencies and bodies. Again, bright colours such as red are frequently used by sign-makers, presumably to draw attention and create a sense of urgency and emergency (Ong 2022). In certain cases (e.g. Figure 5 right), parts of the information (e.g. about wearing a mask) have been highlighted and emphasized. That is, in the English version (“Wear a Mask”), Chinese version (“戴上口罩”), Malay version (“Pakai Pelitup Muka”), and the corresponding Tamil version, the same information has been highlighted and made boldface to increase conformity.

Figure 5:

Quadrilingual top-down signs.

Figure 6:

Quadrilingual top-down signs.

Figure 7:

Quadrilingual top-down signs.

The quadrilingual top-down formula identified echoes Lee’s (2022) term “choreographed multilingualism”. Purposeful and “curated” in nature, this top-down phenomenon seemingly represents a kind of neat multilingualism, where Singapore’s four official languages are construed in a balanced, organized, and neat way that indicates equitability (Lee 2022). For him, this relatively fixed quadrilingual constellation repeats itself in different contexts, stabilizing into a common visual-spatial formula in Singapore. These quadrilingual signs are examples of separate multilingualism (Zhang and Chan 2017), where different (translated) versions co-occur. However, despite the seeming equilibrium or neatness, other more peripheral minority languages (e.g. Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Tagalog, Indonesian, Nepali, and Burmese) are mostly relegated to oblivion as far as the (written) LL is concerned, based on my data. Admittedly, many pandemic-related signs contain multimodal elements (e.g. colours and graphics), and these may have already conveyed some basic information to speakers of different languages. However, these extralinguistic cues (e.g. an illustration of a mask) are far from enough. Also, some might argue that from a practical perspective it is challenging/difficult to offer multiple versions in minority languages, considering the limited space in a sign. Despite these difficulties, it is not impossible to achieve. Gu (2023b), for example, pinpoints multilingual communication in other comparable global cities such as Hong Kong where significantly more minority and migrants’ languages (e.g. Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Thai, and Tagalog) have been strategically used than in Singapore. Given the high stakes involved in a once-in-a-lifetime public health crisis like COVID-19, it is crucial to convey key messages emphatically, strategically, and multilingually (Piller 2020).

Apart from monolingual English and quadrilingual signs (together forming the overwhelming majority), only a handful (N = 3) of top-down signs are found in the corpus data that involve other languages and/or other combinations. Figure 8 presents a sign about vaccination, where only Malay and Tamil are visible. The sign in Malay, for example, says “Klinik ini menawarkan vaksinasi COVID-19. Dapatkan suntikan vaksin. Lindungi diri anda dan orang-orang tersayang.” This roughly means ‘This clinic offers COVID-19 vaccinations. Get vaccinated. Protect yourself and your loved ones.’ Featuring a more formal tone and style (e.g. the Malay word anda as the formal form of ‘you’), this sign contains a couple of sentences using imperatives (e.g. dapatkan and lindungi) to urge the public to get vaccinated. The Tamil version conveys more or less the same message. This sign also features significant multimodal elements. Arguably, senior citizens from the three main ethnic groups are portrayed, conveying a reassuring image that getting vaccinated is safe for the elderly (e.g. the smile and thumbs-up gesture). This exudes a sense of national unity and a “we are in this together” feeling against COVID. In Figure 9, a top-down sign featuring information in four languages (English, Indonesian/Malay, Burmese, and Tagalog) is visible; this was found in an open area/park (taman), frequented by foreign workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Myanmar. This sign constitutes an example of more targeted multilingual communication, presented in the form of separate multilingualism (Zhang and Chan 2017). However, this is very much an exception and aberration from the overall trends, rather than the norm. Again, in this multilingual sign, certain parts have been highlighted. Interestingly, the highlighted parts are not always exact equivalents in an absolute sense, due to the linguistic or stylistic differences between the different versions. For example, in the Indonesian/Malay version, the message says “Menjaga ukuran grup maksimal 8 orang. Grup-Grup dilarang berinteraksi dan masing-masing harus menjaga jarak 1 meter setiap saat” (more or less literally, ‘Keep maximal group size of 8 people. Groups are forbidden to interact. Each must maintain a distance of 1 metre at all times’). Clearly, while the word dilarang ‘forbidden’ is highlighted in the Indonesian/Malay version, the word not is highlighted in the English version.

