MAPPED: The second most spoken language in every county in England | UK | News
England has hosted citizens from all over the world, enriching the country’s cultural and linguistic fabric in the process. The number of foreign languages spoken in the UK is also increasing every year.
According to official data, more than 300 different languages are spoken in London alone. Although most people speak English as their native language, around one million people in England and Wales speak little or no English. As well as foreign languages, there are also UK indigenous languages that are still widely spoken in general.
These include, of course, Scots, Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and even Cornish. Cornish has perhaps the smallest number of speakers, estimated to number no more than 500.
By comparison, there are around 800,000 Polish speakers in the UK, with the largest concentrations in West London, Slough, Southampton, Birmingham and Leeds.
According to the Office for National Statistics’ 2021 census, Polish is the most commonly spoken non-native language in most counties in England.
Romanian was the second most spoken language in the borough, where 472,000 people speak it, and is most popular in Penrith, Ipswich, Chelmsford, Northampton and many more.
In third place is Punjabi, the most common Indian language in the UK.
However, there are other languages in the subcontinent, including Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati.
Together, these four languages are the mother tongues of the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi population of over 2 million people in the UK.
According to the website Lingoda.com, Bengali is the second most spoken language in London after English. The majority of Punjabi speakers are in Birmingham, Bradford and Derby.
Other languages frequently spoken in the English county include Lithuanian (West Norfolk), Portuguese (Great Yarmouth), Turkish (Luton), Yiddish (Southend on Sea), Hungarian (Nottingham), Filipino (Ulverston) and Tamil (Chessington).
Arabic is also a language that can sometimes be heard in English cities, particularly in the South Shields area near London, Cardiff and Newcastle.
In fact, it is the fifth most spoken foreign language in the UK and the mother tongue of around 200,000 people.
