Britain’s other languages

The Celtic people who gave way to the Anglo-Saxons did not disappear – they moved north and west, and their descendants live today in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Cornwall. They went on speaking their Celtic languages, but of course shared the islands with a very dominant majority culture. From the 17^th century onwards, the English imposed their language on huge areas of the world, from the north of Canada to the south of New Zealand, so the chances of the Celtic language surviving in Wales were pretty slim.

In fact, it is the Welsh who have preserved their linguistic identity more than any of the other Celtic peoples. The last native speaker of Cornish died in 1777 and of Manx (the language of the Isle of Man) in 1974. Gaelic in Scotland is spoken by no more than 80,000 people, most in the Irelands off the north-west coast; the only monolingual speakers are young children who have not yet been exposed to English. Irish Gaelic has about 100,000 speakers confined to small areas on the west coast. The Welsh language, by contrast, has a solid heartland in the north-west of the country and is spoken by half a million people: there is a TV channel and a lot of radio in Welsh, it is taught in schools and used by the national political party, Plaid Cymru.

It is hard to find evidence that English actually tried to kill off the Celtic languages in a systematic way – to commit linguicide. Their decline has been more a result of indifference from London, and a lack of will to preserve them on the part of the Celtic speakers themselves. But there have been abuses. In the 19^th century, the English education system was imposed, and children were not allowed to speak Welsh at school: if they did they were forced to wear a wooden board across their shoulders. Echoing this, a Welsh nationalist wrote: “Dy aith ar ein bysgwyddau megis pwn” (“Your language is like a burden on our shoulders”).

All official publications in Wales are produced in two languages.

It came as a surprise to many people when in 1987, a census showed that 172 languages were spoken by children in London schools: Chinese, Turkish, Italian, Ga, Yoruba, Thai, Spanish, Gujarati, Punjabi and 163 others. Some of these, like the West African language Ga, have only a couple of hundred speakers. But others, like Punjabi, are quite significant linguistic communities, with their own linguistic communities, radio programmes, newspapers and videos, and classes for children – to ensure that they do not forget the language of their parents and grandparents.

Attitudes to the ancestral language differ a lot within immigrant communities. Among the Sikhs in west London, for example, it is only the older people who find it impossible to learn English, and who carry on speaking exclusively Punjabi. Everyone else is bilingual, some feeling more at home in Punjabi, and others, especially children who were born in Britain, preferring English. Many are perfectly at ease in either language, and switch between them effortlessly; it is common to hear a sentence begin in Punjabi and end in English.

After the English, the biggest language communities in Britain are the Welsh and then Asian languages such as Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati and Bengali; Chinese, Greek, Arabic, Polish and Turkish are also quite well represented, as are the West African languages such as Yoruba.