Figure 8:

Bilingual top-down sign in Malay and Tamil.

Figure 9:

Rare top-down sign featuring English, Indonesian/Malay, Burmese, and Tagalog.

6.2 Bottom-up signage in Singapore’s COVID-scape

Compared with the top-down signs on Singapore’s COVID-scape, which are mostly monolingual or quadrilingual, the 57 bottom-up signs in the corpus are more varied, manifesting themselves in a wider range of scenarios and combinations (see Table 3 for details). Compared with the top-down signs, bottom-up signage tends to be more flexible and informal. Sometimes, handwritten and makeshift signs can be found. Some are generic signs downloaded from the internet. Still, English monolingual signs are the most prominent (see examples in Figures 10 and 11). However, proportionally, bilingual and trilingual signs are more visible in the city’s bottom-up COVID-scape: quadrilingual signs, while visible in top-down signage, are significantly less present in bottom-up signs (with only four found, or 7.0 % of all bottom-up signage). This is presumably because at a grassroots level there is a lack of linguistic competency and/or resources to communicate in all of the nation’s four official languages. The higher visibility of bilingual bottom-up signs (in particular, in Chinese and English) is aligned with the de facto linguistic situation in Singapore (see Li 2021), in which there is multilingualism at a society level yet bilingualism at an individual level; that is, a person is expected to speak English plus a mother tongue.

Table 3:

Details about bottom-up signage.

Scenario	Number	Percentage
English monolingual signs	29	50.9 %
Bilingual signs	21	36.8 %
Trilingual signs	3	5.3 %
Quadrilingual signs	4	7.0 %
Total	57	100 %

Figure 10:

Monolingual bottom-up signs in English.

Figure 11:

Monolingual bottom-up signs in English.

The photos in Figure 12 give a glimpse into bilingual bottom-up COVID signs in Singapore, which were found on the table of a restaurant in the broader Chinatown area (above) and in a clinic (below). Notably, the second photo is a makeshift handwritten sign in English and Chinese. It is arguably an example of self-translation, where the sign-maker provided both versions.

Figure 12:

Bottom-up bilingual signs (in English and Chinese).

In general, the bottom-up signs are significantly more basic, simpler, and less elaborate in design compared with the top-down ones. A similar trend is observed in Ong (2022), which explores COVID-related LL in Malaysia. It is also worth noting that, while more or less functional, the information in English in Singapore’s bottom-up COVID-scape is not always grammatically and stylistically impeccable (see Figure 12, bottom). This presumably shows that English use at a grassroots level is sometimes more function-oriented, rather than aiming for perfection and pure grammaticality. This is interesting when we consider the fact that English is not a mother tongue for most Singaporeans, and that English often serves as a lingua franca for inter-ethnic communication in a utilitarian manner. Another example demonstrating this is Figure 13, a trilingual bottom-up sign found in a coffee shop. It communicates more or less the same information in English, Chinese, and Tamil and emphasizes that only fully vaccinated individuals can dine in. Again, some grammatical issues can be found, for instance, in the English version. For more information on imperfect language use, mistakes, and miscommunication in multilingual communication at top-down and especially bottom-up levels, see García et al. (2020) and Angermeyer (2017).

Figure 13:

Bottom-up trilingual sign (in English, Chinese, and Tamil).

Overall, it can be observed that in the bottom-up signage found in Singapore’s COVID-scape the language(s) used are still those from the country’s four official languages, which appear either alone or in various combinations. As such, the bottom-up signs in Singapore may be understood as variants of the country’s top-down signage. In contrast, languages without official recognition – such as Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Nepali, Bengali, Indonesian, Burmese, and Tagalog – very rarely appear in the city’s bottom-up COVID-scape, if at all. Arguably, this may be because individuals often lack multilingual skills in different languages.

7 Conclusions

The COVID-scape of a place can be understood as a socially shaped and socially shaping discourse, where vital public health information is inevitably (re)contextualized based on the local situation on the ground (Gu 2023b, 2023c). A detailed analysis of a place’s pandemic-related LL promises to shed useful light on the sociopolitical, ethnolinguistic, and cultural aspects of that locale. Through examining a corpus of top-down and bottom-up COVID-related signs in the (super)diverse city of Singapore, this study has found that Singapore’s pandemic communication can be deemed as multilingual in nature overall.

