Epilogue opportunity, fear, and well-being: heritage languages during COVID-19

The COVID 19 lockdown of 2020 and resulting year or more of social distancing and quarantining left the media as well as educators, psychologists, therapists, and scholars questioning the short and long-term effects on children.Fears about children's learning loss, excessive screen time, lack of social interaction and even more serious concerns about the equitable distribution of resources, food instability, and domestic violence dominated the public discourse.However, where others saw a myriad of problems, multilingual parents and researchers interested in multilingual families saw an opportunity.For multilingual families, the lockdown potentially meant hours of additional exposure to family languages that were not taught at school and opportunities for children to use these languages more fully in their daily lives.And while the learning of other school subjects such as Math and History shifted to online instruction, language learning in multilingual families could take place at home in the center of it all, if the conditions were right.The papers in this issue represent a small body of research from intrepid scholars who were able to shift gears quickly at the start of the lockdown and investigate the "learning, re-learning, and unlearning" of languages during that time.The studies here engage two main trends in family language policy research.First, they explore what is known as dynamic family language policy (cf.Seals 2018; van Mensel 2018) and how changes in family life during the lockdown coincided with changes in language practices within a very short time frame.Second, these studies contribute to a better understanding of the family external influences (cf.Curdt-Christiansen and Huang 2020) on family language policy and, more specifically, how the absence of structures and routines such as school, work, and even social life affected internal family language dynamics.As we might imagine, parents with young children who were committed to using their home or heritage languages, as in Zhang-Wu's autoethnography, found