Census 2021: Languages and locations in England and Wales November 30, 2022
Posted by Pete B in multilingualism, Statistics.add a comment
The new census data on languages spoken in England and Wales has just been released. Here are two mapping tools to tell you what languages are in your area and where specific languages are spoken. (It is worth saying that most people living here who speak something other than English also speak English fluently).
You can search for a specific language using maps provided by the ONS. From January 2023 a new web tool from the UK government allows you to explore an increasing amount of data using custom defined maps. Keen explorers can already access data down to local authority level and from this I’ve created my own map of to show all the reported languages in each local authority (just for England so far, using information on different tiers of local government structure)
The public census information for England and Wales only includes 95 language categories – 77 languages and 18 groupings of ‘other’.
Most local authorities include speakers from languages in at least 70-80 categories. Birmingham is home to 92 languages and categories followed by Bristol, Manchester, Barnet and Brent with 91, and Nottingham, Bradford, Hackney and Haringey with 90. Apart from the Isles of Scilly no authority had less than 50 languages present.
There are over 350 languages known to be spoken in the UK and Ireland. More detailed information is collected in annual school censuses.
There are many ways in which this information is useful, including encouraging churches and community groups to think about the additional languages spoken by people in their communities and in their congregations and I have a whole selection on my blog dedicated to the idea of a more multilingual church.
Search for a specific language —– Explore languages in each local authority
How many Languages are Spoken in Europe? September 26, 2022
Posted by Pete B in multilingualism, Statistics.add a comment
An estimated 225 European languages are spoken in Europe. This can vary according to definitions of languages and definitions of Europe. I wondered how many non-European languages are also spoken in towns and cities across the continent and decided to see what I could find out. Fortunately, this is the kind of data I’ve been looking at for a while.
A tweet from the The Council of Europe (below) for the #EuropeanDayofLanguages, linked to an interesting set of Language facts.
The final fact on the list was that “Due to the influx of migrants and refugees, Europe has become largely multilingual. In London alone some 300 languages are spoken”.
This figure for London has been quoted a lot over the last 20 years and is supported by an annual survey across schools in England of “languages spoken at home”. Unfortunately schools only get to compare the language names that people put on the form with a list of about 300 languages and 16 different categories of “other”, that could be hiding rather a lot of unreported languages.
In Scotland the recent 2022 census used 605 language categories but it will take a while before data is released.
A significant number of censuses that were due to take place in 2020 or 2021 were delayed by the pandemic. Many census reports do not include data on languages and those that do will only cover a subset of any languages people have named on their forms.
There are over 7,000 languages in the world. It seems reasonable to assume that most of the national and provincial languages have representatives somewhere in Europe. It could also be expected that there would be good representation of other languages that have large populations and progressively less as the number of speakers in the homelands get smaller. However , migration from one country to another, isn’t in direct proportion to the size of a people group but is also related to the pressure to leave and the opportunities available. Statistics are available on the countries of origin of business travellers, students, migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers but far less detail is collected on the languages spoken by people in each of these categories.
In short, from looking at the available data, the number of non-European languages currently known to be spoken by individuals and communities across Europe is about 200.
My best guess is that the number actually spoken by by more than two or three households in Europe is somewhere between 400 and 4000. I look forward to discovering better estimates and the methodology behind them.
Pentecost 2022: Encouragement for a more multilingual church June 4, 2022
Posted by Pete B in multilingualism, worship.add a comment
I’ve been blogging for a while about #multilingualchurch. Here’s why – A rich diversity of language and culture was God’s idea!
This is an idea explored a few times in a new book, “Language and the mission of God“. This is an ebook with a suggested price of $25 but a minimum price of “FREE” , that asks, amongst other things, “How does our perception of language influence our lives and ministries?”
If it’s the first time you’ve been asked that, ponder it yourself for a while while listening to this very multilingual compilation of “the Blessing”.
Long before the “World Blessing, the “UK Blessing”, the “The Blessing Zimbabwe” or before that particular 2020 worship chart topper was sung in over 214 languages in over 100 nations around the world, it was God’s idea to bless not just one chosen people but to bless all the nations.
