Laboring to communicate: Use of migrant languages in COVID-19 awareness campaign in Qatar

2.1 Language and mode of communication

Studies in crisis communication have shown that not all segments of society understand official languages of countries in spoken and/or written forms (Lha 2020; O’Brien and Cadwell 2018). In a study of disaster signage in Japan, Tan and Said (2015) show that tsunami emergency evacuation signs in English were not sufficient to ensure safety of foreign-born and temporary visitors to Japan who do not read Japanese or English. In a study of the relationship between translation and comprehension of crisis communication in Kenya, O’Brien and Cadwell (2018) tested comprehension levels of both rural and urban Kenyans on an Ebola health-related crisis text, and despite English being an official language of Kenya, their participants understood the text translated into Kiswahili better than the English source text. O’Brien and Cadwell also found that their Kenyan participants had a preference for the spoken mode of communication over the written one. Similarly, Lha (2020) shows that in her Tibetan regions of western Sichuan Province, many people including elders did not understand Mandarin well, and therefore volunteers had to translate COVID-19 awareness information from Mandarin into local languages. Hopkyns (2020) reveals how English is usually the only language used for make-shift or hand-written COVID-19-related messages in the UAE, which excludes a large segment of the population. Mcculloch (2020) further argues that ignoring community languages in favor of only official languages can be counterproductive for spreading health awareness.

In Qatar, what adds to the precarious situation of migrant workers is that a large number of them are barely literate, and therefore the written modes of communication in their own languages are not effective either. Disseminating information in different community languages and in different modes makes it more accessible and also helps to cross cultural barriers and develop trust during times of crisis.

2.2 Building trust in the message

In addition to the choice of language in crisis and health communication, studies have further shown that trust impacts people’s willingness to receive and comply with the message. Reynolds and Seeger (2005) describe how credibility impacts effectiveness of the messages. They explain that “messages are more effective when they are strategically matched to audience needs, values, background, culture, and experience” (p. 45). Crisis and health communication has to take sociocultural factors into consideration and overcome social and cultural differences (Declercq and Federici 2020; Fairhead 2016; Napier et al. 2014). Haddow and Haddow (2014: xxi) write, “people take information differently, process information differently, and act on information differently.” They recommend partnering with community-based organizations and building neighborhood communication networks with activists and volunteers who create digital and social media and actually go door-to-door. For example, Fairhead (2016) argues that there was resistance to Ebola response initiatives in the Upper Guinea forest region, such as isolating the sick and making burials safe, due to an unsettling of social accommodations related to culture and local sense-making. Fairhead (2016) and Anoko (2014) both show this importance of building locally-appropriate interventions during the West African Ebola epidemic. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bai (2020) shows how minoritized Mongolians felt a stronger emotional response to COVID-19 public health messages marred with traditional Mongolian fiddle stories, and Chen (2020) shows how classical Chinese poetry helped facilitate intercultural communication and connectivity during the pandemic.

2.3 Mediums for information dissemination

The medium of crisis and health communication is equally important. In today’s world, both top-down and bottom-up strategies for getting information out to the public during crises goes beyond traditional press releases and situation reports distributed via television, radio, and printed newspapers, and focuses heavily on digital and social media, particularly since social media use rises during crises. Haddow and Haddow (2014) write that new technology has “profoundly altered the flow of information, undermined the traditional gatekeepers, and replaced the centralized, top-down model used by the government and professional media with a more interactive exchange that empowered citizens and created ad hoc distributive information networks” (p. 55). The government no longer has control over what and when information is shared, and audiences are no longer passive; they actively participate in creating and disseminating news. For example, Hopkyns (2020) describes how in the UAE, an Indian expatriate teenager, Suchetha Satish, has been spreading COVID-19 awareness online through composing songs in 21 different Indian languages. Zhang and Wu (2020) discuss the role of social media in Wuhan China in terms of crowdsourcing volunteer translators for multilingual COVID-19 communication efforts.

This is critical to the context of Qatar since a study of media consumption behavior in the Arab World by Northwestern University in Qatar (Dennis et al. 2019) found that 99% of Asian expatriates seek health information online and 44% of Asian expatriates get their news from Facebook. The study further showed that different social groups use different social media platforms, such that the use of FB in Qatar is highest among Asian expatriates (86%), followed by Arab expatriates (54%) and Qataris (30%). However, the use of Twitter was very low among Asian expatriates (7%) and Qataris use Twitter only slightly more (10%). The study also showed the popularity of WhatsApp among Asian expats (93%) as a tool of communication. In this study, we show how Qatar galvanized both traditional and new media platforms for dissemination of knowledge about COVID-19.

