The United Kingdom, despite its reputation, is home to a lot of linguistic diversity. With six native ethnic groups, each possessing their own language, and people moving to the UK from all over the world, this country has always been multilingual. I’d like to talk about what it means for a language to be British and about the many different languages used in this country.

Native languages of Britain

In modern Britain, there are six indigenous spoken languages in modern usage: English, Scots, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Cornish (in roughly decreasing order of population). English serves as the language of government and bureaucracy in nearly all of the UK, with some exceptions such as some outlying county councils preferring their own languages.

All languages other than English spoken in the UK have faced at least some historical oppression, with use in education, court, and governance restricted to varying degrees. The use of Irish in Northern Irish courts was only legalised this year, for example, and Welsh was only made an official language in Wales in 2011. It’s impossible to give a summary that satisfactorily covers the cases of every minority language in the UK, so I’d like to talk about an example I haven’t mentioned yet:

Cumbric

What’s Cumbric, I hear you ask? Cumbric was a language spoken in Y Hen Ogledd, the Old North, what is now the north of England and the south of Scotland. It was a Brythonic Celtic language, closely related to Welsh, which you can learn more about here, spoken up until about the 12th century. Image: Yr Hen Ogledd, c. 500 AD, by Pickled Pigeon. CC0.

It’s hard to say exactly what happened to Cumbric when, but it was still making its linguistic mark on place names well into the 1100s. The language wasn’t written down, so we really don’t know much about the language’s specifics, but there is a strong enough pattern of Celtic placenames and census records showing a “Cumbrian” ethnic group that we know they existed.

A potential lasting impact of the Cumbric language on modern English dialects is Yan tan tethera, a highly regionalised sheep-counting system still found in northern English. There is also evidence of its use in other longer-lasting Celtic-speaking areas such as in the southwest of England, Derbyshire, and Lincolnshire.

Traveller languages

Often left out of discussions of “British languages” are Angloromani and Shelta; whether from a lack of knowledge about these languages or an intentional act of social exclusion, most Brits don’t even know these languages exist. Angloromani is a Romani-English mixed language that was historically the main language of daily life in Romani communities in the UK. The language has had a strong influence on informal English, bringing the language words from charva to lollipop.

Shelta is another mixed language, this time as a result of English-Irish mixing, that was the historic language of Irish Travellers in England and Wales. It has faced significant decline over the last few decades due to increasing Anglicisation in its communities, although there are still around 50,000 speakers spread mostly across the UK and United States.

Both Shelta and Angloromani were built from the ground up to provide protection and secrecy to groups often oppressed by the outside world. Both show heavy metathesis and reversal (as we can see in English-language examples aks instead of ask, yob instead of boy) as a way to hide meaning from non-speakers. A similar process has been used by children to hide what they are saying from their teachers for decades, commonly called Pig Latin or Egg Language depending on the speaker’s region, although the historical context is entirely different – for Traveller groups, linguistic codes were (and sometimes still are) a means of survival.

British Sign Language

British Sign Language (BSL) is also often ignored when discussing the languages of the UK, possibly because people so often underestimate its scale: BSL is now used by 150,000 people within the UK, about the same population as Preston, making BSL the 4th most used indigenous language in the UK. BSL is also older than most people realise, with its ancestor language of Old British Sign Language dating all the way back to 1760, branching off into a whole array of sign languages now used all over the Commonwealth and potentially beyond.

BSL is highly regionalised, with limited mutual intelligibility of even native users from different regions. Vocabulary and grammar shift rapidly between communities, with even simple words such as “colour” changing depending on where you are. This is thanks in part to a lack of a formalised standard to the language; BSL keeps evolving across hundreds of local Deaf communities, each inventing its own expressions. The same lexical gap can appear in multiple places at once and then be filled by a different solution in each. BSL often acts more like a web of interconnected communities than as a single concrete entity.

Polish: a British language?

The UK has been the destination of immigration for centuries, with immigration law as we know it being established in the late 18th century to monitor the presence of refugees fleeing the French Revolution. In the centuries since, the UK has seen extensive immigration from all over the world, but most notably Europe, South Asia, and Africa. I’d like to focus on one example in this article, so I have chosen Polish.

Polish immigration to the UK dates back to the Middle Ages, but nearly all of the Poles in the UK today have arrived since 2001, when Poland joined the European Union. Polish is now spoken by over 600,000 people in the UK, a lot of whom were born here or hold British citizenship. This raises the question of whether we should consider Polish to be a British language – it’s spoken by many people who legally and culturally consider themselves to be both British and Polish, and there are now generations of British Poles who have maintained and upheld their Polish identity in tandem with their British one.

The story of the Polish community in the UK is far from unique, with hundreds of ethnic and linguistic groups having now settled here. As the definition of British broadens with time, why shouldn’t these groups be included in the definition of British?

Conclusion

Language and identity are inseparable, with people being defined by how they speak and present themselves to the world. It’s important to sometimes look back on what came before to plan for what’s to come in the future, and consider what it means to be part of a group.