At Pentecost three amazing things happen:
- The Holy Spirit comes on a waiting but hidden group of believers
- He gives them the gift of speaking other languages (and the hearers a gift of being spoken too)
- He launches the church as something that is not confined by language or culture.
It’s 30 years since I first really heard about Pentecost in a way that spoke to me and made me realise that the fragments of the Bible I’d heard many times before might fit together into something that was both attractive and true.
Pentecost definitely isn’t the first appearance of the Holy Spirit but it’s the start of something new. Jesus had said he was going back to the Father (I recently saw a facebook post where someone talked of Ascension day as the day Jesus started working from home), and he had told his disciples to wait. He’d said that he would send a new counsellor.
As with many other things Jesus had said, the disciples probably didn’t get what he meant at the time, but with a possible threat to their own lives they had good reason to be hiding away.
At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit gave the tired believers new courage to proclaim good news to those around them. May that be our prayer and practice in the church today.
Finding Hidden Diaspora Languages: Who is looking? January 19, 2022
Posted by Pete B in Bible Translation, multilingualism, refugees, Scripture Engagement, Statistics.add a comment
As part of my wider interest in Multilingual Church this is part 3 in a series on finding hidden diaspora languages. This section looks at “who is interested” (which includes perhaps anyone who makes it to the bottom of this blog), and who is interested enough to collect and explore the actual data.
“Diaspora” is a title used both by self defined members of specific diaspora communities and those outside.
Today, some churches and Christian organisations talk about diaspora mission and think in terms of how we can find many ‘unreached peoples’ living in some of the major cities of the world.
But how many? Which ones? And how do we connect?
Global Gates is one example of an American mission organisation, asking “Where should Christians prioritize work and prayer to see the least-evangelized peoples in North America reached with the gospel?”. Their publicly downloadable data covers just under 60 people groups across 60 metropolitan areas in the USA. They invite submissions of new information but state: “the people group must number at least 5,000 in the city to be included”.
Several other organisations including PeopleGroups.info and Joshua Project are looking for and sharing information. Most are still only scratching the surface in terms of diaspora language information, but at least they are raising the questions.
Who lives around us?
Where else can we find members of a specific people group outside of their homeland?
Personally, I have been interacting with other data sources and some of the people behind them for a number of years, first as a writer, webmaster, and communications specialist with Wycliffe UK, Wycliffe Canada and Wycliffe Global Alliance, then as an advocate and explorer of digital engagement (an emerging field within Scripture Engagement), and more recently in a broader field of missiology as well as data specialist with the SIL Global diaspora team.
In the last few years SIL has begun to talk about MUSE (Multilingualism Urbanisation and Scripture Engagement). We knew that people weren’t just moving from the villages to the cities, they were moving all over the world. And so without adding to the acronym there quietly emerged an SIL Global Diaspora Team, gathering data, stories, and a lot of questions with a remit, “to help SIL discern and articulate best modes of engagement with dispersed language communities and those who serve them, and to encourage and develop initiatives that advance meaningful development, education, and engagement with Scripture in urban, refugee and broader diaspora contexts.”
It is helpful to ask who else is interested in the questions of where languages are being spoken, and what languages people speak? Two clear audiences are Bible Translation agencies and Churches but they are not the only people. Governments and agencies collect or at least use what is available in terms of data on languages to plan and provide services. Thinking about who else wants to know opens up the way for discovering partnerships or data sources.
Questions I asked when presenting at the Bible Translation conference included:
- Who is responsible in our organisation for knowing where to look and who to ask?
- Is there someone responsible in your organisation?
- How do we connect?
You can find key organisations, authors, and data sets through literature reviews, google searches, following some key social media feeds, and occasionally doing searches for key terms showing up in the news such as “languages” , “multilingual”, “multicultural” and “intercultural”.
Here are just a few of the organisations I’ve identified that collect information on communities and/or languages. They are all talking to each other yet but a lot of the available data can be explored and analysed.
