Introduction: Applying linguistics to healthcare communication discourses

The diversity of contexts in which healthcare communication unfolds also reflects wider societal developments, such as the digitalisation of healthcare information, the increasing importance of patient-centred care models and the growing recognition of linguistic and cultural diversity in clinical settings. For this reason, healthcare communication is a vast and multi-faceted area of linguistic research, broadly encompassing any form of communication that takes place in a medical or healthcare context or relates to the description of health and illness. Given this rich and complex landscape, this special issue offers an interdisciplinary study of the role of discourse analysis and applied linguistics in healthcare communication. It offers insights into (1) past and present professional discourses on health and the body, (2) discourse analysis and healthcare communication, (3) the role of the applied linguist in healthcare communication, (4) the application of corpus linguistics to healthcare communication, and (5) the impact of applied linguistics on communicative practices.