15.1 Introduction

The Channel Islands lie at the entrance to the gulf of St. Malo, some eighty miles off the southern coast of England. The eight islands, in descending order of size, are Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, Sark, Herm, Jethou, Lihou and Brecqhou (see Figure 15.1). Although the archipelago has been united politically with the British Islands since 1204, each of the four largest islands features Norman varieties, related to French and called locally Jèrriais(J), Guernésiais(G), Aurignais and Sercquiais(S); however, Aurignais died in the 1950s, before any systematic analysis could be undertaken (though see Jones Reference Jones2015b; cf. Le Maistre Reference Le Maistre1982; Emanuelli Reference Emanuelli1907–08).

Figure 15.1 The Channel Islands.

The surviving insular varieties all contain what Joret (Reference Joret1883) considered to be the defining features of Norman and, according to Fleury (Reference Fleury1886:4), they show greatest linguistic affinity with the varieties of mainland Norman spoken around La Hague. However, despite many shared linguistic features (Brasseur Reference Brasseur1978a; Lepelley Reference Lepelley1999; Jones Reference Jones2015a: ch. 3), the insular varieties are not homogeneous and, although some degree of mutual comprehension is often possible, this varies from one speaker to the next (Jones Reference Jones2015a:80). Indeed, as Brasseur has demonstrated (Reference Brasseur1978b:302), the differences between the varieties of insular Norman remain so salient that it is impossible to suggest that any of them has any particular affinity with another.

Despite their small size, Jersey and Guernsey measuring only some forty-five and thirty square miles respectively, regional variation is still evident in both islands. The sub-varieties of Jèrriais are usually divided into two main groups – East and West – with the Eastern varieties differing most from standard French, mainly owing to secondary developments in the vowel system (Spence Reference Spence1993:20; Jones Reference Jones2015a:56–60; see also Le Maistre Reference Le Maistre1979a–d, Reference Le Maistre1993). In Guernsey, the main regional differences exist between the varieties spoken in the North and South of the island (Jones Reference Jones2015a:60–3). However, more localised linguistic variation is found in both islands, and most native speakers can pinpoint geographically the speech of a fellow islander, although Le Maistre (Reference Le Maistre1947) and De Garis (Reference De Garis1982:xxii) both lament the fact that some of these highly distinctive localised varieties are fast disappearing (Jones Reference Jones2001:35–6, Reference Jones2015a:57). Given that Sark measures less than two square miles, it is unsurprising that Sercquiais is more homogeneous, although speakers of Sercquiais claim that Little Sark, to which Sark is joined by a causeway, once had its own distinct variety.

Estimating speaker numbers with any great degree of accuracy is difficult. The most recent censuses of Jersey (2001) and Guernsey (2001) to investigate language use recorded that, at that time, only 2,874 inhabitants of Jersey (3.2% of the population) and 1,327 inhabitants of Guernsey (2% of the population) were able to speak Norman fluently. The Jersey Annual Social Survey of 2012 put the number of fluent speakers of Jèrriais at less than 1 per cent (in other words, fewer than 1,000 speakers) (States of Jersey 2012), and recent estimates put the number of fluent speakers of Guernésiais at no more than a few hundred. It was suggested that, at the end of the twentieth century, fewer than twenty of the permanent inhabitants of Sark spoke Sercquiais (Brasseur Reference Brasseur1998:152). There is no doubt that, today, all these figures are significantly lower: in Sark, for example, only four speakers remain at the time of writing.

As well as being few in number, speakers of insular Norman are distributed unevenly throughout Jersey and Guernsey (Sark has only one village). These live mainly in the parts of the islands furthest removed from their respective towns (St. Helier and St. Peter Port respectively) which have, for centuries, represented focal points of Anglicisation (Jones Reference Jones2008a, Reference Jones2015a). In Jersey, therefore, Norman is most likely to be heard in the north and west (States of Jersey 1990:16) whereas in Guernsey, its stronghold lies in the west and south-west (Sjögren Reference Sjögren1964:xviii–xix). However, even in its last refuges, insular Norman is no longer spoken natively by any children and probably by no more than a handful of working-age adults: in January 2020, a report in the Guernsey Press newspaper estimated that there remained only ten fluent speakers of Guernésiais below the age of sixty.Footnote ¹

15.2 Effects of Anglicisation

The reasons behind the Anglicisation of the Channel Islands are many and complex and can only be outlined here (for more detailed accounts, see for example Jones Reference Jones2001, Reference Jones2008a, Reference Jones2015a; Lemprière Reference Lemprière1974; Ramisch Reference Ramisch1989; Domaille Reference Domaille1996; Syvret and Stephens Reference Syvret and Stevens1998). English has been present in Jersey and Guernsey since the Middle Ages, when garrisons were established to defend these islands against the French. However, Norman remained as the everyday language of most islanders until well into the nineteenth century – although from this time on, increasing trade links and more regular transport services, which also precipitated the start of the islands’ tourist industry, led to ever more frequent contact between the Channel Islands and the British mainland. Indeed, by 1840, some 15,000 (or 32%) of Jersey’s total resident population were English (Uttley Reference Uttley1966:174). Mass evacuation of the islanders to the British mainland in the days preceding the German Occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War also had severe linguistic repercussions since a considerable proportion of the child population of each island spent the next five years (1940–45) cut off from their native tongue and immersed in the very language with which insular Norman was in competition.Footnote ² On their return, many islanders had either forgotten their Norman or chose to continue using English, which they saw as a means to prosperity and social advancement. The events of the War strengthened existing doubts within the islands’ speech communities as to the utility of the insular Norman varieties. They could not offer the economic rewards of English and became increasingly stigmatised, with parents no longer transmitting insular Norman to their offspring. Since the War, Anglicisation has been further strengthened by the fact that low taxation has made Jersey and Guernsey attractive for high-income earners and those servicing the finance industry, the latter now employing a significant percentage of the workforce. Intermarriage between islanders and immigrants has accelerated the decline of insular Norman within the family domain,Footnote ³ and the tourist industry has also continued to grow steadily, with daily sea and air services operating between the islands and the United Kingdom.

Sark was later to Anglicise than Jersey and Guernsey since, prior to the nineteenth century, it was only rarely visited by English people. Indeed, in 1787, one of John Wesley’s missionaries who had been staying there reported that, at that time, not a single family understood English (Ewen and De Carteret Reference Ewen and De Carteret1969:105). It seems likely that Anglicisation stems from the arrival of English-speaking miners who, in 1835, were brought to work in a tin mine on Little Sark. The development of the island’s tourist industry shortly afterwards must also have been a contributory factor. As only 129 of the 600-strong population left Sark during the Second World War, it seems likely that the War had less of an Anglicising influence there than in the other Channel Islands.

Today, all speakers of Jèrriais, Guernésiais and Sercquiais are also fluent in English and this has had far-reaching linguistic consequences, which have served further to differentiate insular and mainland Norman (for an extensive phonological, structural and lexical analysis, see Jones Reference Jones2015a). This is most immediately salient in the lexis, where English borrowings abound in many everyday domains (see Jones Reference Jones2015a:143–54; also Spence Reference Spence1993:23–9 for Jèrriais; Tomlinson Reference Tomlinson1981: Part 2 for Guernésiais and Jones Reference Jones2012a; Liddicoat Reference Liddicoat1994:298–300 for Sercquiais). However, the use of a borrowing in one insular variety does not necessarily imply that it is also used in another: for example, in Jèrriais, the borrowing ticl’ye [tikj̥] (< English ‘tea-kettle’) is used to denote a ‘kettle’, whereas in Guernésiais the indigenous caudjère [kodʒe:r] is used. In Sercquiais, the borrowing [skrẽ]Footnote ⁴ (< English ‘screen’) denotes a ‘grain riddle’ but not in Jèrriais, which uses the native form cribl’ye [kribj]. Unsurprisingly, borrowings are commonly found in many ‘modern’ domains, such as technology, and here the fact that insular Norman is in contact with English, and mainland Norman with French means that speakers draw loanwords from different languages (see Table 15.1).

Indeed, the abundance of contact phenomena such as loan-shifts (1)–(2) (where the formal similarity between a word of English and insular Norman can lead to the latter extending its meaning to encompass that of the English term), borrowings (3)–(4) and calques (5)–(7) can create considerable lexical divergence between insular and mainland Norman, despite their many shared cognates (Jones Reference Jones2015a: ch. 8).

1. (1)

   [ulapɑ:seavɛkɒnəz] ‘She passed with honours’ (pâsser = ‘to pass’ [movement or time] Le Maistre Reference Le Maistre1966:390); (Jones Reference Jones2001:127) (J).

1. (2)

   [ʒetɛrʒusypɔrtɑjlɛtimdəweɪlz] ‘I’ve always supported the Welsh team’ (lit. ‘the team of Wales’) (supportaïr = ‘to endure’, De Garis Reference De Garis1982:283) (G).

1. (3)

   [illɑɑ̃vlɔpɐduvʏmørsɐdbʎɛ̃kjɛt] ‘He covered it with a piece of blanket’ (S).

1. (4)

   [kɑ̃iltɛbeɪbi] ‘When he was a baby’ (G).

1. (5)

   [ʃɛʃənɑkɪgaʁdeləpatwejɑ̃nalɑ̃] ‘That’s what kept the patois going’ (S).

1. (6)

   [ʒɛːtɛsœlefɛ̃] ‘I was an only child’ (G).