- Census reports (links to census reports from most countries along with dates of last and next census)
- Ethnologue
- Global Gates
- PeopleGroups.info
- Joshua Project
- New York Language map
- Progress.bible
- International Organization for Migration (IOM)
- Migration Data Portal
Open Doors doesn’t specifically give information on languages but provides information about religious persecution of Christians. Many of the remaining needs for Bible translation are in countries on Open Doors World Watch list and different ethnic groups from these countries are often among the hidden diaspora, not yet recorded on the sites above.
The graphic at the top of the page also includes some sites for accessing scripture and other resources. The final links on this page points back to my first post in this series Finding Hidden Diaspora Languages: Intro and a bit more on Why it matters.
Finding (hidden) languages: Why? November 13, 2021
Posted by Pete B in Bible Translation, multilingualism.add a comment
I was excited recently to get a detailed list of the 300 plus languages spoken in 152 local authorities across England and Wales. I already had the list of languages (Available here) but now I have details of where they are spoken and some clues as to by how many people, and I hope to use this to encourage churches to think more deeply about the languages spoken by the people inside their churches and the people around them. This includes new migrants who might need help learning English, but also people who speak English well alongside one or more other languages they grew up with.
In education, schools and local authorities want to have a better idea of the language backgrounds of their pupils and their families to help them in planning and provision. Some may continue to see other ‘languages spoken at home’ as a barrier to education, others are seeing that using ‘home languages’ more at school provides fresh opportunities for individual pupils or even the whole class.
A video from Hampshire County Council in 2020 states, “Anyone involved in education understands the benefits of being able to speak and use more than one language – an asset that is becoming increasingly useful in our connected world”. Sadly one reason that they need the video, and the accompanying course is that this view hasn’t always been the dominant one.
A relatively new term used in multilingual education is “translanguaging”, explained in another resource pointed to by Hampshire, from Pearson International Schools “Translanguaging – what is it and how do you plan for it? FAQs“. I’ll be talking about it more as I discuss the implications with colleagues who presented on Bible Translation and Translanguaging at the Bible Translation conference I attended.
In healthcare, knowing the languages spoken in the community can be an important part of providing care, ensuring that some materials are available in multiple languages, and that translators are on call where needed. Working with SIL I’ve been aware for over 25 years that our work with local languages has a significant impact on health outcomes. SIL’s Language and Culture Archives have over 1500 resources categorised under Health and Hygene.
Again this isn’t always just about making information available to people who don’t speak or can’t read the national language, it is also about going the extra step of making it personal and relevant. In the UK one of the languages that didn’t show up in the 2011 census of England and Wales was Tetum, spoken in Timor. I spotted it on a census report in Northern Ireland and have since learned that there may be as many as 16-18,000 speakers currently in the UK. A couple of health authorities had already noticed this and produced information on Covid and vaccinations in the language.
In the church, making the best use of available data on people and languages has been part of making the case for mission, and making plans for centuries.
Some history…
In 1792 William Carey devoted a significant portion of his ‘Enquiry’ into setting out his understanding of the state of the world. Part of this was to combat a false narrative at the time that the missionary endeavour was largely complete, and that if God wanted to convert ‘the heathen’ he’d do it without the likes of ‘enthusiasts’ like Carey.
Some of the data today may help combat contemporary false narratives.
The Bible Societies kept records of what was known to have been done, and what was in progress. In 1939 Rev Robert Kilgour listed 1115 languages that had at least some portion of scripture, but stated that any definitive answer as to how many more were needed was impossible. That same year the secretary of the American Bible Society had used a figure from the French Academy suggesting that there were “2,776 languages in the world”. Levels of bilingualism were assumed for the non-majority languages, especially in urban areas and the aim was understood not to be translation for every language but ensuring that everyone had something in a language they could understand. “No doubt there are still several dialects in which it will be necessary to make a version of a Gospel in order to reach more surely the hearts of country folk.”
