Who speaks what?

Although ‘the other languages’ have always been a part of British life, they have often been inaudible and invisible, at least in public life. For this reason, estimates of both the numbers of languages spoken and the numbers of speakers are usually highly speculative. But attitudes towards diversity are changing. Growing recognition that other languages are an asset – not a problem – has acted as a stimulus for some useful attempts to chart the diversity of the UK.

The older mother tongues

The 1991 Census reported over 500,000 Welsh speakers. Two-thirds of these live in the traditional heartlands of the north and west. There are some 67,000 speakers of Gaelic, concentrated mainly in the islands, particularly in the Outer Hebrides, where the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (the Western Isles Council) has adopted an official policy of bilingualism. More than 140,000 people in Northern Ireland claim knowledge of Irish, though this figure includes people who don’t speak the language fluently.

But even when official statistics are available, they need to be interpreted with caution. For instance, the UK Census is strictly territorial: it records the number of Welsh speakers in Wales, Gaelic speakers in Scotland and Irish speakers in Northern Ireland, but collects no information on the Celtic diaspora in other parts of the UK. Another problem arises from the difficulty of defining what counts as speaking a language. Is it enough, as in the case of the Irish statistics, to simply ‘have knowledge’ of the language? Does it count if you can talk about home and family, but not about philosophy and politics? Or do you also have to be able to read and write the language?

British Sign Language (BSL) is another of the older mother tongues whose presence in the UK can be traced back to at least the sixteenth century. It is used by an estimated 100,000 Deaf people* who, in many cases, speak English as a second or third language, and by a further 400,000 hearing people in regular contact with the Deaf. There is a history of considerable prejudice against BSL, which for many years was dismissed as a telegraphic, broken and inadequate form of communication. It was not until the 1980s that linguists began to demonstrate that the hand shapes, facial expressions, gestures and body language associated with Deaf people are governed by grammatical rules and that BSL can express the same range of meanings as spoken languages.

One other indigenous variety should be mentioned at this point. Scots has its origins partly in Northumbrian Old English and partly in the Scandinavian-influenced Middle English of incomers from northern and central England. It is estimated that speakers in Scotland currently number around 1.5 million³ and that a further 100,000 speakers are to be found in Northern Ireland.⁴

Community languages

Large numbers of other languages, in addition to the older mother tongues, are spoken in the UK. Many different terms have been used to describe these languages – ‘mother tongues’, ‘first languages’ and ‘home languages’, to name three – but all have serious flaws. For instance, most Pakistani children speak Panjabi at home but study Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, in classes organised by the community. It is difficult to see how a language acquired in this way can be described as a ‘mother tongue’. No more can Italian be called the first or home language of fourth and fifth generation Italians who speak English at home but go to classes to learn the language of their grandparents and great-grandparents. The preferred solution in the UK – and the one used here – is ‘community languages’. By moving the focus from the individual to the wider community it is possible to avoid many of the pitfalls associated with the other terms. But even this approach is not without its problems. People from outside the UK sometimes assume that a ‘community language’ is one of the twelve official languages of the European Union. When we use this term inside the UK, we are, of course, referring to a much wider range of languages.

Another sensitive issue in discussions of diversity is whether we are dealing with languages or dialects. Because the answer to this question is usually more political than linguistic, linguists prefer to talk about ‘language varieties’. For instance, although Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are best described as forming one dialect continuum, political rivalries over many centuries ensure that Danes, Swedes and Norwegians consider their own varieties to be separate languages. In contrast, Putonghua or Mandarin, which is used as a language of wider communication in the People’s Republic of China, and Cantonese, which is spoken by most people in Hong Kong, are so different that speakers from the two communities in the UK often prefer to communicate with each other in English. However, because of shared cultural histories, both are considered to be Chinese.

The presence or absence of a writing system is another important influence on decisions about languages and dialects. Most Bangladeshis in the UK speak Sylheti, a variety sufficiently distinct from Bengali, the official language of Bangladesh, for some people to consider it a separate language.⁵ However, many others insist that Sylheti is a dialect, in part at least because it has no written tradition.

The various African-Caribbean communities can also usefully be mentioned at this point. Although similar in size to the south Asian communities in Britain, they are often considered ethnic rather than linguistic communities, because English is the official language throughout the former British West Indies. However, most people in the Caribbean speak ‘Patwa’ – English and French creoles which evolved through contact between the European languages of the colonisers and the African languages of the slaves. Many young people use a British variety heavily influenced by Caribbean speech to mark a distinctive Black identity⁶ and, for this reason, Patwa is deemed to be an essential part of multilingualism in the UK.