1. (7)

   [silvøpɑːtejkuteilmɛləfəunbɒ:] ‘If he doesn’t want to listen to you he puts the phone down’ (J).

Jones (Reference Jones2001) also found in Jersey that many common terms were being forgotten or only partially recalled, an indication, perhaps, that lack of opportunity to use the language is making speakers ‘rusty’ in their native variety.

The structural effect of English on Jèrriais and Guernésiais is examined in detail in Jones (Reference Jones2000a, Reference Jones2000b, Reference Jones2001, Reference Jones, Jones and Esch2002, Reference Jones2005a, Reference Jones2005b, Reference Jones2008a, Reference Jones, Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williams2010, Reference Jones2015a, Reference Jones, Tyne, Bilger, Cappeau and Guerin2017, Reference Jones2018, Reference Jones, Wolfe and Maiden2020) and Liddicoat (Reference Liddicoat1990). These changes often involve an increase in frequency of syntactic constructions more isomorphic with the structure of English (Jones Reference Jones2001:97–118, Reference Jones, Jones and Esch2002:148–59, Reference Jones2015a: ch. 7). As an example of this, whereas English has one form to convey all functions of the preposition ‘with’, insular Norman is traditionally described as having different prepositions, each of which has a distinct function (Birt Reference Birt1985:165–7; De Garis Reference De Garis1982:214; Liddicoat Reference Liddicoat1994:279–80). The unmarked form, which also tends to be used when the referent is animate, is auve [ov] or avec [avɛk] (J), dauve [dov] (G), [duv] (S), hence:

1. (8)

   dauve sa faumme ‘with his wife’ (Tomlinson Reference Tomlinson2008:21) (G).

However, when the instrumental function is being conveyed, or when the object is inanimate, then another preposition is used, namely atout [atu] (J), atou [atu] (G), [atu] (S):

1. (9)

   [nuz ɛre d la pɛ̃n a marʃi dɑ̃ lɛ: rʏ atu tuo ʃɛ: mɒutœ kɑ:] ‘We would have trouble walking on the roads with all those motor cars’ (Liddicoat Reference Liddicoat1994:280) (S).

A third preposition, acanté [akɑ̃te] (J), à quànté [akẽte] (G), [akãte] (S), is traditionally used to convey a comitative meaning:

1. (10)

   Je m’en vais acanté lyi ‘I am going along with her’ (Birt Reference Birt1985:166) (J).

In insular Norman, however, this threefold opposition is being progressively eliminated by the unmarked form taking over all of these functions, along the lines of the English construction (11)–(14) (Jones Reference Jones2005b, Reference Jones2008a:123–7, Reference Jones2015a:139–40).

1. (11)

   [ilɑ̃kuv̥rɛlɑmɛ̃tʃi:avɛkdyv̥rɛ] ‘He used to cover half of it with seaweed’ (J) (unmarked form used for instrumental).

1. (12)

   [nuvejɛpɑ:dvjɛlʒɑ̃pɑrle:kɛ̃:inmɑrʃepɑ:dovde:bɑtɑ̃:] ‘We didn’t see old people going round about, they didn’t walk with sticks’ (G) (unmarked form used for instrumental).

1. (13)

   [mevlɑhoravɛkdɛdovreilavɛpɛrsɔnavɛkliitɛasɑ̃tusœ] ‘There I was out with Dad going to collect seaweed, there was no-one with him, he was on his own’ (J) (unmarked form used for comitative).

1. (14)

   [ivnɛtɑlapwɛ:kduvnu] ‘He used to come fishing with us’ (S) (unmarked form used for comitative).

As discussed in Jones (Reference Jones2000a, Reference Jones2015a), the motivation behind the structural changes currently being witnessed is not always straightforward and, in the above, simplification may also be a contributory factor. However, cases also exist where influence from English seems clear (Jones Reference Jones2001:118–28, Reference Jones, Jones and Esch2002:149–54, Reference Jones2015a: ch. 7). One such example is that the insular Norman tendency to prepose unmarked monosyllabic adjectives and adjectives of colour is becoming extended to all adjectives (15)–(17), including comparatives (18), superlatives (19) and other modified adjectives (20)–(21). Given that this change does not occur in mainland Norman and that, in English, the unmarked position for most adjectives is prenominal, contact seems a likely motivation (Jones Reference Jones2015a:132–4).

1. (15)

   [ʃɛlaparfɛtpɑrejs] ‘It’s the perfect parish’ (J).

1. (16)

   [ʃejɑ̃jtejtykɑ] ‘It’s a stubborn cat’ (G).

1. (17)

   [jaø̃ʎɛtdɑ̃:laʃɑ̃:brʃɛø̃dubʎəʎɛt] ‘There’s one bed in the bedroom, it’s a double bed’ (S).

1. (18)

   [ʃɛønpy:fintɛl] ‘It’s a finer oilcloth’ (J).

1. (19)

   [lɛpʏ:gʁɑ̃:gaʁso:̃ɛfiʎ] ‘The biggest boys and girls’ (S).

1. (20)

   [ø̃nasɛgrɑ̃gardẽ] ‘Quite a big garden’ (J).

1. (21)

   [nu:zaveɛnɑmɑdyrivɛr] ‘We had a very hard winter’ (G).

15.3 Language Revitalisation

The realisation that insular Norman is declining rapidly in terms of speaker numbers has prompted the establishment of a number of language planning measures, which aim to maintain and strengthen the use of these varieties. These measures are most advanced in Jersey (see, for example, Jones Reference Jones2001, Reference Jones2008b; Jigourel Reference Jigourel2011; Scott Warren and Jennings Reference Scott Warren, Jennings and Jones2015). Most significantly, L’Office du Jèrriais was established in 1999, funded at that time by the States of Jersey (Jersey’s legislative assembly) and Le Don Balleine Trust charity. L’Office du Jèrriais is responsible for promoting Jèrriais within Jersey and for coordinating all language revitalisation initiatives. In 1999, a teaching programme was introduced in the island’s primary schools and, at the time of writing, the Government of Jersey employs seven full-time qualified teachers and two language promotion officers. In 2021–22, the Jèrriais teaching service was able to offer access to Jèrriais to more than 1,000 students, in the form of playgroups, primary school groups, secondary school groups and adult groups, though Jèrriais does not yet form part of the curriculum. Jèrriais versions of children’s books such as We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (2018), The Gruffalo (2019) and The Gruffalo’s Child (2021) have been produced and active links have been established with the British–Irish Council, which enables regular interchange with those working in the field of minority languages in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Momentum in favour of Jèrriais has also gathered outside the classroom, and today the language is more visible in everyday life than it has ever been. Bilingual signage is increasingly common in St. Helier (Jigourel Reference Jigourel2011:44) and at the airport. Jèrriais is included on public buildings, on the side of buses and on bus travel passes and, since 2010, it has featured on Jersey’s banknotes.Footnote ⁵ The language is also present in the community, with ‘drop-in’ conversation groups held every weekday. The annual Jèrriais Festival (La Fête du Jèrriais) runs a programme of events including talks, song and dance to promote and raise awareness of the language. The status of Jèrriais received a significant boost in 2019, when it was recognised as an official language of the States of Jersey. Since 2019, the language has been mandatory on all official letter headings used in the public sector and on all new public signs, including government branding. In its recently published Jèrriais Language Strategy 2022–2025, the Government of Jersey recognises ‘the importance of Jèrriais to our island culture’ and includes in its aims ‘to increase acquisition of the language by growing the number of learners and, ultimately, speakers’, providing ‘opportunities to increase the use of the language outside the classroom’. It supports ‘the increased visibility of the language’, suggests ‘ways in which the status of Jèrriais could be enhanced further’ and advocates ‘ensuring that Jèrriais continues to develop and evolve, as all living languages must’. (Government of Jersey 2022:4). La Société Jersiaise (established in 1873 for the study of natural history, antiquities and conservation) includes a language section (Section de la Langue, established in 1995), which works to sustain and raise the profile of Jèrriais and has supported the publication of several books including a Jèrriais–English dictionary (2008).Footnote ⁶ It also hosts the Pages Jèrriaises website, which, at the time of writing, consists of more than 4,000 pages, including indexes of Jèrriais authors, poetry and texts and other topics of interest.Footnote ⁷ L’Assembliée d’Jèrriais (founded in 1951) organises regular social events in Jèrriais which provide an opportunity to bring together native speakers and learners.

The States of Guernsey (Guernsey’s legislative assembly) has supported Guernésiais with a modest budget for several years via their Museums Service. Most of the teaching currently focuses on adult learning. Traditional class-style courses are available and, from time to time, ‘drop-in’ conversation groups are arranged. Guernésiais is not currently taught as part of the school curriculum, although some primary schools have occasionally hosted lunchtime or after-school clubs run by volunteers. Several children’s books have been produced in Guernésiais suitable for children, including My First Guernésiais Word Book (2021), Teach Your Cat Guernésiais (2022) and translations into Guernésiais of The Gruffalo (2019) and Room on the Broom (2021). In 2020, the States voted to support the language to a much greater extent and to make it an official language of Guernsey. As a result, a Guernsey Language Commission was set up and, at the time of writing, Commissioners are being appointed and links developed with the Indigenous and Minority Languages Workstream of the British–Irish Council.Footnote ⁸ Outside the classroom, L’Assembllaïe d’Guernésiais (founded in 1956 on a similar basis to Jersey’s Assembliée) remains an important social forum for native speakers. At the time of writing, Guernésiais is becoming more visible in the branding of some local products and services and in public spaces. For example, Guernsey Post includes sayings in the language such as Coum tchi q’l’affaire va? (‘How are you?’) and A la perchôine (‘Till the next time’) on its delivery vans, with its newest fleet of electric vans sporting the phrase Cachi par l’électrique (‘Powered by electric’), and has also published a series of stamps featuring Guernésiais greetings, including Banjour (‘Good day’), Oh! Té v’la (‘Oh! there you are’) and L’affaire va-t-alle? (‘How are things?’). The Guernsey driving licence bears the translation License pour Cachier and Guernésiais also features on orientation signs in St. Peter Port, greeting signs at the airport, in some shops and in the museum. Guernésiais names are often given to local events and festivals such as L’Viaer Marchi (an annual community festival celebrating Guernsey’s culture and traditions) and Les Babouins dé Tortéva (the annual scarecrow festival).

