Why It Matters Languages Spoken
Summary
We are measuring a prediction of the proportion of individuals in a postcode who speak each language as their main language, categorised into 95 language brackets by the ONS, based on a projection of the number of speakers of a language as their main language at borough level.
Interpretation
We have listed the 12 most commonly spoken languages in the selected postcode area, in addition to the percentage of that postcode’s population who speak each of those 12 languages. Languages have broken down into 95 possible options, in accordance with the ONS’s division of languages in their own studies, including English.
Why the metric matters from a commercial inhabitant’s perspective
Language usage data is imperative to business owners, as unlike ethnicity or sometimes country of birth which might seem to be more visible upon visiting an area, language usage tells us a lot about how diverse an area is generally, how susceptible it is to immigration, how best to communicate with a customer base and the languages spoken by your potential local workforce. For example, you might establish your business in an area of Southwark and not know there are a high proportion of residents are Spanish speakers, so possibly missing a commercial opportunity to communicate with your customer base in the best possible way, or offer goods or services which tend to appeal to Spanish speakers, such as English Spanish bilingual nursery schools.
Why the metric matters from a residential inhabitant’s perspective
Residents will be interested to know that the rate of English usage in their neighbours’ households will provide a firm indicator of the level of integration between the different groups living there. For example, in communities where no one in the household speaks English as a main language, these neighbours will have to interact solely with other members of their own community who speak their language until their English improves.
Resultantly, they will form or add to their own community rather than integrating with the existing groups already in the neighbourhood. Conversely, areas where the adults in the house do not speak English as a main language, but the children do, whilst not demonstrating the highest levels of integration seen in areas where the majority of households have at least one member with English as their main language, will exhibit more cohesion between the various linguistic communities as well as between members of those linguistic communities and native Londoners.
Further, English usage in households provides a rough and ready bellwether of how susceptible an area is to immigration – that is areas where a high proportion of households do not contain a member who speakers English as their main language will tend to also be areas where immigrants head to initially upon migrating to London.
There is also a correlation between how proficient in English your neighbours are and their general health, with the small population of people who could not speak English at all reporting the poorest levels of health. This is of course because such people are reliant on only their own communities so their access to healthcare is poorer than if they were integrated with the existing neighbourhood.
General Commentary
Based on the data gathered as a result of the 2011 census, more than nine out of ten people in England and Wales (49.8 million people) reported English as their main language. 1.3% of the population of England and Wales (726,000 people) could speak English but not well, and 0.3% of the population (138,000 people) reported that they could not speak English at all, so whilst England and Wales are home to speakers of 600 different languages, the vast majority of these people also consider that they can speak English well.
As one of the most diverse cities in the world, London’s 8 million residents speak over 300 languages, which reflects the linguistic diversity of the capital, not only as a result of migrant languages brought to the country, but also due to the UK having its own regional and minority languages.
As a result of the free movement of peoples within the European Union, 2.9 percent of the population speak a language from one of the other 27 EU member states as a main language. With 546,000 speakers as of 2011, Polish is firmly in place as the second most spoken language in the country, followed by Punjabi, then Urdu then Bengali then Gurjarati. Arabic, French, Chinese and Portuguese occupy positions six to ten of the top ten most spoken language ranking. The languages most frequently listed as the second most commonly spoken in any given borough are: Polish, in seven boroughs including Barnet and Wandsworth; Turkish in four boroughs including Enfield and Islington; Bengali in three boroughs including Camden; French in three boroughs including the City of London and Punjabi in three boroughs including Bexley.
We must remember when considering linguistic data that Languages spoken correlate well with some nationalities and ethnicities, for example where one language is spoken across a region and by most members of an ethnic group, such as South East Asia, but not with others, such as African, in London. Language spoken also does not always tell us about origin – those who speak French as a first or second language could be from France or any one of hundreds of regions where French is spoken. This is why here at Walulel we capture data on household languages spoken, country of birth, passports held, national identity and ethnicity.
Trivia
A study that captured which languages you are most likely to hear on the various tube lines and stations of London Underground found Turnpike Lane on the Piccadilly line in north-east London, to be the most diverse tube stop, as 16 languages are spoken by more than 1% of the population living within a short distance of the stop.
History
London has always been incredibly diverse and the majority of inhabitants that settled it were not native to Britain. At the time of Londinium’s establishment as a Roman town in 43 CE the population was thought to be around 60,000 inhabitants from across the Roman Empire, continental Europe, the Middle East, and both Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa, speaking hundreds of different languages, dialects, and pidgins as languages of trade.