Evidence for diversity

Although the UK Census collects no information on languages other than Gaelic, Irish and Welsh, statistics on ethnicity offer useful indirect evidence. Ethnic minorities make up a little over five per cent of the population and, for historical reasons relating to post-war immigration, these minorities are concentrated mainly in industrial and urban areas. Ethnicity is not, of course, an automatic guarantee that someone is bilingual, but it does at least offer a starting point for estimates of linguistic diversity.

Other sources of information are the language surveys undertaken in Inner London schools throughout the 1980s which show not only the range of languages spoken but also the changing profiles of the different communities over time. For instance, Bangladeshi pupils trebled in number between 1981 and 1987 to become the largest linguistic minority in London. More recently the Languages of London Project⁷ has brought together information on well over 300 home languages spoken by more than 850,000 schoolchildren all over the capital.

The languages of London schoolchildren

Rank	Language name	% of school popu- lation	Lowest estimate of total population	Highest estimate of total population
1	English	67.86	5,636,500	5,737,400
2	Bengali + Sylheti	4.51	119,000	136,300
3	Panjabi	3.32	143,600	155,700
4	Gujarati	3.19	138,000	149,600
5	Hindi/Urdu	2.91	125,900	136,500
6	Turkish	1.74	67,600	73,900
7	Arabic	1.23	49,500	53,900
8	English- based Creoles	1.20	46,3008	50,7008
9	Yoruba	1.16	43,300	47,600
10	Somali	0.93	19,037	22,343

Information on linguistic diversity for other parts of the UK is more limited, though growing numbers of local education authorities are conducting surveys of the languages spoken in their schools. It is generally agreed that settlers from the Indian subcontinent – and in particular Panjabi, Urdu, Gujarati and Bengali speakers – form the largest linguistic minority communities. Panjabi-speakers are usually held to be the biggest of these south Asian groupings and certainly outnumber Welsh speakers. There are two main groups: Sikhs from the Indian Panjab and Muslims from the Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir in Pakistan. However, because Urdu is the language of religion and high culture in Pakistan, Mirpuris usually describe themselves as Urdu speakers. Both groups are spread throughout the UK but have important settlements in London and the south, the Midlands and the north of England. Gujarati speakers are scattered throughout the country with particular concentrations in Greater London and the Midlands. Bengali speakers draw on a small, mainly Hindu, community from Indian West Bengal and a much larger Muslim Bangladeshi community, which is concentrated in the London boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Camden, though smaller settlements are also to be found in cities such as Coventry and Bradford.

The Chinese form another numerically important group, although – unlike the large south Asian communities – their patterns of settlement are more dispersed. Most came to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s to escape high levels of unemployment in Hong Kong. The first language of seventy per cent of people in Hong Kong is Cantonese, which also serves as a lingua franca for the rest of the population. Other ethnic Chinese include a refugee community from Vietnam, who use Cantonese as a language of wider communication, and small numbers of Mandarin speakers from Singapore, Malaysia and the People’s Republic of China, many of whom came to the UK as students. In the absence of more sophisticated methods of data collection, estimates of the numbers of speakers are – necessarily – speculative. Yet the fact remains that multilingualism is part of the fabric of British life and attracts a great deal more sympathetic interest now than in the past. This change in attitude is neatly encapsulated in the title of the book which reports the findings of the Languages of London Project. Multilingual capital refers not only to the geographical location of the project but to the benefits associated with the ability to speak other languages.

Interesting web sites

British Deaf Association (BDA)

www.bda.org.uk

Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council)

www.w-isles.gov.uk/

Comunn na Gàidhlig (Gaelic Development Agency)

www.cnag.org.uk

European Bureau for Lesser Use Languages

www.eblul.org

Federation of Deaf People

www.fdp.org.uk

Foras na Gaeilge (The Irish Language Agency of The North South Language Body)

www.bnag.ie

University of Birmingham database of publications on bilingualism developed for professionals, researchers, students or parents of bilingual children

www.edu.bham.ac.uk//bilingualism/database/dbase.htm

Welsh Language Board

www.bwrdd-yr-iaith.org.uk

World of Language project

www.worldoflanguage.com

Discussion points

• What are the problems associated with collecting data on languages?
• Which is the official language (or languages) of your country?
• Which other languages are spoken?
• Is information collected on the numbers of speakers? If so, how?
• How might this information be used to serve the interests of minority communities?

* In this publication we are following guidance from the British Deaf Association regarding the convention of making a distinction between ‘Deaf’ and ‘deaf ’. The lower-case is used when referring to the audiological condition of not hearing; the upper-case is used when referring to a particular group of people who share a common language, culture and sense of identity.