Effects of COVID-19 on London's multilingual communities

This chapter discusses the findings from the survey. The primary aim of our research project was to gather voices from multilingual communities during the unfolding pandemic. We sought to record narratives directly from ethnic and minority communities to understand the spread of COVID-19 within specific language groups. Due to the UK’s third national lockdown from January to March 2021, in-person interviews were not possible. Instead, we resorted to online questionnaires to test our hypotheses. From February to May 2021, we conducted an online survey targeting 16 community languages in London. We aimed to identify differences in how these communities responded to COVID-19 and took precautions against the virus. The languages included Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Somali, Sylheti, Swahili, Turkish, Yiddish, and Yoruba.