(A pdf of Kilgour’s The Bible Throughout the World can be downloaded at https://missiology.org.uk/book_bible-throughout-the-world_kilgour.php )
The assumption was that even then 90% of the world had at least something, and so conversely 10% did not. It wasn’t until Cameron Townsend. Leonard Legters, and other founders of SIL that a more comprehensive list of remaining languages began to emerge.
Speculation that there might be 1,000 languages gave way to the notion of “2,000 tongues to go” and the numbers kept going up as more languages were catalogued.
It became clear early on that the need for translation wasn’t quite as simple as counting languages and ticking off the list once ‘something’ was translated. In the early days of the Ethnologue some languages were classified as “too bilingual”.
It’s still common to present the big pictures needs to western monolingual churches and funders more in terms of languages than of people but the story is beginning to change, and that may in part be as we open our eyes and ears to the diversity in our own communities.
Beyond the issue of whether people need scripture in their own language in order to understand, are issues raised by theologian Lamin Sanneh and others about identity and connection. Bible translation is not just intellectual comprehension but head and heart connection. This is a view often reflected on by speakers of minority languages when the scriptures are first available in their language.
Some further research needed…
Research and discussion needs to continue about the current and future role of languages in a multlingual world.
In 2019 SIL published a collection of essays on, “Language and Identity in a Multilingual, Migrating World“.
In 2020 SIL colleagues organised the God and Language Forum, reflecting on many issues including the theologies of language. An ebook is due early next year with a print one to follow in due course, but may of the individual papers are already available via the link.
As I’ll explain in my next post, while there is a lot of information about some of the places where some of the (mostly larger) languages are spoken, significant research also needs to continue into finding more data to answer the questions SIL is now encouraging project staff to think about:
“What are all the languages that this community uses?”
“Where are all the communities that use this language?”
And the related questions I would love churches to consider:
“What are the languages spoken in your community?”
“What are the languages spoken in your church?”
Finding (hidden) Diaspora Languages – intro October 15, 2021
Posted by Pete B in Bible Translation, multilingualism, Scripture Engagement, Statistics.add a comment
Good data can help us ask (and sometime answer) a number of questions. Two key questions I want to ask are: “What are the languages spoken in your community?” and “What are the languages spoken in your church?”
I’m looking forward to presenting a paper today at the 2021 Bible Translation conference, on how to find more of the languages that are spoken outside of their country of origin, and people that speak them. I’m also looking forward to saying why I think this is important.
I have a written a few posts on this already including, Ten Reasons for a More Multilingual Church, but I suspect that one reason that the church doesn’t talk much about language is that they still need to talk more about Race, Justice, Culture and Diversity.
I’ve read a lot more articles on issues around language use and linguistic discrimination (which can also include accentism), as well as about churches working towards greater inclusion and models of intercultural church. Part of my contribution into discussion and action in this area has been in digging deeper into data.
Did you know that over a 100 countries were due a census in 2020 or 2021? Some of these ask questions about how well people speak the national language (or languages) and about the main language(s) spoken at home.
2011 Census details for England and Wales include about 80 languages plus over 20 different broad categories of “other”. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own censuses and picked up a few more. Results from the 2021 census won’t be available until at least March 2022 (probably later).
Meanwhile, frequent reports of there being over 300 languages spoken in London are based on data coming from schools. (2015 data is online and a freedom of information request got me the latest list and the ability to delve deeper).
Prior to 2020, the US Census and American Community Survey had details on over 350 languages but might include more that get reported in the 2020 census. In a 2016 review, “Any language that was written in at least once between 1980 and 2015 was given a code. This resulted in 1,334 language codes”American Community Survey Redesign of Language-Spoken-at-Home Data, 2016
Meanwhile, over 700 languages have been identified in New York.
While better data on the languages spoken in our multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual cities and towns is useful for Bible Translation and Scripture Engagement – it may also be about justice, equity, inclusion, and richness.
In some upcoming posts I’ll share just a few of the questions I’m exploring.
Under the question of “Why?” I explore reasons for wanting to know more than is already known about the distribution of migrant languages and their speakers.
Under “Who”, I raise the questions of who has information and why.
In a category of “How” I explore how information can be obtained and arranged.
