UK languages

Distribution of United Kingdom languages: English Scotch Welsh Scottish Gaelic

The languages of the United Kingdom include the languages spoken by the population residing on British territory, that is to say, which includes both the island territories of Western Europe and many overseas territories on the other continents.

The UK has no official language. The most commonly spoken language in the UK is English, which is spoken as the primary language by 95% of the UK population. Along with this majority language there are other regional languages spoken only in some regions of the territory, such as the Welsh language in Wales, which is the second most spoken language in the United Kingdom. In addition, there are several living indigenous languages of the territory, various regional dialects and languages spoken by numerous populations of recent immigrants and those who have learned as a second language.

Local languages of the United Kingdom

Metropolitan and European territories

Along with English originating on the island of Great Britain, other European languages are still spoken. These languages belong to three Indo-European subfamilies:

• Germanic languages
  • English, which in the UK presents greater dialectal diversity as the number of English varieties in Britain exceeds the rest of the world's English varieties.
  • Scottish (scotts or lallans), closely related to standard English, derives just like this from the old Anglo-Saxon.
• Celtic languages
  • British Celtic Languages: Welsh is the second most spoken language in Britain and is more closely related to the extinct and revitalized Nordic language spoken in Cornwall and the Breton language spoken in Brittany (France).
  • Gaelic Celtic Languages: the Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, the Irish Gaelic in Northern Ireland and the Manese Gaelic on Man Island.
• Romance languages
  • Welsh languages: like the jèrrais of the Island of Jersey and the dgèrnésiais on the island of Guernsey, closely related to each other and derivatives of the old French.
  • Iberorromance languages: the Rim, variety of southern Spanish spoken in Gibraltar.

Creolized languages are also used, such as Anglo-Romani, which is a creolized version of Romani heavily influenced by English, or Gaelic-based Shelta. In addition to these spoken languages, British Sign Language (BSL or British Sign Language) is widely used by the deaf community in the UK, which is not phylogenetically related to the languages of signs from the mainland, not even with American Sign Language.

Disappeared languages

In antiquity and in the Middle Ages, other currently extinct languages were also spoken. Between them:

• Germanic languages: the Anglo-Saxon ancestor of English and Scottish varieties (scott). The old Nordic among the Viking population preferably settled in certain enclaves of the British coast. A descendant of the ancient Nordic language, survived until the centuryXVIII Shetland Islands and Orcadas.
• Britonic languages: the cubic and other varieties of proto-britonic (also the Welsh and the Corn are derived from this language).
• Romance languages: the ancient French spoken by much of the nobility during the XI, XII and XIII centuries as the main language. During the ancient age there would have been some Roman settlements in which certain bilingualism would have been given between the regional Latin (sometimes called britannicus or British Latin) and proto-britonic.
• Dudose classification languages, such as the picto language that has been discussed if it could be a Celtic language or a pre-indo-European language of Scotland.

Overseas Territories

In their small overseas territorial colonies in Asia, America, Africa and Oceania, many of them retain their native languages. Creole languages with an English lexical base that developed autochthonously in those territories are spoken in a good number of territories dependent on Great Britain.

Alochthonous languages

Along with the previous languages, in the United Kingdom there are numerous immigrant population groups that continue to use their native language in the family context. The main languages of immigration in the United Kingdom are Polish (0.6% of the population), Tamil (0.5%), hindi-urdu, the eastern and the western, the Bengali, the French, the Spanish, cantonese, juggling, the greek, the Italian, the Caribbean Creole, the gujarati and the cashmere. Between all of them there are more than one hundred thousand speakers.