3.1 Languages in Qatar

Arabic is the official language of Qatar, but English acts as a de facto second official language and is widely used as a lingua franca. However, as Piller (2017) describes in her sociolinguistic account of Dubai, “the statement ‘Arabic is the official language of the UAE’ hides more than it reveals” and “the statement ‘English is the lingua franca of Dubai’ equally conceals as much as it reveals” (p. 15). Hillman and Ocampo Eibenschutz (2018) describe multiple Arabic(s) and Englishes in Qatar that mix with each other and other expatriate languages. These languages include Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Nepali, Tamil, Balochi, Urdu, Tagalog, Indonesian, Persian, Sinhalese, Amharic, Swahili, French, and Pashto, among others. Hillman (2019: 178) describes that English is the most prestigious lingua franca in Qatar, but other languages such as Hindi and Urdu operate as less prestigious lingua francas even though they have often appeared as “peripheral” (van Den Hoven and Carroll 2016) in terms of language planning and policy in Qatar. Hindi is a significant language across the GCC, and this was the reason the Abu Dhabi court accepted Hindi as the third official language in labor courts, despite the fact that Malayalam speakers are the largest language-group in the UAE (Ahmad 2019). It is worth noting that there is also a spoken form of Urdu-Hindi that is used as a medium of communication between workers speaking different languages. Theodoropoulou (2020) found that blue-collar workers in Qatar who speak languages as diverse as Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali use this Urdu–Hindi lingua franca. The presence of many languages and cultures has, however, contributed to a sense of fear of loss of Arabic across the GCC and among Qatari nationals.

3.2 Strengthening the status and use of Arabic

The unprecedented economic boom in the GCC over the last two decades and a spike in the number of different ethnicities and languages due to guest workers has led to dramatic social, economic, demographic, and psychological changes, which have created fears and concerns about preservation of Arabic language and identity (Ghalyoun 2009). Governments and the civil societies in GCC countries have discussed the issue in many seminars, conferences, and media reports (e.g., Al-Daihani and Al-Anazi 2000; Aljazeera 2010; Al-Najjar 2013; Ghalyoun 2009). Baqar (2013) mentions several factors that contribute to the loss of Arabic identity among the future generations including the numerical dominance of expatriates, diminished use of Arabic in the public and private sectors, including education, and the influences of nannies and house-hold workers on language as well as values (p. 11).

Given the growing concerns about the fear of loss of Arabic, Qatar has more recently engaged in a number of Arabization policies. In 2012, an Emiri decree made Arabic mandatory on all public signs, although the use of other languages was permitted (Al-Khidhr 2012). This is similar to Bill 86 of Canada that allowed use of languages other than French on public signs in Quebec (Backhaus 2008). Arabic was also reinstated as the medium of instruction in K-12 education as well as Qatar University in all social science subjects (Mustafawi and Shaaban 2019). This abrupt shift followed an unsuccessful trial of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) following an educational reform launched in 2003. A third major policy change was the Arabization of bills and receipts in 2016. This made it mandatory for businesses in Qatar to use Arabic as the main language for product labels, service lists, issuing receipts, and call center services for customers. The most comprehensive milestone, however, is the 2019 Arabic Language Protection Law. It requires, among other measures, that ministries, government agencies, and public entities and institutions use Arabic as the primary language in all their functions. A fine of 50,000 Qatari Riyal can be imposed if some of these articles are violated. On the ground though, migrant languages were not completely invisible before COVID-19.

3.3 Use of migrant languages prior to COVID-19

Qatar’s Primary Health Care Corporation’s helpline has been available in Malayalam, Tagalog, Urdu, English, and Arabic (Gulf Times 2015). Similarly, Metrash, a government mobile app that allows online solutions to many issues related to visa, residency, motor registration, and so forth has been available in six languages including Urdu and Malayalam (Chandran 2019). Government ministries and government-owned companies have also occasionally used Hindi, Malayalam, Urdu, and Tagalog in various awareness posters. Theodoropoulou (2020) shows the role of language in multilingual blue-collar workplaces and the relationship between policy and practice in Qatar. The construction workers in her study did not speak much Arabic or English, but these were the working languages of their higher management. She found that the everyday communicative practices on the construction site were more complex and creative multilingualism became the norm “for the safety of everybody involved” (p. 21).