As a result of the four-hundred-year Roman rule of London, about two hundred words with Roman origin are left in the modern-day lexicon, many of which were used by Roman soldiers and merchants, such as ‘weall’, which became ‘wall’, ‘belt’, ‘candel’ and ‘win’, which became ‘wine’. The sixth century CE onwards saw the settlement of various Saxon, Germanic peoples in London, as the Romans were no longer there to provide protection from invasion as they had been recalled to defend their empire from Barbarian attacks. The majority of the invaders were from Engla Land, which meant ‘land of the Angles,’ who came from the Angeln peninsula in the area of the Bay of Kiel, which is in the Baltic Sea. They spoke a language known as ‘Englisch.’
The region where the invaders came from became the origin of the name ‘England’ and their language evolved into the present spelling: English. The basis of Old English which was in usage from 450 to 1100 AD were the Anglo-Saxon dialects. There are still about one-third of those Anglo-Saxon words that remain in constant use today, like the words ‘be’, ‘sleep’, ‘night’, ‘sing’, ‘food’, ‘strong’, ‘house’, ‘water’ and ‘earth’.
The subsequent Viking invasion in the eighth century brought with it the adoption of at least two thousand Nordic words to the English language such as ‘reindeer’ and ‘awkward’, which filtered down to London from the Viking strongholds in Scotland and the North of the country.
This included a large influx of the invading Norman French which had the greatest impact on English. The ruling French class ensured that French became established alongside the traditional Latin as the language of public state business and of the court. These elevated uses of French meant that there was an inequality of status between the two languages, so it was a case of superstrate borrowing: French influenced English from above, bringing words such as ‘throne’, ‘princess’, ‘saint’ and ‘royal’. In contrast to the immediate post-Conquest period, French usage became increasingly no longer confined to the upper classes. Knowledge of the language became useful for the growing aspirations of the middle class in England so in the thirteenth and fourteenth century a huge variety of French words for everyday activities and terms were also adopted. Usage was adapted, for example, French affixes were added to native words - for example the suffix - ance, which was deduced from words of French origin such as ‘resistance was added to native verbs such as ‘hinder’.
Meanwhile, further populations of black Africans reached London from Spain because of its colonial expeditions. Trade lines also opened directly between London and West Africa such that there was believed to be a minimum population of 20,000 black people in London by the mid-seventeenth century. Another wave of French migration came to London in this century in the form of the Huguenots protestants, following their expulsion from France and bringing with them the word refugee.
Another significant population in London which had been increasing from the sixteenth century was the Irish but whose numbers peaked in the mid-eighteenth century during the famine years. In 1801, when the first reliable modern census was taken, greater London recorded just over a million people; rising to a little over 1.4 million inhabitants by 1815. With the increased Irish presence in London this cemented the use of Irish words in English which had begun during the English colonisation of Ireland for example, the word galore comes from the gaelic phrase ‘go leor, which translates as “til plenty’, ‘brogue’ comes directly from the Irish word for shoe, bróg and the word slogan traces its roots back to the Gaelic term ‘sluagh-ghairm’, used to refer to the battle cries used by Scottish Highland or Irish clans.
During these decades smaller communities of Chinese, Indian and African sailors, established communities living and working along the riverside. And finally, there was a thriving and substantial Jewish community, replenished decade by decade by further European migration. In this period the Jewish population in London, influenced the local lexicon with Yiddish words such as ‘shtum’ which meant ‘speechless’ or ‘silent’ and was adopted into cockney slang, a vernacular used in the East of London. Other words such as ‘noshed’, ‘schmaltzy’, ‘schmoozed’ and ‘schlepped’ also became commonly used.
The twentieth century saw significant influxes of migrants from the Caribbean and Africa as colonial subjects who volunteered to fight in the First and Second World Wars and following the arrival of the Windrush in 1948. The latter came in the wake of the British Nationality Act in the same year, which conferring British Citizenship on all who lived in the British Empire and Commonwealth, granted due to concerns about job and skills shortages following the Second World War. Words were absorbed into the language from these countries following colonisation and their increased presence in London, from the Taino words ‘canoe’, ‘potato’ and ‘barbeque’, to words from various African dialects such as ‘banana’, ‘bongo’, ‘chimpanzee’, ‘jazz’ and ‘zombie’.
The 1950s to 1970s was when Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis started to make up a more significant proportion of the population of London, following the breakup of then India. Though the adoption of words spoken in the Asian subcontinent had begun during the English colonisation of this region, their arrival in London, hastened the uptake of borrowed words, such as ‘cashmere’, ‘bungalow’, ‘pyjamas’ and ‘veranda’.
The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen a large influx of immigration from Eastern Europe, following the adoption of the Free Movement of Persons Directive in 2004. We are excited to see how these waves of immigration influence the English spoken by Londoners in years to come.