Exploring “What exists?” and “What next?”, I share some discoveries to date and further exploration that may be needed.
Are there 600 languages spoken in Scotland? January 29, 2021
Posted by Pete B in multilingualism.add a comment
No one knows but the 2022 census might get closer to finding out.
I recently spotted the list of 600+ language classification codes at https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/ods-web/metadata.html?metadatavar=language-classification#
I was waiting to hear if these are languages that have already been identified as appearing at least once in a previous census or just a selection from the 7000+ languages in the world that might be identified if made available on the list?
…and while I was posting this blog an email arrived
The list of 600 languages available on the Scotland’s Census website is known as the classification index. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) are responsible for the census in England and Wales. The Scotland’s Census classification index is based on the ONS one so it is possible the 300 categories you have seen on their website may be a summary presentation. Enquiries on that would need to be made direct to ONS. An assessment was also made of the ISO 639-1 list of recognised written languages to check for completeness. For Scotland’s Census 2022 those who respond online will be offered suggested languages depending on what they begin to type (known as ‘predictive text’). If their language is not offered as a prompt they can type in their language therefore giving the ability to collect information on languages we may not have listed.
Business Management Unit, Scotland’s Census 2022
So I think the answer remains, no one knows quite how many languages are spoken in Scotland but if you speak one of the 600+ on the list and live in Scotland, you can report it one the 2022 census, and hopefully the same list is being used for the England and Wales, and Northern Ireland censuses. (despite being the United Kingdom we have three census boards)
Languages are both hard to count and to classify. YouTuber and linguistics graduate Tom Scott explains in a video that has been seen over 800,000 times since December, quoting a number that will be out of date by the end of February.
Those (including some Scots) not sure whether Scots is a language or a dialect, here is a sample of some aims articulated in a 2013 report written in Scots
it is thocht important tae:
- promote mair the idea o bilingualism an multilingualism;
- provide trainin for teachers throu professional oncome an initial teacher education on Community leids;
- speir at weys that folk can access an uphaud their Community leids;
- mak shair that folk gets alloued access eneuch tae their leid an culture.
scottishcorpus.ac.uk/document/?documentid=1060
You can also learn more at scotslanguage.com
Meanwhile, in preparation for the 2020 USA census, “Any language that was written in at least once between 1980 and 2015 was given a code. This resulted in 1,334 language codes” (quote from census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2018/demo/SEHSD-WP2018-31.pdf .
The list of codes is at https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/about/language-use/primary_language_list.pdf …and, just to be clear, Scots is on the list!
Speak English and… November 27, 2020
Posted by Pete B in multilingualism.add a comment
There are schools and churches across America who think languages are important, and that being multilingualism is a gift.
Here’s a great video from the Seattle Schoolboard that I borrowed the title for this blog post from.
The original article I found this on states:
The Seattle school district serves 6,948 English language learners who contribute 162 languages to the total of 154 spoken by families across the district. According to federal data, Seattle’s 98118 zip code is home to speakers of 78 languages, more than any other zip code in the United States.
In the classroom, we recognize a student’s home language as an asset to learning. Parents are encouraged to support their children to read or speak in their home language first in order to build upon the competencies they already possess.
Honouring Home Languages, Seattle Schoolboard, 2016
The following video was produced in partnership with Highline Public Schools, the Kent School District and OneAmerica to honor the linguistic diversity of our students and families.
I found the article after coming across a US Census article about the 15 most linguistically diverse cities. I then googled to find out a little more about linguistic and cultural diversity in the Churches of Seattle, but those are subjects for another blog post.
Of course if you think that there are a lot of languages spoken in Seattle or other ethnically diverse cities across America, that’s nothing compared to the ones spoken in the church worldwide. The question is do we recognise that as an asset and a blessing or simply see it is a barrier?
Lots of churches are recognising multicultural and intercultural churches as a blessing and are even learning how to incorporate multiple languages as part of normal church life. Read more on this and other blogs or share your own thoughts using the hashtag #multilingualchurch
Brassingtons in Britain 