Jèrriais and Guernésiais are also promoted in cultural festivals such as the annual pan-Norman Fête Nouormande and the Eisteddfod of their respective islands, the latter including competitions in music, poetry and theatre plays. Fewer revitalisation initiatives are underway in Sark although, at the time of writing, some Sercquiais is being taught to children at the Sark School.

Although the twelfth-century author Wace hailed from Jersey, no literary writings in insular Norman exist until the nineteenth century. The first author to publish in Jèrriais was Matthieu Le Geyt (1777–1849) (see Rimes et Poësies Jersiaises, Mourant Reference Mourant1865), and the first in Guernésiais was Georges Métivier (1790–1881), whose Rimes Guernesiaises date from 1831. Both Jersey and Guernsey produced several poets and writers during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but their work is not easily accessible as they tended to publish in newspapers, almanacs and in the form of short pamphlets. The largest corpus from one pen in insular Norman, Thomas Martin’s nineteenth-century translations into Guernésiais of the Bible and 100 plays by Shakespeare, Longfellow, Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille, Molière and Voltaire (see Jones Reference Jones2008a) has never been published in its entirety, although Romeo and Juliet has appeared in parallel text format. A nineteenth-century Sercquiais version of the Parable of the Sower is published in Métivier (Reference Métiviern.d.) and a collection of sayings and riddles in the language has recently been produced (Jones and Neudörfl Reference Jones and Neudörfl2022). For further details of individual authors and their work, see Lebarbenchon (Reference Lebarbenchon1988), Lepelley (Reference Lepelley1999:123–51) and Jones (Reference Jones2008a, Reference Jones2012b). Dictionaries and grammar of Jèrriais (Le Maistre Reference Le Maistre1966, Société Jersiaise 2008a, 2008b; Birt Reference Birt1985), Guernésiais (Métivier Reference Métivier1870; De Garis Reference De Garis1982; Tomlinson Reference Tomlinson2008) and Sercquiais have been published (Liddicoat Reference Liddicoat1994, Reference Liddicoat2001) and an extensive comparative glossary of the extant insular Norman varieties has recently been compiled (Jones Reference Jones2022).

In terms of the media, since the 1970s, Jèrriais and Guernésiais have both featured for a few minutes per week in short radio broadcasts, namely Jersey’s Lettre Jèrriaise and Guernsey’s weekly news summary bulletin. Articles in Jèrriais appear regularly in several parish magazines and the Guernsey Press newspaper features a regular ‘phrase in Guernésiais’ item. Digital media are used to enhance the accessibility of Jèrriais and Guernésiais to learners. In Jersey, for example, the Office du Jèrriais hosts a YouTube channel and makes available via the Linguascope platform pedagogical material as a supplement to its online and school classes. It also maintains a regular Jèrriais presence on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Soundcloud, and a uTalk app has also been launched.Footnote ⁹ Digital resources in Guernésiais are also slowly growing. For example, the Language Commission’s YouTube channel contains playlists that include basic lessons, beginner-level conversations, songs and Christmas carols.Footnote ¹⁰

Should revitalisation efforts fail to gain momentum, then the francophone heritage of the Channel Islands will be preserved in their toponymy, patronymics and, for a while at least, in the substrate imprint that their Norman languages have left on the distinctive variety of local English (Ramisch Reference Ramisch1989; Barbé Reference Barbé1994, Reference Barbé1995; Jones Reference Jones2001:167–74, Reference Jones, Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williams2010, Reference Jones2015a; Rosen Reference Rosen2014 and this volume).Footnote ¹¹ However, owing to factors such as population mobility and increased access to more standardised English via the education system and the media, this imprint is starting to decrease (Jones Reference Jones, Schreier, Trudgill, Schneider and Williams2010; Rosen Reference Rosen2014:181–93).

16.1 Introduction

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the United Kingdom has seen sustained migration from South Asia, predominantly from former British colonies.Footnote ¹ Today South Asians represent just under 9 per cent of the total population, the largest ethnic minority in the UK.Footnote ² The population increased significantly during the twentieth century and has stabilised in recent years. South Asians have settled primarily in urban centres across England, including in London, Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford.

As a result of this sustained migration, South Asian languages – languages spoken on the South Asian subcontinent – have become a very significant part of the linguistic ecology of Britain. Dozens of South Asian languages are spoken across the country, but five, along with their sub-varieties, represent the largest of these: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Panjabi and Urdu. The vast majority of South Asians in Britain speak one or another of these languages, all of which belong to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. In the 2011 census,Footnote ³ these five South Asian languages were the most commonly spoken languages in the UK after English and Polish (Figure 16.1). By the 2021 census, their rank (but not numbers) had dropped due to a substantial net increase in European migration, particularly from Romania, Portugal, Spain and Italy. Several other South Asian languages are also well represented in the UK in somewhat smaller numbers. These include Tamil (a Dravidian language spoken in South India and Sri Lanka), Sylheti (under-reported, as frequently reported as and grouped with Bengali, as in the census data in Figure 16.1), Pashto (one of the four main regional languages of Pakistan) and Malayalam (another Dravidian language).

Figure 16.1 Main language other than English, as reported in the UK censuses of 2011 and 2021.

16.2 History and National Demographics

Contact between South Asian language speakers and English speakers has a long history, beginning with the arrival of the English in India at the end of the sixteenth century, continuing throughout the period of British colonialism in the Indian subcontinent, and in the postcolonial period through the migration of South Asians to Britain. Immigration to the UK, too, has a long history. In the 1920s, Sikhs, some of them soldiers who had fought for Britain in World War I, peddled goods door-to-door in many British cities (Agnihotri Reference Agnihotri1987; Mahandru Reference Mahandru, Alladina and Edwards1991). They encountered racism and exclusion, and notably formed bonds with the Jewish community, who shared this experience. There were also Bangla migrations in the 1920s and 1930s. But the major movement of South Asian populations into Britain came in two later waves: first in the 1950s and 1960s, when post-war British labour shortages led to policies encouraging migration from South Asian and the Caribbean, and second in the late 1960s and 1970s from East Africa (Kenya and Uganda), when policies of Africanisation forced South Asians to leave. Among this second wave were the majority of Gujarati-speaking migrants (Dave Reference Dave, Alladina and Edwards1991). East African migrants were often well educated and had professional and commercial occupations, in contrast to earlier migrants, especially from the Indian and Pakistani Panjab and from what is now Bangladesh, who were mainly from rural areas and had more basic education.

The number of South Asians in Britain has grown dramatically since the 1960s, increasing from to 4.4 per cent (2.6 million) in 2001 to 6.9 per cent (4.4 million) in 2011, and to 8.2 per cent (5.5 million) in the 2021 census. In 2001, just under half of this group were listed under the census ethnic category ‘Indian’; by the 2011 and 2021 censuses, this proportion had dropped to a third, with proportional increases in the categories of ‘Pakistani’, ‘Bangladeshi’ and ‘other Asian’. The majority of the top three Asian categories – Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi – are now represented by individuals born in the UK. The South Asian population continues to grow at a faster rate than that of the white majority.

South Asian communities in Britain share some characteristics but differ markedly in other respects. It is common for later generations to remain actively bilingual, partly because of the substantial size and sustained in-migration in many of these communities. This means that language maintenance can be heavily affected by the size of the community, the status of the heritage language, and the relative proportion of recent migrants from South Asia who speak the South Asian language in question. Stable bilingualism in a community can in turn be an important source of continuing influence on the English spoken by later generations, so in communities where we see longer-term maintenance of the South Asian language, we sometimes see continuing development of a local ethnically marked variety of British English too (see Sharma and Wormald, this volume). Many of these observations, regarding community size, patterns of in-migration, and the nature of social networks between first and later generation migrants, apply equally to other community languages in the UK, not just those of South Asian origin.

16.3 Urban Demographics

South Asians have settled principally in the large conurbations of England. The largest concentrations are in Outer and Inner London, followed by the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester and Lancashire. There are significant communities in Bedfordshire and Berkshire, in the home counties north of London, and in the smaller industrial towns of Warwickshire, to the south of Birmingham. In Scotland, the main concentrations of Pakistanis and Indians live in the west of Scotland, particularly in Glasgow. In Wales, there are significant numbers of all three main South Asian communities in Cardiff, but lower numbers elsewhere.

