The United Kingdom is the homeland of the world's most widespread language, English, spoken as a first or second language by more than one and a half billion people. But the island is far from monolingual: alongside English survive ancient Celtic languages, Germanic sister languages of English such as Scots, dozens of dialects and accents and, thanks to immigration, hundreds of languages from all over the world.
English and its accents
English is not official by law, but it is in practice everywhere. It was born from the fusion of the Germanic dialects of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, enriched by the Norse of the Vikings, the French of the Normans and the Latin of the Church and scholars (see the history of the English language). In the UK accents vary enormously, sometimes from one town to the next: Received Pronunciation, the "BBC" and public-school accent, is now spoken by a small minority; in London traditional Cockney, the Estuary accent and young people's Multicultural London English coexist; and every region has unmistakable accents, such as Liverpool's Scouse, Newcastle's Geordie, Birmingham's Brummie, Manchester's Mancunian, and those of Yorkshire, the West Country, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Accent is still partly a marker of social class, although regional accents are now much more accepted on television and in the professions.
The Celtic languages
- Welsh (Cymraeg): the most vibrant Celtic language, official in Wales alongside English, spoken by about 18% of the Welsh population, more than half a million people (see Wales).
- Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig): spoken mainly in the Outer Hebrides and parts of the Highlands by a few tens of thousands of people; it has been recognised by law since 2005 and is taught in bilingual schools across Scotland.
- Irish (Gaeilge): in Northern Ireland about one person in eight has some knowledge of it; since 2022 it has been an officially recognised language in the region.
- Cornish (Kernewek): the Celtic language of Cornwall, extinct as an everyday language at the end of the 18th century and now reviving thanks to a movement of enthusiasts.
Scots and Ulster Scots
Scots, descended from the Old English of the north, is spoken in various dialects in the Scottish Lowlands: at the 2022 census about one and a half million people said they could speak it, although many consider it a dialect of English. It is the language of Robert Burns's poems. In Northern Ireland its variant, Ulster Scots, is recognised as a regional language. Since 2022 British Sign Language (BSL) has also been recognised by law.
The languages of immigration
At the 2021 census, about 9% of people in England and Wales had a main language other than English, and more than three hundred languages are spoken in London. The most common are Polish, Romanian, Panjabi and Urdu; Italian is in the top ten.
British and American English
British English differs from American English in spelling (colour not color, centre not center), vocabulary (flat for apartment, lift for elevator, queue for line, chips for fries and crisps for chips) and pronunciation. Learners of English in Europe usually learn the British variety: see English courses in London.
See also population and the history of the English language.