Healthcare communication discourses and Applied Linguistics

Healthcare communication constitutes a vast and multifaceted domain of linguistic inquiry, broadly encompassing any form of communication (a) that occurs within a medical or healthcare context or (b) that refers to the description of health and illness. It is not restricted to formal or clinical interactions but extends across a wide communicative spectrum, ranging from casual conversations about wellbeing, to the dissemination of health information through digital media (cf., for instance, Ndlangamandla et al., 2024; Padley, 2022; Zollo, 2022. See also Creten & Heynderickx, 2023), to structured institutionalised exchanges (Donadio & Passariello, 2022) which also include doctor-patient consultation (Brookes & Collins, 2023). As a result, healthcare communication has increasingly drawn the attention of scholars working in various disciplines, including corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, applied linguistics, cultural studies, and literary and narrative inquiry. Each of these perspectives offers distinct yet complementary insights into how health is talked about, represented, and experienced through language.