ABSTRACT
This chapter reports the findings from a study that draws on corpus linguistics to identify the language used by around 4000 anonymous YouTube commenters in response to Bangla videos disseminating information and advice about the risks posed by COVID-19. The researchers drew upon the quantitative and qualitative affordances of corpus software to gain an inductive window into the multilingual dataset. The analysis identified the presence of an unprompted religious discourse that expressed an at-times fatalistic disempowerment in the face of an overwhelming threat. By looking at this intersection between language, risk, and religion, this study explores how religiosity is both ingrained in everyday uses of language and emerges in ways specific to a given risk scenario.