Panjabi speakers, of both Indian and Pakistani ethnicity taken together, represent the largest group of South Asian language speakers in Britain. The largest proportions of Panjabi speakers are found in the Inner London borough of Newham and in the Outer London boroughs of Hounslow, Ealing, Greenwich, Waltham Forest and Redbridge. Outside London, there are sizeable communities of Panjabi speakers in Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, Leicester in the East Midlands, and Bradford and Leeds in West Yorkshire.

The largest Bangla/Sylheti speech community lives in Tower Hamlets in London (81,400 in the 2021 census).Footnote ⁴ Outside London, the largest Bangladeshi communities are in Birmingham, Oldham in Greater Manchester, Luton in Bedfordshire, and Bradford. Pakistani Panjabis have settled in many of the same areas in Inner and Outer London, Birmingham, Bradford, and Greater Manchester, especially Oldham and Rochdale. The Gujarati speech community is concentrated in Leicester, with other sizeable populations in Brent and Harrow in Outer London, Bolton and Blackburn in Lancashire, and Kirklees in West Yorkshire. The Hindi-speaking community is much the smallest of the main five Indo-Aryan languages. In London, the main areas of Hindi speakers are Newham, Brent, Ealing and Hounslow. Unlike other South Asian language groups, the Hindi speech community is more middle class and more dispersed across the country and across neighbourhoods, due to different migration and employment patterns.

The census data on the geographic distribution of Tamil speakers in the UK shows that, like other British South Asians, Tamils are an overwhelmingly urban population, with 70 per cent of Tamil speakers in England and Wales living in London (Jones Reference Jones2020). The Tamil community is smaller relative to other South Asian groups in London and is concentrated in South East London boroughs such as Bexley, Bromley and Croydon, as well as in the West (Harrow, Ealing, Kingston-upon-Thames). Some of the diversity in settlement reflects differences between the Sri Lankan Tamil population in the UK and the Indian Tamil population (Sankaran Reference Sankaran2020).

16.4 South Asian Language Speakers in London

As noted, London is the largest hub of South Asian settlement in the UK. According to the 2021 census, 36 per cent of the South Asian community lives in London (20.8% of the city’s total population), with major concentrations in West and East London. South Asian languages are concentrated in different neighbourhoods of London: Gujarati in North London (Wembley), Bengali in East London (Tower Hamlets), and Panjabi in West London (Southall and Hounslow).

Classifying languages and estimating speaker numbers accurately has historically been a challenge in the UK. In the case of London, for example, there was initially a practice of collecting such statistics through the now disbanded Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). There followed a period of little uniformity or consistency in local educational authority (LEA) statistics, with use of divergent terms for home languages (e.g. variable use of ‘Panjabi-Pakistani’, ‘Panjabi-Sikh’, ‘Panjabi-Hindi’, ‘Panjabi-Mirpuri’, ‘Mirpuri’, ‘Panjabi (Urdu script)’, ‘Urdu’). More recently, improved LEA statistics have emerged, with a more detailed picture of home language use.

The largest detailed survey of London language use to date – one that goes beyond the single ‘main language’ question in the census, and that took place before the census had any language questions in England – was conducted by Baker and Eversley (Reference Baker and Eversley2000). They surveyed 850,000 children in London schools and asked what the primary home language was; 71.6 per cent of children reported that English was their main home language (608,500). The next four languages in order of number of responses were all South Asian languages: Bengali (including Sylheti), Panjabi, Gujarati and Hindi/Urdu (ranging from 40,000–26,000). In Baker and Eversley’s data, French ranked 15th (1,800) and Polish ranked 25th (1,500). Using large-scale language mapping via geographical information systems, the project estimated that Panjabi was the second most used language after English, with between 143,600 and 155,700 speakers. This was followed by Gujarati (138,000–149,600 speakers). Hindi/Urdu, controversially classified as one language, was fourth, with a high estimate of 136,500 speakers, closely followed by Bangla-Sylheti, with somewhere between 120,000 and 136,300 speakers. Three other South Asian languages figured in the top forty: Tamil (17th), Sinhala (37th) and Pashto (39th).

Twenty years later, and with more direct census data, the figures look quite different for the top six languages. According to the 2021 census, out of 8.8 million London residents – both Inner and Outer London boroughs – 78 per cent (6.8 million) report English as their main language, followed by Romanian (1.9%, or 159,000), Spanish (1.4%), Polish (1.3%), Bengali (1.2%), Portuguese (1.1%) Gujarati (1%), Italian (1%) and Panjabi (0.9%). Though the two surveys are not directly comparable, in proportional terms several European languages have clearly expanded substantially, while South Asian languages have remained among the most widely attested in the capital. This is primarily due to the continued high presence of South Asians in Britain as well as chain migration of relatives after settlement. Census figures derive mainly from these first-generation South Asians; later generations of British Asians tend to report their main language as English, even if bilingual. This is one of many problems with the use of a single ‘main language’ question in the census.

16.5 Language Status in South Asian Communities

The official quantitative picture of languages in the UK is very limited. Until 2011, the national census gathered no language-related information at all, and it subsequently introduced just a single question asking for a respondent’s main language, a monolingual framing that was retained in the 2021 census. Other borough- or council-level information data can be informative but has not always been consistently gathered over time and across regions. These figures can erase many aspects of the sociolinguistic complexity of South Asian multilingual repertoires, cultures and communities. In this section, therefore, we consider the more qualitative backdrop to South Asian language use in the UK.

Several South Asian communities are strongly associated with a high-prestige South Asian language, even though the majority of community members may speak another language. The majority of Bangladeshis in Britain come from the Sylhet province in the north-east of Bangladesh and speak Sylheti as their home language, rather than standard Bangla. Bangla is nevertheless often the language that is promoted more in terms of prestige and literacy (Lawson and Sachdev Reference Lawson and Sachdev2004) and reported in the census. The Pakistani community is strongly associated with Urdu as a language of literacy and as a high-prestige lingua franca that is used across the entire northern part of the Indian subcontinent. However, like Bangla, Urdu is often not the primary home language for Pakistanis in Britain, nor indeed in Pakistan. A substantial number of Pakistani immigrants to Britain came from the Mirpur province and speak Mirpuri, a variety of the Potwari language that shares features with Punjabi and Pahari. Some Pakistani migrants speak Pashto as their home language. Many Pakistani households will involve a layered form of ‘triglossia’, with Mirpuri, Panjabi and Urdu layered across social situations and social networks.

This diversity shows that (i) South Asian languages in the UK are not in an equally subordinate role relative to English, but rather form a complex internal hierarchy of prestige and (ii) it is a mistake to attempt to map one language to each South Asian community.

Panjabis are an excellent example of how fruitless an attempt at a one-to-one mapping would be. The geographical area called the Panjab (East and West) in South Asia predates the partition and postcolonial creation of India and Pakistan. As a result, the ethnolinguistic group described as ‘Panjabis’ are subcategorised into Panjabi Sikhs, Panjabi Hindus and Panjabi Muslims based on their religious affiliations, all very large demographic groups in South Asia. The region is united by a common language, Panjabi, which forms a bond between the three groups now divided by religious and national boundaries. In the UK too, these three groups are large and maintain a linguistic bond.

Another interesting complexity across the wider Panjab region – and consequently across the three main Panjabi cultures in London and in the UK more widely – is their distinct ideologies regarding their choice of language of prestige for education and government. Panjabi Sikhs consider Panjabi their mother tongue, but for historical reasons also the symbolic language of their culture, and so it has been formalised as their language in education and politics, and in the language of literacy via the Gurmukhi script. Hindu Panjabis and Muslim Panjabis, by contrast, also use the language as their mother tongue but generally ascribe it the status of a colloquial language, associated with their vernacular home culture, and appropriate for such uses as folk music on festive occasions. For well-known historical reasons, these two communities choose different languages as their language of prestige for educational and other official functions: (Sanskritised) Hindi and Urdu respectively. Some Sikh and Hindu Panjabis do have an interest and competence in two literacy traditions, but for the most part, this three-way division of religious and national identity gives rise to distinct educational and prestige ideologies in the Panjabi-speaking communities of South Asia and the UK. At the same time, the language facilitates strong bonds of friendship across religious subcommunities and among Panjabi-speaking second-generation British Asians from different cultural traditions (Sharma and Rampton Reference Sharma and Rampton2015).

The Tamil community similarly defies a simple national or religious cultural profile, with a large Sri Lankan Tamil population, many of whom historically sought asylum from the civil war in Sri Lanka (see Sankaran Reference Sankaran2020), as well as an Indian Tamil group, and additional migrants from the sizeable Indian Christian community in South India.

16.6 South Asian Languages in Education

These layered systems of ethnic, national and religious identity, along with associated language ideologies and priorities in different communities, and changing national education policies, together form a very complex situation of South Asian language teaching in Britain’s schools.

South Asian languages are an important dimension of modern languages in the British educational context. Approximately 1.7 million students in England are currently reported to have English as an Additional Language (EAL), with London, Slough, Luton and Leicester, all cities with large South Asian populations, having some of the highest proportions (Cushing, Georgiou and Karatsareas Reference Cushing, Georgiou and Karatsareas2021). In some boroughs or LEAs, children who speak a South Asian language at home form the majority of incoming pupils. In Birmingham, Leicester and Bradford, they have at times represented a quarter of the total state school population. I first offer a brief review of the historical presence of South Asian languages in British education, and then return to the role of language ideologies and market forces in language choice in education.