Migrant languages have also had some presence on radio in Qatar before COVID-19. Qatar Media Corporation (QMC) is the national broadcasting authority that oversees media operations in Qatar. In addition to the Qatar TV and Al-Kaas Sports TV channels, it directly oversees the six government radio channels, namely Qatar Radio, Quran Radio, Sawt Al-Khaleej in Arabic, QBS in English, FM 107 in Urdu, and Oryx Radio in French. It also oversees the private radio stations FM 98.6 and Radio Suno 91.7 in Malayalam, Radio Olive 106.3 and One FM Radio 89.6 in Hindi, and Qabayan 94.3 in Tagalog. It is important to note here that the Urdu station has had listeners not only from Pakistan, but India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Iran (Haroon 2018). Radio Olive, the first private Hindi radio station boasts an audience of over 1.8 million listeners and viewers and caters to Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Nepali expatriate communities (Radio this Month 2020). Radio as a media is quite significant for the migrant population in Qatar as it transcends the boundaries of literacy. Amir Ali, the managing director of Radio Suno argued, “Not many people from the subcontinent are literate, but even though they can’t read or write, they can still understand” (Chaudhary 2018). Moreover, many South Asian workers in Qatar have jobs as drivers, manual laborers and domestic workers, and they can listen while doing their job. While migrant languages have had some presence in the media landscape, we show that their use increased significantly during Qatar’s COVID-19 campaign.

5.1 Multilingual COVID-19 awareness campaigns in Qatar

On February 29, 2020, Qatar reported its first case of COVID-19; more cases continued to be announced daily, but on March 10, 2020, there was a significant increase of 238 new confirmed cases, bringing the total to 262. Qatar announced that this spike was due to positive cases among three migrant workers in shared accommodations. It was during this time frame when the government ministries along with QMC started various multilingual COVID-19 awareness campaigns in languages beyond just Arabic and English, such as Hindi, Malayalam, Urdu, Bengali, Tagalog, Tamil, Sinhalese, Indonesian, and Nepali. QMC launched an awareness campaign on social media to “educate residents of different nationalities about the risks of the coronavirus and the necessary precautions” and it particularly targeted community members who do not know Arabic or English (Qatar Tribune 2020).

Faisal Abdulhameed al-Mudahka, the Editor-in-Chief of a leading English language newspaper the Gulf Times serves as the assistant director of QMC. While discussing the role of foreign language media in Qatar on a local program called Doha 360, al-Mudahka stressed how important it was to partner with the radio stations to fight misinformation and deliver the correct information to people. Soon after Qatar diagnosed its first COVID-19 case, he called a meeting of the directors of all radio stations and stressed the need to work with the community members to ensure that the awareness campaign was successful. The other participant, K. C. Abdul Latheef, the Vice Chairman of FM Malayalam 98.6 was asked about the role that foreign language media in general, and his channel in particular, played in the awareness campaign. He responded by saying that the media received instructions from authorities to help spread awareness messages through all the radio channels. He proudly mentioned how he and his team created a new Bengali language channel on FM 95.3 to assist the campaign as there did not exist any radio stations for Bengali speakers (Foreign Media in times of CoronaAl-Jamili n.d.).

Additionally, the Gulf Times in collaboration with Radio Olive and Suno Network, Qabayan Radio, and FM 107 launched a health awareness campaign, “Come Together, Overcome Together” in Hindi, Nepali, Tagalog, Malayalam, Sinhalese, and Urdu. Although the stations involved are private and rely on advertisement, the campaign was a non-profit initiative. In an interview with the radio, Kumar of Radio Olive and Suno Network said that they considered this as part of their corporate social responsibility. This helped the radio stations win listenership as well, which plays an important role in attracting advertisements, their main source of revenue.

We also asked Faisal al-Mudahka to tell us more about the multilingual campaign led by QMC. In response to our question, he admitted that when he started to study the demographics of Qatar, he was surprised to learn that Indians alone speak so many languages. He was under the impression that most people understood Urdu. He further added that he learned that English is not really an international language understood by everyone. This led to the realization that there is a communication gap because of linguistic barriers. He provided the example of how there were rumors circulating among blue-collar workers that people with COVID-19 who had their visas expired, would be deported, which made them not report COVID-19 symptoms for fear of deportation. These factors convinced al-Mudahka that an aggressive campaign in the languages of the workers was needed.

