Language in the Time of Corona: an analysis of Saudi and British newspaper headlines

Abstract

The study explores the linguistic characteristics of headlines about the coronavirus outbreak in four international newspapers: The Times, The Telegraph, Saudi Gazette, and Arab News. The data consists of 374 headlines accessed on the newspapers’ online sites; 95 from Saudi newspapers and 279 from British newspapers. Some linguistic characteristics, such as present tense favored over past tense, special vocabulary, omission of words, and abbreviations, were widely used in both Saudi and British headlines. Salient elements in British but not in Saudi headlines were the use of metaphors and interrogatives. The findings support past research that the English of newspaper headlines deviates from standard English, and this was found to be the case in both Saudi and British newspapers.