Britain has a long tradition of teaching the languages of the Indian subcontinent. The expansion and consolidation of the Indian empire necessitated the training of British civil servants and army personnel in the languages of colonial India. Early Oriental Studies departments at the universities of Cambridge, London and Oxford offered courses in Hindi–Urdu–Hindustani, guided primarily by instrumental rather than integrative motivation, but nevertheless resulting in pedagogic and philological research in South Asian languages.

The arrival of a large number of children from the Indian subcontinent and other regions in inner-city British schools in the 1960s attracted a variety of rushed educational responses by language planners in LEAs, the erstwhile Department for Education and Skills (DES) and the Home Office. Language debates moved away from linguistic diversity to English-only stances in the early education of these children. Their educational context was perceived as a problem, both linguistic and cultural. Their parents were frequently trapped by socio-economic pressures and hostile socio-cultural experiences, and so were easily persuaded that their heritage languages would interfere with the children’s acquisition of English as a second language. The mother tongue was perceived as a handicap and an assumed lack of competence in English as a disadvantage. Taking a narrowly monolingual view, the Plowden Report (Reference Plowden1967:69) said that ‘it was absolutely essential to overcome the language barrier’, notably presupposing that a second language was a barrier. Ironically, it was in this period that linguistic research was starting to show that the home language can provide crucial scaffolding for the acquisition of further literacy, numeracy and cognitive skills (Cummins Reference Cummins2000).

The Bullock Report (Reference Bullock1975) was the first major positive assessment of the pedagogical and socio-cultural significance of the mother tongues of ethnic minority children. It recognised these as ‘an asset … to be nurtured’ by schools (1975:249; see also Rampton et al., this volume). A series of studies followed that supported bilingual education. For example, one of the conclusions of the DES- sponsored Linguistic Minorities Project (1979–83) was that ‘as far as Panjabi was concerned, the clear superiority in performance of the experimental (Panjabi-speaking) group was accompanied by indications of a transfer of higher-level ability to more complex tasks in English’ (Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick1987:109). Another study in Bedford found that Panjabi children had achieved a higher level of literacy in English than in Panjabi but were orally more fluent and accurate in Panjabi than in English (Tosi Reference Tosi1980).

During this time, minority communities began to establish community language and culture classes, and these positive stances to language maintenance were taken up by many professional teachers’ organisations and by some LEAs. Nevertheless, the Swann Report (Reference Swann1985), an enquiry into the education of children from ethnic minority groups, continued to adopt the long-standing monolingual argument that mother tongue use in primary schools would be a barrier in the acquisition of English. This view has persisted to the present day, despite research showing evidence that South Asian home languages do not interfere with English literacy development (e.g. Stuart-Smith and Martin Reference Stuart-Smith and Martin1999). The report also established the continuing view that minority ethnic communities are responsible for the teaching of their languages. South Asian communities depend largely on a combination of home use and complementary schools – also referred to as supplementary schools, Saturday schools, heritage language schools or community language schools (Cushing et al. Reference Cushing, Georgiou and Karatsareas2021) – for heritage language maintenance, particularly in the crucial early childhood years.

Swann recommended subsuming South Asian languages within the modern foreign languages curriculum, rather than within the model for indigenous minority languages of the UK (Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic), which have more potential for integration into the primary or secondary curriculum. This put the home languages of non-autochthonous Britons in competition with high-prestige European languages rather than treating them as heritage languages, and contributed to a dramatic loss of modern language skills across the UK over the past two decades (see Rampton et al., this volume). The later Kingman (Reference Kingman1988) and Cox (Reference Cox1989) reports used rhetoric around speakers’ rights to their heritage languages but continued to endorse Swann’s recommendation.

The rise of a market-based approach to language learning has led to further shifts in education. Language planning policies in the school curriculum have transformed ‘mother tongues’ into ‘foreign’ languages, driven by an ideology not to foster or support the cognitive advantages of early bilingualism but to teach these languages for academic and commercial pursuits. After a reform of GCSE and A-Level qualifications in 2015, a number of smaller or ‘lesser-taught’ languages were discontinued, with a focus on Arabic, Modern Greek, Gujarati, Bengali, Japanese, Modern and Biblical Hebrew, Panjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish and Urdu (Long, Danechi and Loft Reference Long, Danechi and Loft2020). And regular intervention is needed to make the case for retaining national-level qualifications for lesser-studied languages.

Today, the choice of languages at GCSE and A-Level is determined to a large part by which languages are offered by schools, which in turn is influenced by prevailing language ideologies that tend not to favour South Asian languages as highly as European languages (and recently also Arabic and Chinese), even in communities where the main minority languages are South Asian.

Table 16.1 shows entry rates for a number of community languages in the GCSE ‘Other Modern Languages’ category. The first thing to note in comparison to Figure 16.1, is that entry levels do not correspond to community size: Arabic and Chinese appear to be languages with global appeal, chosen beyond their community numbers, whereas most South Asian languages have significantly lower uptake, despite larger communities, suggesting that they are seen as home languages and not languages for educational or professional advancement. Second, Table 16.1 shows that this discrepancy is widening: Arabic and Chinese have increased over the last decade, while Panjabi, Gujarati and Bengali have dropped in numbers, sometimes by more than 50 per cent. Urdu groups with Arabic and Chinese, being seen as a high-prestige lingua franca with global appeal.

Table 16.2 delves further into these language ideologies. The data are from one of very few detailed examinations of GCSE language statistics beyond the three main European languages (Vidal Rodeiro Reference Vidal Rodeiro2009). Although the data are not recent, the detail of interest is in the internal contrasts here.

Note, firstly, that the level of uptake in 2007 was much higher overall than four years later, from 2011 onwards (Table 16.1). As seen earlier in Table 16.1, Table 16.2 shows again that Urdu, the language with highest prestige in the South Asian regional context, attracts approximately five times more students than the next most popular South Asian languages at GCSE, yet it has never been the Asian language with the most reported speakers in the UK. The same was noted earlier for Arabic, also visible here. These languages are selected for their religious and cultural status; many South Asian schoolchildren currently choose Arabic or Urdu over their home language at GCSE level. This is made clear in Table 16.2: 95 per cent of GCSE students of Bengali had the language as their mother tongue (this of course treats Sylheti speakers as Bengali speakers, a layer of ideological erasure), in contrast to only 58 per cent for Arabic, 43 per cent for Urdu, and of course less than 1 per cent for the main GCSE languages of French, German and Spanish. Although this might suggest that a high proportion of Bengali speakers are taking their language at GCSE level, it actually only means that few other people take Bengali. In fact, only 45 per cent of Bengali speakers took Bengali at GCSE (and only 15% of Panjabi speakers), in contrast to 46 per cent of Urdu speakers, the highest of all the South Asian languages. In sum, the numbers are a stark illustration of language ideology in action: high uptake of Urdu by Urdu speakers and by others, in contrast to lower uptake of Bengali by Bengali speakers and by others. Panjabi and Gujarati pattern like Bengali, being treated as only community-relevant and tending to lose out to higher-prestige languages.

Current institutional provision for South Asian languages thus ranges from voluntary community language classes managed entirely by the communities with minimal financial support from the local authorities to community language classes offered as part of the mainstream curriculum, for example as GCSE or A-Level subjects, but almost exclusively after the primary-school years when languages are best acquired. South Asian language organisations and South Asian media, along with some provision of heritage language subjects at university level, also continue to support learners with an interest in their heritage languages.

16.7 Language Maintenance, Mixing, and Shift

The overwhelming majority of sociolinguistic research on the languages of these communities has focused on new British Asian English varieties (see Sharma and Wormald, this volume). Much more research is needed on the sociolinguistics of South Asian heritage language use. This section reviews some of the insights gained from a small set of studies to date.

Although South Asian communities see relatively healthy levels of heritage language maintenance and use, they face the almost inevitable decline in usage seen in such communities. This occurs both due to general integration into the majority language over generations and because certain languages are associated with higher value, as discussed above. Patterns of language maintenance, language mixing and language shift are remarkably similar across South Asian language communities. For example, smaller communities see more language shift both towards English and towards larger South Asian languages.

In early work on language maintenance, Romaine (Reference Romaine, Dabène, Flasquier and Lyons1983) reported a classic pattern of contact bilingualism among Panjabi schoolchildren in Birmingham, namely a gradual community-wide shift to English, particularly through interaction between siblings in the home. The Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) showed that the use of Panjabi, both oral and written, and knowledge of Panjabi was fairly solid in the adult British Panjabi population, but that English was becoming the dominant language for children. Nearly two generations later, Sharma (Reference Sharma2017) gathered detailed language use questionnaires with seventy-five people across three generations in the Panjabi community of Southall, in West London, and found a similar pattern in the next generations: almost all seventy-five participants across three generations had basic or advanced knowledge of Panjabi, but with some decline in the proportion of Panjabi used in their daily repertoires. So while competence was fairly intact, use was slightly in decline. This difference, along with the widespread use of a ‘mixed code’, was similar to what earlier studies showed (Agnihotri Reference Agnihotri1987). Sharma’s (Reference Sharma2017) findings also parallel Saxena’s (Reference Saxena1995) findings for Panjabi Hindus in Southall twenty-five years earlier, with domain-specific language roles. Saxena found Panjabi to be predominantly associated with the family domain, Panjabi and English with community, English with education and employment, and Hindi with Hindu religious contexts. He described this as a double overlapping diglossic situation: ‘Hindi is the High language and Panjabi the low at the community level; and English is the High language and both Panjabi and Hindi are the low languages at the wider societal level’ (Saxena Reference Saxena1995: 220). Notably, he concluded that English had not encroached enough on the family domain to threaten Hindi and Panjabi, and Sharma’s later findings bear this prediction out; Reynolds (Reference Reynolds, Cotterill and Ife2001) came to a similar conclusion for the Panjabi community in Sheffield.