In addition to QMC, other government departments involved in the campaign were the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), Ministry of Interior (MOI), Ministry of Administrative Development, Labor and Social Affairs (MADLSA), Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, The Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning, and the Government Communication Office (GCO). Various campaigns were launched in collaboration between government ministries. For example, the first video campaign by doctors from HMC was jointly launched by HMC and MoPH. The MoPH and MOI became extremely active on Facebook and MoPH opened its first Instagram page.

A National Volunteering Campaign was also created with over 30,000 volunteers to provide various medical, logistical, and public awareness support during the pandemic, including translation of awareness materials. Other campaigns such as the National Human Rights Committee campaign also showed a commitment “to reaching all expat communities and communicating in the different languages they speak” (QNA 2020b). What was striking about the multilingual campaign was that her excellency Lolwah Alkhater, Assistant Foreign Minister and spokesperson for the Supreme Committee for Crisis Management, began to share slogans of solidarity such as “stronger together” in the languages of the expatriate communities on her Twitter account. In an interview with France 24 English TV channel on May 25, 2020, she attributed Qatar’s low COVID-19 fatality rate due to aggressive campaigning in nine different languages. This clearly shows that use of migrant languages was a well-planned decision (France 24 2020). On June 11, 2020, she reiterated the role that multilingual campaigns played in keeping the fatality rate low in a webinar with Swiss Business Council, Qatar. She further added that a dedicated hotline was created which was serviced by people who spoke migrant languages.

5.2 Using migrant languages in different modes

Shortly after the spread of COVID-19 to Qatar, the government started to create health awareness messages in migrant languages containing precautions against the virus, which included washing hands frequently, covering mouth and nose while sneezing, avoiding touching nose, mouth, and eyes, and staying away from sick people. Some sporadic content notwithstanding, the first COVID-19 awareness content in migrant languages became available on March 13, in which health professionals from HMC provided critical information in Nepali, Tagalog, Hindi, Malayalam, Sinhalese, and Urdu languages. Videos in Tamil, French, and Bengali were soon added (Table 2). Interestingly, HMC made a few videos in sign language as well. It was remarkable to see awareness material by health professionals in 10 migrant languages available in the first stage of the pandemic. These videos were posted on the FB page of HMC and on other social media platforms such as Twitter and FB Pages of MOI, MoPH, Radio Olive, Radio Suno, Urdu Radio, Malayalam Radio, and Tagalog Radio.^[3] In addition to these videos, radio stations in Arabic, English, and migrant languages started to educate people.

The first large-scale printed awareness pamphlet entitled, “Protect yourself and others from infection” using the migrant languages Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Nepali, Sinhalese, Tagalog, Tamil, and Urdu appeared on March 21, 2020. These posters were bilingual, as seen in Figure 1, in a migrant language and English, except for the pamphlets in Hindi and Malayalam. It is worth noting, however, that the title of the pamphlet was written in a migrant language in the top line with English translation below it. Hindi and Malayalam were created monolingual perhaps because these are the two major migrant languages in Qatar in terms of numbers of speakers. Other languages with smaller numbers of speakers such as Pashto, Bhasha, and Telugu were not used at all or were used sparingly and inconsistently. A possible reason for the inclusion of French could be that there is a significant number of North African bilingual Arabic speakers and that a French speaking doctor is on the HMC staff.

Figure 1:

Bilingual COVID-19 awareness pamphlet (Bengali and English).

Since COVID-19 also impacted people’s mental health, especially after the implementation of the social distancing law, HMC health professionals released videos in Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tagalog, in addition to Arabic and English, raising awareness about the mental health issues and the available help at HMC. The fact that these video messages were not released in other languages such as Nepali, Tamil, Bengali, and Sinhalese may have to do with the fact that Urdu and Hindi serve as a lingua franca between speakers of other languages not only in Qatar, but the GCC in general (Ahmad 2019). In terms of the use of migrant languages, our analysis also found a lack of coherent policy about which languages were used on social media. In Table 3 we provide all migrant languages that were used for different messages during the COVID-19 campaign period for print for at least one pamphlet. It is clear that some languages were used for most communications while others were used for only a few.

The migrant languages that were used for all communications were Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Nepali, and Sinhalese. The languages used for the minimum number of pamphlets were Pashto (one pamphlet) followed by Indonesian (three pamphlets). The situation is not much different for the video messages as seen in Table 4. The reason why religious leaders did not use Hindi and Sinhalese is because in India, North Indian Muslims use Urdu and not Hindi for religious discourses. Similarly, Muslims from Sri Lanka are largely of Tamil ethnicity and therefore their religious discourse is in Tamil, and not Sinhalese, which is the language of ethnic Sinhalese who largely follow Buddhism. Pashto, like the printed material, was used in only one video.

