Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication

This completely revised and updated new edition of The Routledge Handbook of Language and Health Communication examines how linguistic and multimodal practices organize health communication in systems reshaped by digital media and Covid-19. Leading international scholars from anthropology, applied linguistics, media studies, health informatics, and social psychology explore how health and illness accounts are produced across clinical, policy, and everyday contexts.

Organized into three sections—individuals' everyday health communication, health professionals' practices, and patient-provider interaction—the handbook analyzes encounters between patients and professionals, health discourse circulation on social media, and multimodal care construction. Case studies include online health communities, Covid-19 memes, digital crowdfunding, and public health communication across diverse cultural settings.

This fully revised edition features a new editorial team, introduction, and ten new chapters covering multimodal discourse analysis, digital discourse analysis, metaphor analysis, and pandemic risk communication. All chapters reflect emerging debates, new technologies, and innovative methodologies transforming the field.The volume combines conversation analysis, ethnography, corpus linguistics, social network analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis, emphasizing technology's role in health communication and authentic communicative contexts. By positioning language as central to understanding health and illness, this handbook provides essential insights into how evolving communication reshapes health and care meanings. An indispensable reference for researchers and practitioners in the field of applied linguistics, addressing healthcare access, inequality, and the ethical dimensions of health communication.

Nelya Koteyko is Professor of Language and Communication in the School of Arts at Queen Mary University of London. She is co-author, with Kevin Harvey, of Exploring Health Communication: Language in Action (Routledge, 2012)

Kevin Harvey is Associate Professor of Discourse Analysis in the School of English, University of Nottingham.

Daniel Hunt is Associate Professor of Discourse Analysis in the School of English, University of Nottingham.

Gavin Brookes is Reader in Linguistics and English Language within the School of Social Sciences at Lancaster University. He has co-authored The Language of Patient Feedback- A Corpus Linguistic Study of Online Health Communication (Routledge 2022), Historical Medical Discourse-Corpus Linguistic Perspectives (Routledge 2025), Masculinities and Language (Routledge, 2025) etc.