In sum, despite shifts in use, decline in knowledge of Panjabi has not been precipitous over fifty years, at least in the West London community, possibly due to community size, sustained migration, and language teaching via gurdwaras and other community forums. Sharma found that the social network detail that correlated most strongly with level of Panjabi use was the proportion of India-born ties in the person’s network. In terms of casual interaction across friendship groups, for example between youngsters in school, or even between two middle-aged Sikh and Muslim friends who grew up in West London (Sharma and Rampton Reference Sharma and Rampton2015), the community shows evidence of extensive use of vernacular mixing of multiple Panjabi and English styles (Rampton Reference Rampton1995). The project also found an important role for consumption of Indian film, music and other media.

The Linguistic Minorities Project (1985) found similarly robust levels of competence in Gujarati, but again with a trend towards code-mixing and reduced use in younger generations. Later research found a similar positive community orientation to language maintenance: Choudhry and Verma (Reference Choudhry and Verma1994), looking at 109 adults and 141 children in the Gujarati communities in London, Leeds, Bradford and Leicester (Hindu and Muslim), found that the majority felt that ethnicity without mother tongue was not sustainable. Gujarati remained dominant cross-generationally in the home domain. Some shift to a mixed code with English among later generations was evident, but this and later work (Sneddon Reference Sneddon, Martin-Jones and Jones2000) found that strong family networks and close links to the region of origin helped sustain a degree of language vitality. The notable shift was in Gujarati literacy skills among younger community members (also found by Bhatt and Martin-Jones Reference Bhatt, Martin-Jones and Fairclough1992), a situation reflected in most South Asian language communities.

The majority of Bangla speakers in the UK are Bangladeshi Muslims, but with some presence of Hindu Bangla speakers from West Bengal in India. As a result, much of our knowledge of Bengali use in the UK is through research on Sylheti-speaking communities. As with the other languages, studies over a long period of time have shown robust use of Bangla in the community (Husain Reference Husain, Alladina and Edwards1991; Mesoudi, Magid and Hussain Reference Mesoudi, Magid and Hussain2016), but with the familiar dynamic of English mixing and preference among younger children, for example in a study in Leeds (Verma et al. Reference Verma, Mukherjee, Khanna and Agnihotri2001), and a preference for English in the British-born generations’ sibling interactions (also found in Blackledge Reference Blackledge, Martin-Jones and Jones2000, a study based in Birmingham). Literacy practices reflected an orientation to both Arabic, for religious use, and Bangla (Gregory and Williams Reference Gregory and Williams2000).

As noted, the Tamil community in the UK and particularly in London is somewhat different for a number of reasons. First, it is a smaller community, and so language maintenance can be compromised by small numbers of speakers, fewer opportunities for language use, and fewer resources for community language teaching. Second, there are two different primary sources of Tamil speakers, a larger group of Sri Lankan Tamil speakers and a smaller group of South Indian Tamil speakers. Sri Lankan Tamils came to the UK in distinct waves: first with middle-class professional migration in the mid twentieth century, then in larger post-independence numbers, especially after Sinhala was made the official language in Sri Lanka in 1956, and finally a particularly large number of refugees after the onset of civil war in 1983. Sri Lankan Tamils are therefore a very diverse group in terms of nationality, caste, class, education, religion and reasons for migration (Sankaran Reference Sankaran2020). Recent studies indicate fairly similar language maintenance to other South Asian languages, though interestingly, Canagarajah (Reference Canagarajah2013) suggests that the South Indian dialect spoken in Tamil movies may influence the Tamil spoken by younger Sri Lankan Tamils in the diaspora. Smaller or more dispersed language communities (e.g. Nepali, Malayalam, Sindhi, Pahari, Konkani, Balochi) can struggle more with language maintenance.

In contrast to more regionally circumscribed languages, Hindi and Urdu have a different profile in terms of maintenance. Information about Hindi use and acquisition in the UK, particularly as a mother tongue, is less clear as such speakers may come from diverse regions and there are consequently few clear Hindi-speaking neighbourhoods in the UK; it is also used by more middle-class migrants who have more diffuse British settlement patterns, and as a lingua franca among speakers of other languages. Census reporting tends to blur the distinction between Hindi and Urdu, which complicates the picture, but certainly Hindi/Urdu has a fairly stable presence in the UK for wider reasons of prestige, religion and popular culture, discussed earlier in relation to Tables 16.1 and 16.2.

Overall, sustained migration from South Asia, relatively large settlements in the UK, and a reduction in the early explicit hostility to migrant cultures has meant that South Asian speech communities have broadly maintained their languages in the family and the community, though with gradual inroads by English with each generation.

17.1 Chinese Speakers in Britain: A Historical Sketch

Speakers of varieties of the Chinese language have been one of the largest and longest-established linguistic and ethnic minority communities in Britain. The first recorded Chinese person in Britain was Shen Fu Tsong, 沈福宗, a Mandarin-speaking polyglot and a Jesuit scholar in the court of King James II in the seventeenth century, who catalogued the Chinese books in the Bodleian Library. The first naturalised Briton, more precisely, naturalised Scotsman, from China was William Macao, an accountant who lived in Edinburgh from 1779, whose background was unknown except that he came to Scotland from Macao, hence his adopted name. The first Chinese community in Britain was the Chinese seamen employed by the East India Company in the early 1880s, who settled in London’s dock area, and later in other port cities such as Liverpool and Cardiff. The majority of these people were from the coastal areas of China, speaking Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and Wu dialects. By the mid 1880s, small Chinatowns started to form in London and Liverpool, with grocery stores, eating houses and meeting places (later townsmen associations). By 1890, there were two distinct Chinese communities in east London. Chinese from Shanghai settled around Pennyfields, Amoy Place and Ming Street, and those from Guangzhou Canton and northern and southern China lived around Gill Street and Limehouse Causeway. Most of the settlers from China ran small laundries, eating places (later take-aways and restaurants) and barber shops. This occupational bias was mainly due to the Chinese settlers being blocked from seeking any other employment at the time but it had important implications on their settlement pattern and language socialisation. First of all, they did not have a great deal of opportunity to learn and speak English beyond interacting with relatives in family-run businesses. Secondly, in order to maximise their business opportunities, they lived apart from other Chinese people. Consequently, only one or two family members who learned limited English were dealing with customers and the others remained largely monolingual Chinese.

Over 100,000 Chinese were brought from China by the British to serve in the Chinese Labour Corp in France and Belgium during the First World War. But after the war ended, the Aliens Restriction Act was extended in 1919, and none of the Chinese servicemen were granted permission to settle in the country. The overall Chinese population in Britain declined drastically. By 1918, the number of Chinese people living in Pennyfields, Poplar, London totalled less than 200; all were men and nine of them had English wives.

The largest wave of Chinese immigration took place during the 1950s and 60s, consisting predominantly of male agricultural labourers from Hong Kong, which became a British colony in 1842, especially the rural villages of the New Territories, which was leased to Britain for ninety-nine years from 1898, but also migrants from the Guangdong province via Hong Kong. Most of them were Cantonese speakers. The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act placed more restrictions on immigration from current and former British colonies, and the rules were tightened by successive governments. Chinese immigration was only possible if they were relatives of those already settled in the UK and had guaranteed employment. Consequently, the majority of Chinese immigrants in the 1960s and 70s were of this type, and worked in the family-owned catering trade. They followed the earliest settlement patterns of the Chinese immigrants and were dispersed in different parts of the country with no clear concentrated geographical area. Occasionally, Britain allowed special groups of people in; for example, in around 1976, 2,000 Chinese nurses were allowed in. They had to be able to speak and write English, as well as having professional training, to qualify. In anticipation of the return of sovereignty of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the 1981 British Nationality Act denied right of abode in the UK to Hong Kong’s British Overseas Territories citizens passport holders. It took a political event of 1989 for the British government to use the British Nationality Selection Scheme to allow 50,000 Hong Kong Chinese to enter Britain and they had to meet specific criteria of education, employment and language skills.

Since the 1980s, new immigrants of the Chinese community have been largely from mainland China, speaking a range of mutually unintelligible Chinese ‘dialects’. There are also many secondary immigrants who migrated from China first to Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe and elsewhere, and then migrated to the UK. The growth of the Chinese population is mainly due to second- and third-generation (i.e. British-born) Chinese. According to the 2021 census, the Chinese ethnic group in England and Wales numbered 445,646, or 0.7 per cent of the population. Approximately one-third are British-born. Britain has the largest Chinese population in western Europe, followed by France, the Netherlands and Germany. Further information about the history of Chinese migration to Britain can be found in Price (Reference Price2019).

17.2 The Linguistic Background of the Chinese in Britain

The Chinese language is an independent branch of the Sino-Tibetan family. It is spoken, in various forms, by over one billion people as a native language, and its written form has an unbroken history since 1500 bce. It is important to distinguish between the spoken and written forms of Chinese. Spoken Chinese comprises a large number of related varieties, known to the Chinese as fangyan, or regional speech. Traditionally, the Chinese fangyan are classified into eight groups in terms of geographic distribution and linguistic-structural affiliation. They are:

1. 1. Beifang (Northern), the native language of about 70 per cent of the Chinese population.