5.3 Building trust by partnering with community leaders

As cases of infection began to increase and more information about the importance of social distancing became available, the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs on Tuesday, March 17, 2020 banned congregational prayers in mosques (The Peninsula 2020). Gatherings in open public places such as beaches and parks were still not banned. On March 21, 2020, his Excellency the Prime Minister and Minister of Interior Khaled Al-Thani issued a ban, enforceable by law, on different forms of gathering (QNA 2020a). A pamphlet in multiple languages entitled, “Forms of gathering banned by the power of law” came out between March 24–26, 2020. The prohibition included gatherings on beaches, public parks, courtyards of mosques, majlis (a private space where Qataris receive and entertain guests), public celebrations, and condolence meetings. The government also announced that vehicles would patrol different areas to catch violations and that a hotline was established for people to report violations. This pamphlet, however, was posted in fewer languages than the first one; it used Arabic, English, Hindi, Malayalam, Nepali, Sinhalese, and Urdu. Tagalog and Bengali, two major migrant languages spoken by about 20% of the migrant population were conspicuous by their absence. Figure 2 shows a sample pamphlet in Nepali explaining social distancing with some visuals.

Figure 2:

Social gathering prohibition pamphlet in Nepali.

Many newspapers and social media, however, reported and shared videos showing violations of the social distancing instructions from beaches, in front of cafeterias, and Friday congregational prayers on rooftops and open public spaces. On March 30, the MOI informed that they received 846 calls reporting violations of the social distancing law (Abuhajr 2020). This led the MOI to issue a second pamphlet on March 30 in 10 languages that stressed the significance of physical distancing and reiterated that gatherings at beaches, restaurants and cafeterias were banned. It specifically added that jama’at ‘congregational’ prayers on rooftops and any other open spaces were banned too. A critical feature of this pamphlet was that it further stipulated consequences of non-compliance with the law including imprisonment not exceeding three years and/or a fine up to Qatari Riyal 200,000. An Urdu pamphlet is given in Figure 3.

Figure 3:

Social gathering prohibition pamphlet in Urdu.

This in many ways was a turning point in the way the government communicated with its migrant population. It realized that, in addition to use of migrant languages, the community leaders could play a critical role not only in delivering health-related information to their people but also creating trust needed for strict compliance. The government began to partner with prominent cultural and media personalities from different expatriate communities in creating messages in their own languages and delivering them to their people. The messages by the community leaders began to be circulated on different platforms from April 3, 2020.

The MOI reached out to community leaders explaining to them the goal of the campaign, and they recorded short video messages in their languages, highlighting the significance of social distancing, including gatherings at beaches and prayers in open spaces. While the video messages appealed to their audiences to observe the law to protect themselves and others, they also reminded them of the consequences of non-compliance. The people and languages that were chosen to record and deliver the message also showed that the government’s perception of Qatar’s communities is largely based on language. Indian workers in Qatar in particular and the Gulf at large are organized based on language-affiliations (Vora 2012). To reach out to the Indian nationals, the messages were not only recorded in Hindi and English, the official and the associate official languages of India, but in a number of regional languages that are spoken by significant numbers of Indian migrant workers living in Qatar, which included Malayalam, Tamil, Urdu, and Bengali. Before the video began to play, the MOI logo appeared briefly, followed by the name of the speaker at the bottom, their social and cultural affiliation, and the language of the message (Figure 4). The fact that languages were officially marked along with the speakers shows that perceptions of community are predicated upon language.

Figure 4:

Community leader and language use.

Another interesting fact about the relationship between language and community could be gleaned from the fact that two messages were recorded in Urdu—one by an Indian leader and the other by a Pakistani. This was clearly done to make sure that the political rivalry between Indian and Pakistan does not impact the reception of the message and that the Urdu speakers from India and Pakistan receive the message from one of their own leaders. This also shows that the issue of trust in the message is linked to who the carrier of the message is, despite the fact that the language of the message is the same. In addition to messages in regional Indian languages that mainly targeted blue-collar workers, the educated white-collar workers were addressed in Indian English by Sundaresan Rajeshwar, director of Toastmaster Doha.

Table 5 gives information about the languages used in the video messages. The languages Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Tamil, Tagalog, Bengali, Nepali, and English cover the major non-Arab migrant languages accounting for approximately 65% of the expatriate population.

