English today

Walk through any big British town and you can hear languages as diverse as Cantonese, Spanish, Urdu and Greek. But there are also a number of indigenous or native languages spoken within the UK.

Use of the English language is undoubtedly one of the most important factors in being British. It is widely claimed that it is the key to participation on equal terms as a full member of British society. On the other hand, the more the importance of English is emphasized, the more the other languages of the United Kingdom are likely to be undervalued.

The minority languages of Britain fall into three categories: indigenous languages, languages of the new ethnic minorities, and dialects. First, there are the indigenous British languages. Although, there are only a tiny number of monoglot speakers of these languages, bilingual speakers of Welsh and Gaelic form a significant minority, and may even be increasing in number. Estimates suggest that there may be 80,000 speakers of Gaelic, and over half a million Welsh speakers.

The second category comprises the minority languages whose presence in the UK results mainly from the influx of ethnic minority groups from many parts of the world (especially the Indian subcontinent) since the Second World War. When questions about linguistic diversity are raised in the United Kingdom, it is usually these languages on which the discussion is focused. No precise statistics are so far available for the population as a whole, but a number of surveys of bilingualism have been carried out in schools. A language census carried out in 1994 for the inner London Education Authority, for example, showed that 16% of schoolchildren in that district spoke a language other than English at home, and altogether 147 different languages were recorded. The 12 most commonly spoken languages (in descending order) were Bengali, Turkish, Gujarati, Spanish, Greek, Urdu, Punjabi, Chinese, Italian, Arabic, French and Portuguese. In Bradford, a city in the north of England, 69 languages were recorded in 1997, and nearly 25% of the city’s schoolchildren spoke a language other than English at home. Four-fifths of these spoke Punjabi/Urdu or Punjabi/Gurmukhi, and the other main languages were Gujarati, Bengali, Pushtu, Italian, Polish, Hindi, Cantonese, Ukrainian and Creole. Some children, particularly those of Asian origin, may indeed be multilingual; in one piece of research, a ten-year0old girl is reported as saying:

I speak English at school, Gujarati on my way home with my friends, I learn Urdu at mosque, I read the Koran in Arabic and my mother speaks Marathi.

Speakers of minority languages are distributed unevenly throughout the UK, however, and there are very many places, particularly the villages and countryside, where English is the only language spoken or understood.

The third category consists not so much of other languages as of dialects other than Standard English. There is a remarkable variety of dialects, many of them quite bewildering to the speaker of Standard English, often with distinctive sentence structures as well as pronunciation and vocabulary. In addition to the regional dialects within the United Kingdom, this category also includes the language forms used by many British citizens and children of West Indian origin.

In England there are many differences in regional speech. The chief division is between southern England and northern England. South of a line going from Bristol to London, people speak the type of English usually learnt by foreign students.

Further north (roughly beyond a line going from Manchester to Hull) regional speech is usually ‘broader’ than that of a southern Britain.

In accent the people of the Midlands represent a gradual change from the southern type to the northern one.

According to the 2001 census, 527,510 people said they spoke Welsh. The Welsh have preserved their language to a remarkable extent. It is increasingly used in schools and by some local authorities. Public pressure has led to more public services in Welsh. A Welsh television channel, S4C, began broadcasting in 1983 and there are radio stations and newspapers.

In some areas, the use of English in schools and in the media has contributed to the decline of minority languages. There were about 69,000 speakers of Gaelic in Scotland in 2001, according to that year’s census. In Scotland the sound denoted by the letter ‘R’ is generally a strong sound, and ‘R’ is often pronounced in words in which it would be silent in southern English. The language, especially strong in the Highlands, in the Western Isles and in the Outer Hebrides, is used in some schools but speakers have limited legal rights. It is not used in the courts, and it plays no part in the national government.

The Scots language, which is different from Scottish Gaelic, is so close a native of English that it is often regarded as simply a northern dialect. It is spoken in the central belt of Scotland and the Lowlands. It was the everyday language here from the 14^th century until the late 17^th century. The upper classes slowly turned to English, influenced by the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603. Most Scots speak a mixture of Scots and English, but English is the language of education and the government.

There has been a Scots revival in recent years: the New Testament in Scots was published in 1985, and Scots is used in parts of the Scottish press.

There are speakers of the Irish Gaelic in Northern Ireland, but it has no official status there.

Other native languages in Britain include Cornish in Cornwall and Manx in the Isle of Man. The last native speaker of Cornish died in 1777 and the last speaker in Manx in 1974. There have been recent revivals, although the languages have no legal status.

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