Polish Has Now Officially Become UK’s Second Most Spoken Language
New data from 2011 census released by the UK Office of National Statistics, reveals that the number of people in England and Wales that speak Polish exceeds 500,000 and it has now become UK’s second most spoken language while according to one report on immigrant languages published by language analyst Ethnologue, Polish was not even in the UK’s top 12 in 2001. The other popular languages are Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati, followed by Arabic, French, Chinese and Portuguese. Almost one in ten UK residents reported speaking a language that isn’t English or Welsh.The data also indicated that around one million households (four million people) speak other languages than English at home. Among them 1.7 million said they could speak English as well, 726,000 have a weak grasp of English, and 138,000 residents do not speak English at all!
The increasing use of the Polish language in England is the result of the great number of immigrants from Poland - over one million Poles have moved to the UK in the last decade.
Ranking of main languages spoken in England and Wales, as reported by The Independent:
- English (English or Welsh if in Wales) 49,808,000 or 92.3% of the population
- Polish 546,000 or 1%
- Punjabi 273,000 or 0.5%
- Urdu 269,000 or 0.5%
- Bengali (with Sylheti and Chatgaya) 221,000 or 0.4%
- Gujarati 213,000 or 0.4%
- Arabic 159,000 or 0.3%
- French 147,000 or 0.3%
- All other Chinese (excluding Mandarin and Cantonese) 141,000 or 0.3%
- 10 – 16 are Portuguese, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish, Italian, Somali and Lithuanian with 0.2% each.
- 17 – 20 are German, Persian / Farsi, Tagalog / Filipino and Romanian 68,000 with 0.1% each.
In practice, this means that the Polish language and culture will over time also influence the British language and culture. On the down-side, instead of enjoying the benefits of living and working in a tolerant multilingual society, many Poles now have to cope with a lot of criticism, and sometimes xenophobic and nationalist attacks previously directed at other ethnic immigrant groups in the UK. This is always more of a problem in times of economic crisis and no idealistic EU policies can change that.