Social distancing also had an impact on the religious practices of Muslims, which includes five daily congregational prayers and a weekly Friday prayer that is held in a bigger mosque and thus attracts larger crowds. On March 13, 2020, in an effort to minimize attendance in mosques and reduce physical contact, the government imposed certain restrictions whereby the time between the call to daily prayers and the start of the prayer was reduced from the usual 15–20 minutes to 5 minutes. Similarly, for Friday prayers, the first call to prayer, which happens 40 minutes before the start of the khutbah or ‘religious sermon’, was eliminated altogether. Similarly, mosques were allowed to open their doors only 10 minutes before the khutbah and were closed right after the end of the prayer, so people do not gather in the mosque afterward. As more infections were detected, the Ministry of Awqaf shut down all mosques on March 17 for all forms of prayer (The Peninsula 2020). However, as pointed out earlier, many Muslims were found praying in the courtyards of the mosques, which fall outside of the area officially closed by the Ministry. One reason why the courtyards were not closed was because they contain public toilets. When this came to the attention of the authorities, they published another pamphlet during March 24–26 specifically mentioning that prayers in the courtyards were banned too. The non-compliance did not go away and many cases of people holding congregational Friday prayers outside of mosque premises—on rooftops of buildings and open public spaces continued (Saaduddin 2020).

This specific non-compliance made it clear to the government that there was something more to the issue and they began to adapt their multilingual communication strategy. Many Muslims from South Asia believe that not offering Friday prayers is sinful. Consequently, the MOI mobilized religious leaders to deliver messages that could convince the people that compliance with the government instruction not to offer congregational prayers in public is not a sin. Towards this end, the MOI mobilized preachers, imams of mosques, and other religious leaders to create messages in the migrant languages clarifying the religious ruling on offering congregational prayers during times of pandemic. Table 6 provides information about the religious figures who were chosen to deliver the message and the languages of the message.

These messages were different from those prepared by the community leaders, both in terms of their structure and their intended audience. Firstly, the community messages were created by people who are socially and culturally prominent in different walks of life. Secondly, the community messages were crafted using secular arguments that mentioned the medical and social benefits of social distancing, and they reiterated the civil consequences of non-compliance. Messages by the imams and preachers, by contrast, recruited religious arguments drawing upon hadith, the narrations of Prophet Muhammad, and verses from the holy Quran. Secondly, most speakers were recorded in clothes that gave visual cues about their religious and professional identities. This helped construct credibility and trust in their messages. Speakers of Pashto, Tagalog, Urdu, and Bengali were wearing Arab clothes that included a white thawb, an ankle-length usually white robe, and a shemagh, a white or checkered headgear. Although the speakers of Nepali, Malayalam, and Tamil had western clothes, they, like others either began their message with a religious supplication or referenced Quran or hadith in the body of their message. For example, in the Urdu video, Sheikh Omri starts with the Islamic verse, “In the name of Allah, the most Gracious and Merciful” and then cites Verse 195 of Chapter 2 of the Quran which says, “do not throw yourself into destruction” and supplements it with a hadith in which Prophet Muhammad asked healthy people not to intermingle with sick people. He further adds that Muslims will get the same rewards in the hereafter for praying at home as praying in a congregation in a mosque.

The above analysis shows that as the messages in multiple migrant languages were not able to achieve the desired compliance, the government quickly tapped into social and cultural resources of the migrant communities and recruited influential secular as well as religious leaders from amongst them to create and deliver the message. The deployment of community leaders and imams and preachers shows the complex nature of messages and their social and cultural anchoring that impact their reception and compliance. These two factors, however, were not enough. The medium of the message was found to be equally critical.

Although a significant number of non-nationals in Qatar are highly educated and hold white-collar jobs, a vast majority of them are illiterate or semi-literate and work in blue-collar jobs including construction and service sectors. The successful delivery of the message to this group depends on exploiting oral and/or audio-visual medium, especially through radio and phone applications like WhatsApp.

5.4 Strategic mediums for information dissemination

In order to understand the use of radio as a tool to disseminate health information to speakers of migrant languages, we interviewed Mohammad who works for Malayalam FM 98.6 and Kumar, Ajay, and Ahmad who oversee operations of Radio Olive FM 106.3 and Radio Suno 91.7.^[4] In separate interviews, they informed us that different departments of the government including the GCO, MOI, and MoPH invited them as early as the first week of March for a meeting to seek their cooperation in spreading COVID-19 health awareness messages through their radio stations. Kumar added that the government knew well that in addition to having a large listenership catering to 1.8 million listeners (Radio this Month 2020) they also had a significant presence on the ground. He explained that they have reached such a large listenership because their strategy “3 O’s” referring to On-air, Online, and On-ground, has been successful. Their on-ground activities include involving migrant communities in cultural activities such as Diwali and Onam celebrations. They also host entertainment programs in Qatar involving film actors from India. Below we discuss how they used these transnational connections to create health awareness videos involving actors from India.

