Around the world, COVID-19 lockdowns have caused abrupt shifts in the amount of time spent at home versus out of the home for work, school, and recreation. As a result, many individuals have experienced a disruption in the frequency and type of their interactions. Given the importance of intergenerational transmission and intergenerational interaction for promoting language maintenance, and the importance of peer-to-peer interaction for promoting language shift, we ask how these abrupt changes necessitated by social distancing will affect language use and attitudes, specifically short- and long-term language maintenance or shift involving heritage languages. We examine principles of language maintenance and shift in the context of the COVID-19 lockdown for university students, people still involved in critical acts of identity creation. Here we describe a survey designed to learn how the lockdown is affecting young people’s language ecologies and attitudes. Using both quantitative and qualitative interpretive methods, we document the experiences of over 400 students, focusing on changes in their perceptions of their language use and the causes of these changes.

While multiethnolects have been documented in major European metropolises over the last several decades, no such varieties have been reported in North America. This is surprising given the high degree of global immigration in many North American cities. We consider Toronto, Ontario, one of the most multicultural cities in the world, and explore the features of a Multicultural Toronto English. Data comes from young people in an ethnolinguistically diverse region of the Greater Toronto Area. We investigate five vocalic phenomena: goose fronting, the Canadian Vowel Shift, Canadian raising, ban/bag tensing, and goat monophthongization. Our results indicate a great deal of interspeaker variability with some suggestion that young, immigrant men are least likely to produce normative Canadian English patterns. However, a lack of cohesion in covariation between phenomena is consistent with a multiethnolect as understood as a variable repertoire. We argue that Multicultural Toronto English represents linguistic alterity and a means of everyday resistance for young Torontonians.