General practitioners’ use of Chilean colloquial language to support equity and inclusion in medical consultations with students with invisible disabilities

Abstract

This chapter examines Chilean colloquial language in medical consultations between two GPs and 14 university students, who self-identify as having invisible disabilities. It shows how locally grounded verbal resources may help legitimise students’ lay expertise, support sensitive concerns, and mitigate epistemic asymmetries. We argue that colloquial Chilean Spanish can function as a key communicative resource for equity, not simply by replacing medical jargon with plain language, but by creating interactional conditions in which students’ lifeworld concerns are treated as legitimate parts of the consultation. Using a mixed‑methods approach, we analysed 14 videotaped consultations by identifying stretches of talk containing colloquial expressions and applying corpus methods to examine their frequency and context. Building on Cordella’s Fellow Human Voice , an illustrative case study explores interactional patterns observed across the dataset, focusing on the GPs’ use of colloquial and interactional resources to display attentiveness, normalise psychological symptoms and formulate inclusive recommendations.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Discourse & Communication, 2026 · DOI ↗