In terms of the contents of the COVID-19 awareness campaign, they informed us that they often reused content received from the MOI, but they also created their own. Radio Olive and Suno Malayalam Network graciously shared their audio clips in 10 languages namely Bengali, English, Hindi, Tagalog, Kannada, Malayalam, Nepali, Pashto, Sinhalese, and Urdu that played on air. These multilingual messages were prepared by their RJs in collaboration with community members. They were aired from March 11 until the end of May from 6 a.m. until 12 midnight every hour. Radio Olive and Suno Network also did something unique; they sent these audio clips to listeners on their WhatsApp. They have a list of 40 thousand listeners in their WhatsApp database. Listeners use WhatsApp to send their requests of songs or answers to competitions, or to say hello to their friends, and so forth.

Malayalam 98.6 FM had a similar approach to the dissemination of health information to its listeners. Mohammad proudly informed us that in addition to Malayalam, the language of their FM channel, they aired COVID-19 awareness material in Tamil, Bengali, Sinhalese, English, and Arabic. During the peak times of the virus, messages in the above six languages were aired every hour. Mohammad said that the multilingual COVID-19 content was rotated so frequently that many of his listeners started to call it a COVID channel. On our request, Mohammad was kind to share the report he submitted to the government about the frequency of the multilingual campaigns on FM 98.6. Figure 5 shows the languages and the rotation of the campaign in Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali, Sinhalese, Arabic, and English.

Figure 5:

Rotation of languages on FM 98.6.

The items that do not indicate a language are in the default language of the station, Malayalam, so the common notification in the table was in Malayalam and in male and female voices indicated in the table with (m) and (f). Figure 5 shows that there were two different messages in Bengali marked as 1 and 2. When Mohammad was asked why speakers of other languages would tune in to this channel, he clarified that they do it for two reasons. Firstly, they tune in because of its popularity; the stations play Bollywood songs, which attract non-Malayalis. Secondly, they make announcements about discounts and offers in different stores in Doha, which is another reason why non-Malayalis tune in to their channel.

In addition to on-air broadcast, the radio stations also posted the COVID-19 awareness printed and video contents on their social media pages. The most striking part of the awareness campaign was the community engagement in which radio stations with their RJs partnered with the government to take the message directly to the people in their own languages using vans fitted with public announcement systems, acting as linguistic and cultural mediators. Both Mohammad from FM 98.6 and Radio Olive and Radio Suno Network shared that they were actively involved in this campaign. In Figure 6, we see on the left a Radio Olive RJ making an announcement in Urdu, whereas the car in the right has a Nepali RJ. We also interviewed a community volunteer who participated in this campaign. He informed us that the MOI had identified the migrant labor camps and the neighborhoods that had large concentrations of workers speaking a specific language. The cars went to these locations and parked at the main entrance and the announcements were made through the PA system. He also informed us that they went to neighborhoods and got out of their vans and spoke to people. He said people were very happy that they were being spoken to in their own languages.

Figure 6:

Government partnering with radio olive and FM 98.6.

Since WhatsApp is extremely popular among Asian expats, the government used it as well for the diffusion of awareness information. On April 6, 2020, it launched the chat-bot based secure WhatsApp service, which people could use to get information about symptoms of COVID-19, preventions against it, the number of cases in Qatar, and travel advisories in six languages namely Arabic, English, Urdu, Hindi, Nepali, and Malayalam (GCO 2020b). The service was free of charge. Figure 7 shows sample screenshots of the main page of the services showing the available languages in English, and sample information messages about preventive measures in Urdu and Malayalam.

Figure 7:

Awareness using whatsapp service.