2. 2. Yue, the majority of its speakers are in Guangdong province, the southernmost mainland province of China, with the capital city of Guangzhou (Canton) as its centre. Large numbers can also be found amongst the overseas Chinese diaspora.

3. 3. Kejia (Hakka), whose speakers came from small agricultural areas and are now scattered throughout southeastern China.

4. 4. Min Bei (Northern Min), spoken in the northern part of Fujian (Hokkien) province, the mainland province on the western side of the Taiwan Strait.

5. 5. Min Nan (Southern Min), spoken in the southern part of Fujian, as well as in Taiwan and Hainan islands.

6. 6. Wu, spoken in the lower Changjiang (the Yangtze River) region, including urban metropolitan centres such as Shanghai.

7. 7. Xiang, mainly spoken in the south central region.

8. 8. Gan, spoken chiefly in the southeastern inland provinces.

Within each fangyan group, there are sub-varieties with their own distinctive features. For example, Cantonese, as it is known in the West, is a sub-variety within the Yue fangyan group, Shanghainese a sub-variety of Wu, and Hokkien of Min Nan. It is in this sense (i.e. being a sub-variety of a fangyan group) that Chinese linguists talk about Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hokkien as ‘dialects’, an important point often misunderstood and misrepresented in the linguistics literature in the West.

One prominent feature of spoken Chinese is the unintelligibility between one fangyan and another. This unintelligibility is regarded by the Chinese as a social group boundary marker distinguishing people of different origins and used by some linguists to argue that fangyan are in fact different ‘languages’. Among the Hong Kong Chinese, for example, Cantonese is spoken by the Cantonese Punti (native) people as their first language; others speak Hakka, Chiuchow (variably spelt as Chiuchou, Teochiu, Teochew, Chaozhou), Hokkien, Shanghainese, and other dialects and sub-dialects.

In addition to these regional varieties, there is a spoken Chinese form known as Guoyu (literally: national speech), which has evolved from Guanhua, a hybrid, standardised spoken form used during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) and which has been officially endorsed and promoted as the lingua franca in China since the 1920s. It is now widely used, in modified forms, in mainland China, where it is known as Putonghua (or common speech), in Taiwan, where it is known as Guoyu (national language), and in Singapore, where it is known as Huayu (the Chinese language). Phonologically, Guoyu, Putonghua and Huayu sound different. Guoyu is better known in the English-speaking world as Mandarin. As the story goes, Mandarin is the transliteration of Man daren, or Manchu officials, who ruled China for nearly three hundred years. Thus, it was used to refer to both the people and their language. Since the Manchu dynasty was overthrown by the republicans in 1911, the term has been used to refer to the official spoken language of China. As the official language of China is based on the structure and vocabulary of Beifang fangyan, Mandarin is also often used to refer to Beifang (Northern) varieties of Chinese.

The Chinese writing system is not alphabetic. Instead of letters, a system of written characters is used to represent words. The characters began as pictographs but evolved into complex symbols often combining semantic and phonetic radicals. The Chinese written characters were first standardised in about 200 bce, and the system of characters still in use today had taken shape by about 200 ce. The same system of written characters is shared by all literate Chinese, whatever fangyan they may speak. The Chinese traditionally place great emphasis on the written language and see it as a major cultural symbol distinguishing the Chinese from all other peoples. Chinese schools at all levels devote a considerable amount of time to literacy – in the Chinese context, the reading and writing of written characters.

One reason for such emphasis seems to be due to the unique and complex relationship between the Chinese phonological system and the written script. Chinese is a monosyllabic and tonal language. Every written Chinese character represents a syllable with a tone. There are over 48,000 written characters in the standard Chinese dictionary Zhonghua Da Zidian. Yet according to Putonghua pronunciation, there are only around 300 legal combinations of sounds, or syllables, with four different tones. Consequently, there are numerous homophones in Chinese, distinguishable primarily in written forms.

Since the 1950s, there have been a series of mass campaigns in mainland China and in Singapore to popularise the official forms of Chinese (Putonghua and Huayu respectively). The rationale behind these campaigns is to remedy communication difficulties caused by the differences in regional speech varieties, or fangyan. Two principal strategies have been used in the campaigns: simplification of some of the characters and the introduction of a phonetic spelling system. The latter is known as pinyin. It is designed to represent the written characters as they are pronounced in Putonghua, so that non-native Chinese speakers or speakers of non-standard Chinese dialects could learn a standard pronunciation. There are as yet no agreed phonetic spelling systems for the other spoken varieties of Chinese, and given the popular perception among the Chinese that there is only one Chinese language, it seems unlikely that efforts will be made to design such systems. However, since 1997, the Linguistics Society of Hong Kong has developed a Cantonese romanisation scheme, known as Jyut Ping and is trying to promote it in the region. More information on the history and sociolinguistics of Chinese can be found in Chen (Reference Chen1999).

With regard to the Chinese in Britain, it is estimated that up to 70 per cent speak Cantonese as their first language, some 25 per cent speak Hakka, and the rest speak Hokkien and other varieties of Chinese fangyan. Cantonese is used as the lingua franca of the Chinese communities, especially amongst the immigrant generations. Putonghua and Guoyu are increasingly taught in Chinese community schools and used in public spaces too.

17.3 Current Patterns of Language Use in the Chinese Communities in Britain

Like other immigrant communities in the country, the Chinese in Britain face the sociolinguistic dilemma of maintaining their ethnic language on the one hand and developing proficiency in English on the other. In terms of the status of the various languages involved, a complex pattern of polyglossia has emerged, with English as the socio-economically high variety, Cantonese the community high variety, Putonghua or Guoyu the politically high variety within the community context, and all the other Chinese fangyan and some regional forms of English as low varieties (see Figure 17.1).

Figure 17.1 Polyglossia of the Chinese communities in Britain.

With regard to language use, a three-generational language shift has taken place, with the grandparent generation remaining Chinese monolingual, the parent generation using Chinese as their primary language of communication but having some English for specific purposes, and the child generation becoming English-dominant.

18.1 Introduction: The Yiddish Language

Yiddish is the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews. It arose about 1,000 years ago, when Jews who had migrated from the Near East (via what are now France and Italy) began to settle in those parts of central Europe where Germanic languages were spoken. The term Ashkenaz originally referred to the Germanic territory they had moved to, but it eventually came to denote the Jewish inhabitants of that territory – and it has subsequently continued to be used for Jewish people of this provenance even after their migration elsewhere. As Weinreich puts it: ‘The name has become freed of its territorial connotations; geography, as it were, has been transformed into history’ (Weinreich Reference Weinreich and Fishman1968:384; see also Weinreich Reference Weinreich1973).Footnote ¹

Yiddish developed as a result of language contact between the Hebrew and Aramaic that the Jewish migrants to Ashkenaz had brought with them, and the medieval German dialects that they encountered upon their arrival (Katz Reference Katz, Hogan-Brun and O’Rourke2019). By the thirteenth century, some Ashkenazi Jews had begun moving eastward to escape persecutions, massacres, and expulsions; and by the eighteenth century, most were living in east-central and eastern Europe (Peltz Reference Peltz, Deumert and Vandenbussche2003). As a result of this geographic shift, Yiddish underwent a notable Slavicisation, and the language in its modern form not only includes Slavic as well as Germanic and Hebrew-Aramaic vocabulary, but its syntax is also strongly influenced by Slavic patterns (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2005). Nevertheless, Yiddish continues to be written in the Hebrew alphabet, from right to left; and despite having been characterised as a ‘fusion language’ due to its evolution, it is traditionally categorised as a Germanic language (Weiss, Greve and Raveh-Klemke Reference Weiss, Greve and Raveh-Klemke2013).

Further migration, in largest numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – and again often the result of persecutions – brought Yiddish to other parts of Europe and even led to the development of a sizeable Yiddish-speaking diaspora in North and South America, South Africa, and what is now Israel (Aptroot and Gruschka Reference Aptroot and Gruschka2010). From the nineteenth century until the Holocaust, it was the mother tongue of the majority of the world’s Jews (Weinreich Reference Weinreich1973) and the third largest Germanic language at that time, after English and German (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2005). By then, ‘Yiddish [had long] developed a highly structured system of dialects, a modern literature, a standard language, and more – all without the support apparatus of a nation-state’ (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2005:3).

Yiddish has been termed ‘the most famous “dying” language’ (Brenzinger Reference Brenzinger2007:2) because it went from being the vibrant vernacular of an estimated 11–13 million people immediately prior to the Second World War to being an endangered language with less than a tenth of its original speaker population by the end of the twentieth century – partly due to its repression in the Soviet Union, partly due to the privileging of Hebrew in Israel, but primarily as a result of the Holocaust (Millar Reference Millar2005). It is estimated that at least 5 million of the murdered Jews were Yiddish speakers. Moreover, many of the survivors consciously decided not to pass on the language to the next generation (Wisse Reference Wisse and Shapiro2008).Footnote ² Also due to the Holocaust, Yiddish lost its eastern European reference point: before the Second World War, this is where its ‘densest strongholds’ lay, but the surviving speakers were too few and too scattered to constitute a cohesive language community (Soyer Reference Soyer and Shapiro2008:59). Yiddish has thus effectively become disconnected from any previous geopolitical borders and it is now a language without a homeland that is spoken almost exclusively in parts of the world that were originally its diaspora – with only a few European cities constituting significant exceptions (Jacobs Reference Jacobs2005). Consequently, any sociolinguistic investigation of Yiddish is bound to be in the context of language contact and multilingualism (Fishman Reference Fishman and Fishman1981).

