Multilingual Health Communication, Digital Trust, and Institutional Discourse: A Comparative Critical Discourse Analysis of Public Health Messaging in Canada and Singapore

Abstract

Multilingual public health communication has become a central institutional challenge in digitally mediated societies where linguistic diversity, platformized information flows, and public trust intersect. This article comparatively examines how multilingual health messaging constructs institutional authority, citizen participation, and communicative inclusion in Canada and Singapore. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and corpus-assisted institutional discourse analysis, the study analyzes 1.9 million words of public health messages, government advisories, multilingual social media posts, translated health materials, and institutional web texts produced between 2020 and 2025. The findings show that Canada’s public health discourse emphasizes participatory inclusion, community translation, and culturally responsive risk communication, whereas Singapore’s discourse prioritizes institutional clarity, behavioral compliance, and centralized multilingual standardization. The comparative evidence demonstrates that multilingual health communication is shaped by language policy regimes, governance traditions, digital platform practices, and culturally situated expectations of institutional trust. This article argues that public health discourse functions as a linguistic infrastructure through which states organize risk perception, social responsibility, and communicative belonging. The study contributes to contemporary language science by proposing the concept of multilingual risk mediation to explain how institutional discourse transforms health knowledge into socially actionable communication across linguistically diverse societies.