5.5 Online platforms for COVID-19 awareness messages

The closing part of our analysis examines the use of online platforms for the COVID-19 awareness campaign, particularly since use of online sources like social media platforms increases during crises. Online campaigns, especially paid ones, have another advantage in that depending on the need, they can target a specific group based on demographic and geographical factors such as neighborhoods. Since residential locations of workers in Qatar are organized largely in terms of language groups, QMC used paid campaigns to spread awareness targeting each group. In the interview, Faisal al-Mudahka of QMC informed us that they hired services of Dotspace, an advertising agency with Google Premium Partner status, based in Kuwait, to deliver the message in migrant languages based on the concentration of workers in different neighborhoods and reports of violation from specific ones. Using the Geo-targeting method, Dotspace focused on six locations in Qatar namely, Industrial Area, Al-Wakrah, AL-Wukair, Al-Khor, Muntazah, and Corniche. Given below in Figure 8 is a map showing the targeted locations.^[5] He mentioned that some of these targeted awareness messages received more than a million views suggesting that the messages were viewed by individuals more than once.

Figure 8:

Awareness messages targeting specific locations.

Since Facebook is the most popular social media platform used by Asians in Qatar (Dennis et al. 2019), we examined this platform in greater detail in terms of the number of views of certain COVID-19 health awareness videos. We focused on two video messages—one created by the medical professionals of HMC and the other by the MOI with religious preachers—in Urdu, Nepali and Bengali across FB pages of the relevant ministries and RJ Ubaid Tahir, a social media influencer who also works for Urdu radio FM 107. Table 7 shows that both videos posted on Ubaid Tahir’s FB page were viewed by far more people than the MOI and HMC pages. It was not possible to study videos in other languages since neither Ubaid Tahir nor any other social media influencer will post in all languages. The ministries were not consistent in terms of posting their own videos on their pages. They generally posted their own videos on their FB pages, but sometimes they did not. For example, the video in Nepali by Sheikh Siddiqi is missing from the MOI page.

It is clear from Table 7 that social media influencers play a critical role in disseminating information. The Northwestern University in Qatar study (Dennis et al. 2019) previously discussed in Section 2.3, also showed that 96% of Asian expatriates look at stories and posts from social media influencers and 79% of them get their news and information from social media influencers. Therefore, we decided to examine Ubaid Tahir’s FB page more closely.

Ubaid Tahir is a young well-known media personality who works for FM 107. He is extremely active on social media, especially FB where he has over 340,000 followers. Since he is multilingual in Urdu, Arabic, and English, he works as a conduit for transmission of information from Arabic into Urdu. He mainly posts on issues that concern daily lives of the South Asian migrant population in Qatar. He regularly posts on issues related to visa, residency, driver’s license, exit permit, vehicle registration, and starting in March, on COVID-19. Although his video posts are written in Urdu and Hindi, his followers go beyond the speakers of these languages. When we asked him who the target audience of his videos is, he replied that it is quite mixed including those who speak Urdu or Hindi as their first languages and speakers of Nepali, Bengali, and other Indic languages who speak Urdu–Hindi as a lingua franca in Qatar. Furthermore, while community and religious leaders have influence over a large number of people of different migrant communities, they may not be equally effective with the youth.

In Table 8, we show views for one informational video that was released after part of the Industrial Area, largely inhabited by workers from South Asia, was shut down on March 17 (GCO 2020a). This news was worrying for workers and the people at large, despite the fact that Assistant Foreign Minister and spokesperson for the Supreme Committee for Crisis Management Lolwah Alkhater in a press conference assured that essential supplies including grocery and pharmacy would remain open. She also assured that people requiring medical services would be able to access them. However, to help alleviate fears, videos were released on March 23 by doctors from the HMC in Malayalam, Nepali, Hindi, Sinhalese, and Urdu in which the doctors stressed that the area had been closed to prevent the virus from spreading to other areas and reiterated that the MoPH would be responsible for all their needs and that medical care or ambulance services would be provided to those in need. Since this news impacted a large number of workers who live in the area and elsewhere, the video message of assurance was uploaded on the MADLSA FB page.

Ubaid Tahir’s unofficial video in Urdu, which he made from his home containing the same message, in addition to a few other items announced in the press conference was viewed by more people than the three videos in Nepali, Urdu, and Hindi combined on the Ministry’s page. Although he released his video on March 17, the same day of the press conference, and thus had the advantage of more time since MADSLA posted theirs a few days later, the reach is still significantly higher.

Ubaid Tahir’s other informational videos related to COVID-19 similarly received a large number of views. Table 9 shows some examples of short videos with specific messages that the government announced, which Ubaid then picked up and repackaged in his videos. He also summarized the announcements of the press conferences held by Qatar’s Supreme Committee. These videos received much higher numbers going over half a million views. Media influencers such as Ubaid Tahir worked as an amplifier of the COVID-19 messages in a much more effective way than any other government ministries.