The Archive Vol. 6, No. 2 (2025)

The Languages Used in Philippine News Agencies and the Risk Perceptions of Filipino Workers During the Outbreak of COVID-19

Abstract

The study banks on the media coverage of Philippine news agencies during the Super Typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan), which critics said affected how Filipinos responded to the possible effects of the typhoon. Both the media and government agencies failed to explain what a storm surge (daluyong) is and the extent of its destruction. The literature suggests that if a foreign language is used to craft a message, people would perceive and act on it with less risk in mind. As such, this research answered the question, in what language do Filipino workers perceive high-risk perception in reading, listening, and watching news about COVID-19, in Filipino (ISO 639-3 [fil]) or in English [eng]?

Using an online survey, which is composed of three sections (words, headlines, and news clippings), administered to 100 Filipino workers, 50 males and 50 females, the research found that both the Filipino and English languages elicit high-risk responses from the respondents. Specifically, three headlines in the Filipino language received high-risk responses, while the word \form{pandemic}, an English word, accumulated the highest risk response in the section on words. Meanwhile, the news clipping delivered in Filipino received the lowest risk response. These results can be attributed to the fact that Filipinos are bilingual. Filipinos speak English as a second language and some workers surveyed even use English as their primary language. Therefore, we do not experience disfluency in making sense of information written in the English language.

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