Hashtags in Linguistic Anthropology: A COVID-19 Case Study

Abstract

Hashtags in social media reflect the Coronavirus pandemic outbreak and the consequential shifts and swifts in people’s lifestyles. Several studies related to the pandemic have used hashtags from linguistic, economic, and sociological perspectives. However, the potentiality of hashtags in addressing the pandemic-related anthropological questions is still underexplored. This study verifies how hashtags are primarily anthropocentric and can act as a source for anthropological studies. We have collected COVID-related hashtags in Instagram under five different pandemic-related words like #newnormal, #oldnormal, #quarantine, #lockdown, #pandemic, #corona. Eighty-eight hashtags under the mentioned pandemic-related keywords and 11 neologisms are collected to analyse their linguistic patterns and anthropological implications. The hashtags are segmented into basetags and stemtags to find the lexical significance of individual word units in the pandemic lifestyle. The segmentation helped analyse the range of vocabulary in hashtags used to describe people’s lifestyles during the pandemic. Hashtags are user-friendly and are primarily used as an expressing and recording device. The archival and emotive quality added to hashtags’ searchability and accessibility make them a potential linguistic anthropological research source for the ’COVID-19 pandemic.

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