However, as far as Singapore’s publicly displayed linguistic and semiotic landscape is concerned, the city’s top-down COVID-scape tends to involve mostly English monolingualism or a pattern of quadrilingual arrangement (involving the four official languages English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil). While this is very much multilingual in nature, other less dominant and even peripheral languages spoken in Singapore (e.g. Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Nepali, Indonesian, Burmese, and Tagalog) are almost invisible. While there may be sampling bias, these languages are mostly absent as far as the data collected in the corpus are concerned (which cover reasonably large areas in different stages of the pandemic). In the bottom-up signage evidenced in Singapore’s COVID-scape, different variants are found, pointing towards more dynamic interplays of different languages (which manifest themselves in different scenarios). However, the languages found are still predominantly those from the country’s four official languages, appearing alone or in various combinations and permutations. The bottom-up communication in the city’s physical LL, therefore, might be viewed more or less as a continuation of the country’s top-down COVID-scape, where other non-official languages/varieties are largely invisible and are rarely represented, if at all.

Admittedly, compared with the superdiverse United Arab Emirates’ COVID-scape, which focuses largely on Arabic and English bilingualism (Gu 2023c; Hopkyns and van den Hoven 2022), the multilingual practices in Singapore can potentially reach out to a wider audience. Also, to a limited extent, awareness-raising materials in a few languages other than Singapore’s four official languages can be found in the virtual space (e.g. online), as mentioned earlier. Nevertheless, the established features and trends on Singapore’s physical top-down and bottom-up COVID-scapes point to a kind of linguistic “inertia” and relative unwillingness (especially at top-down levels) to venture out of the city state’s linguistic “comfort zone” and familiar communication patterns. This is in contrast to the multilingual communication practices in comparable global and diverse places like Hong Kong (Gu 2023b) and Qatar (Ahmad and Hillman 2021), where arguably a wider range of languages (e.g. different South Asian languages) have been mobilized in the pandemic communication process in a more systematic and strategic way.

Without doubt, the unexpected, sudden, and exceptional nature of the COVID-19 pandemic called for a shift to survival mode (Hopkyns and van den Hoven 2022) and flexible and speedy responses. However, as far as the LL data collected are concerned, there is arguably a sense of hesitancy in Singapore about using a wider range of linguistic resources and better mobilizing the country’s broad linguistic repertoire, especially at a top-down level. This is particularly salient, considering that the inclusion of certain languages not only relates to issues of access, inclusion, and social justice but can also be vital and even life-saving (Ahmad and Hillman 2021; Al-Shehari 2022; Hopkyns and van den Hoven 2022; Piller 2020) during a public health crisis, especially at the beginning of a pandemic. Failing to do this means that certain groups are excluded from effective communication and are thus put in a disadvantaged position. This is particularly true for those temporary foreign workers who may not speak or understand Singapore’s four official languages.

Understandably, the pandemic has generated an explosion of signs in our multilingual societies and it is not possible or realistic to collect all COVID-related signs in a given place. In other words, sampling bias may inevitably exist in LL studies like this. As such, the features and patterns found in the current study are only true of the publicly displayed physical signs included in my corpus data. To get a more holistic picture of Singapore’s pandemic communication process, a community or area-specific approach might be useful going forward. Also, a more systematic multimodal approach covering different platforms, venues, and modes of communication might be needed (e.g. looking at press conferences and speeches from political leaders and public health experts). Nevertheless, COVID-related communication in the form of top-down and bottom-up signage no doubt constitutes a most salient marker of and an important entry point into the overall (multilingual) communication practices in this specific location.

Overall, this interdisciplinary study reveals some general and salient trends in the city state’s COVID-scape as part of the Singaporean experience in the anti-COVID journey, which adds to a growing body of empirical research concerning (multilingual) aspects of crisis and public health communication (Gu 2023b, 2023c; Hopkyns and van den Hoven 2022; Lees 2022; Piller 2020). This study also adds to sociolinguistic research that explores the LL of Singapore in general from different perspectives (e.g. Lee 2022; Shang and Guo 2017; Tang 2020; Zhang et al. 2020; Zhang et al. 2023). Ultimately, this study contributes to a better understanding of our increasingly (super)diverse and multilingual urban spaces, against a backdrop of globalization (Coluzzi 2016; Gu 2024; Gu and Manan 2024; Song 2022).