During the official lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021, educational institutions had to come up with innovative ideas for teaching and learning. In the aftermath of these lockdowns, changes had to be made to accommodate measures that would prevent a rise in infections, like physical distancing. Institutions could not continue with face-to-face teaching as they used to do and now online materials and remote learning seem to have become a more permanent feature of teaching and learning. From the perspective of institutions it becomes difficult to maintain multilingual teaching practices like providing materials in more than one language and using more than one language in the classroom. However, other multilingual teaching practices have become possible, like providing podcasts in other languages or providing contact sessions with students in different languages because space and time on a timetable are not factors anymore. Students (at all levels of education) may have been able to draw on multilingual support from parents and family members, rather than their fellow students. However, they may also have decided to simply stick with one language if there was no support in other languages. In this paper I will report on the first phase of a project to investigate this issue by presenting quantitative data collected from university students and qualitative data collected from secondary school teachers, in an attempt to determine what happened during the lockdown periods.