In fact, even historically, Yiddish speakers have always been multilingual. Ashkenazi society was traditionally triglossic, with Yiddish functioning as the vernacular and the language of religious instruction, Hebrew-Aramaic as the loshn koydesh (‘the sacred tongue’) – that is, the language of prayer and religious texts, and the co-territorial language of wherever the Ashkenazim lived at the time, for communication with the non-Jews around them (Peltz Reference Peltz, Deumert and Vandenbussche2003). In some communities, this triglossic repertoire survives ‘in various incarnations’ up until today (Katz Reference Katz, Hogan-Brun and O’Rourke2019:557).

18.2 Demography: Who Speaks Yiddish

What makes the situation surrounding Yiddish so unusual nowadays is that its speakers are clearly divided along religious lines: around the world, Haredi (often referred to as ‘ultra-Orthodox’)Footnote ³ and secular Yiddish speakers constitute distinct communities which remain ‘residentially and ideologically separate’ and have little to no contact with each other (Fishman Reference Fishman, Singleton, Fishman, Aronin and Laoire2013:276).

Among Haredi Jews, and especially the Hasidim,Footnote ⁴ the language is used by large families and passed on from one generation to the next, with only few people ever leaving the religious and linguistic community. Therefore, Haredi speaker numbers in most communities are increasing. For instance, due to their high fertility rate, it is predicted that the Haredim will constitute the majority of Jews in Britain by the middle of the twenty-first century (Staetsky and Boyd Reference Staetsky and Boyd2015). However, while the Haredim use Yiddish in their family life and as a language of religious instruction, they make little to no conscious effort to protect, promote or cultivate it: ‘They do not generally focus on “language per se” but rather on the imperative, as they see it, of maintaining their true Judaism as a veritable civilization that includes strict religious adherence to the inherited norms as well as attire, language, and compact neighbourhoods rooted in continuity with pre-Holocaust East European Jewish life’ (Katz Reference Katz, Hogan-Brun and O’Rourke2019:554). Yiddish among the Haredim thus functions as ‘an insider language rather than a … heritage language within a pluralistic society’ (Margolis Reference Margolis, Guo and Wong2015:167–8).

Among secular Jews,Footnote ⁵ on the other hand, speaker numbers dwindled and Yiddish increasingly shifted from a vernacular to a heritage language (Margolis Reference Margolis, Guo and Wong2015). Intergenerational transmission in secular communities – if they had not already linguistically assimilated to the societies they lived in – was interrupted by the Holocaust (Aptroot and Gruschka Reference Aptroot and Gruschka2010). Until not long ago, the typical secular Yiddish speaker would therefore have been from an older generation, and for them, Yiddish would have been a symbol of their diasporic Jewish identity (Glaser Reference Glaser, Roth and Valman2015). Recent years, however, have seen the emergence of a different profile of secular Yiddish speakers: the so-called new speakers. This term refers to ‘individuals with little or no home or community exposure to a minority language but who instead acquire it through immersion or bilingual education programs, revitalization projects or as adult language learners’ (O’Rourke, Pujolar and Ramallo Reference O’Rourke, Pujolar and Ramallo2015:1). In Britain, for instance, it is currently possible to study Yiddish as part of specific degree programmes at the University of Oxford and University College London, and through summer courses offered by institutions such as the Jewish Music Institute in London. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, several well-renowned international institutions – such as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York – have also been offering online instruction in Yiddish. Moreover, in 2021, the online learning platform Duolingo began providing Yiddish courses. While new speakers were already a salient group in many Yiddish-speaking communities, these recent developments have facilitated the acquisition of Yiddish for even more new speakers around the world.

New speakers’ reasons for learning and using the language vary. For example, in his research among new speakers in England and Scotland, Hornsby (Reference Hornsby2015a, Reference Hornsby2015b) found that his participants’ motivations included not only the desire to gain access to and connect with their heritage, but also the wish to reinforce family links, and the hope of obtaining a sense of belonging. As Hornsby (Reference Hornsby2015b:88–9) concludes, engagement with Yiddish as a new speaker often seems to be ‘about connecting to the past, seeing the relevance of it for the present and then continuing “the conversation” into the future’. In their discussion of queer Yiddish culture in the United States, Baron (Reference Baron2023) cites both communal and political motivations for learning the language. They comment that, as queerness is increasingly persecuted again, Yiddish culture can constitute a kind of refuge: ‘a culture without a country that is well-suited for people being rejected by theirs’. Baron notes that learning Yiddish can be counter-cultural, an act of resistance – adding that, for them and many others, their queer Yiddishkayt is ‘deeply entwined with the fight for a better and more beautiful world for all’. The fact that, until recently, Glasgow was home of the queer-friendly, Yiddish-speaking, pay-as-much-as-you-can Pink Peacock café (Judah Reference Judah2020) indicates that what Baron describes is not restricted to the United States. Notably, forums like the Queer Yiddishkayt Facebook group and organisations such as the virtual Queer Yiddish Camp enable new speakers’ participation in queer Yiddish culture across physical borders. A systematic study of new speakers’ further reasons for learning Yiddish and participating in Yiddish culture is needed.

18.3 History: How Yiddish Came to Be Spoken in Britain and Ireland

The real story of Yiddish in Britain and Ireland begins in the 1880s, when large numbers of Ashkenazim left eastern Europe in order to escape poverty and pogroms (Aptroot and Gruschka Reference Aptroot and Gruschka2010). Britain received the greatest share of these newcomers within western Europe (Roth Reference Roth1950) – and while London was home to the largest British Ashkenazi community, many also moved to the industrial centres in the north of England and Scotland, especially Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow (Metzler Reference Metzler2014). Smaller but nevertheless significant numbers also settled in Ireland and Wales (Keogh Reference Keogh1998; Parry-Jones Reference Parry-Jones2017).Footnote ⁶

Prior to the mass influx that occurred in the 1880s, some Ashkenazim – primarily from western Europe – had already begun entering Britain from around 1690 onwards (Roth Reference Roth1950). However, most of these early immigrants had assimilated quickly and adopted English as their main language (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2006). Thus, when repeated outbreaks of violence in eastern Europe brought large waves of Ashkenazi newcomers to Britain in the late nineteenth century, tensions arose between the newly arrived immigrants and the established community. The traditional narrative regarding this clash of cultures is that, while the newcomers were ‘poor, Yiddish-speaking, and often very Orthodox in observance,’ the more established Jewish community had become ‘lax in religious observance, more anglicised, and more affluent’ (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2006:1; but see also Metzler Reference Metzler2014 for a more nuanced discussion).

Particularly in London, the Yiddish language constituted a focus of these tensions. As Metzler (Reference Metzler2014:138) notes: ‘The late nineteenth and early twentieth-century controversies over the place of Yiddish in the metropolitan Jewish culture … reveal the shifting attitudes between established and immigrant sections of the community, underscoring the trajectory from confrontation to coexistence and even cooperation’. Initially, Yiddish was associated with old-worldliness, foreignness, and poverty – and thus, the established Jewish community undertook substantial efforts to suppress the language, and to Anglicise the newly arrived immigrants. Then, by the end of the nineteenth century, a certain sense of curiosity in Yiddish culture gradually began to arise among the established community. Finally, several events that occurred in the early twentieth century paved the path towards the acceptance of Yiddish, both within the Jewish community in London and beyond. One of the key events in this regard was the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. This entailed new immigration restrictions, resulting in many eastern European Jews being unable to seek refuge in Britain and instead having to face discrimination and violence in countries that they could not flee (Aptroot and Gruschka Reference Aptroot and Gruschka2010). In the established Jewish community, this led to a shift in perspective on immigration in general, and the Yiddish language in particular. A 1906 editorial of the Jewish Chronicle exemplifies this by suggesting that ‘[i]t should be a serious consideration whether, even at some risk of appearing to accentuate our separation as a people, it would not be to our interest to submit to the prevalence of Yiddish with a view to its becoming a Jewish Esperanto, a lingua franca’ (see Metzler Reference Metzler2014 for a more detailed discussion of the development of attitudes towards Yiddish at that time). In the wake of this, comparatively positive views of Yiddish and active use of the language in certain parts of Britain prevailed for quite some time.

18.4 Geography: Yiddish-Speaking Communities in Britain and Ireland

Ashkenazi migration to Britain and Ireland was a predominantly urban phenomenon, with many of the newcomers hoping that life in the cities would allow them to escape marginalisation and persecution (Metzler Reference Metzler2014). Consequently, Yiddish in Britain and Ireland has also always been spoken primarily in urban contexts. This trend now continues with the emerging group of new speakers of the language: as O’Rourke and Pujolar (Reference O’Rourke and Pujolar2013) note, new speakers of minority languages are typically characterised by middle-class, urban profiles.

London has always constituted the main destination for Ashkenazi immigrants. Between the 1880s and the First World War, approximately half of all newcomers to Britain moved to the metropolis, and the vast majority of those immigrants settled in the East End (Feldman Reference Feldman, Feldman and Jones1989). By the turn of the twentieth century, London had become home to ‘the most diversified and vibrant Yiddish cultural landscape in Western Europe’ (Metzler Reference Metzler2014:138). There were active Yiddish presses and publishing houses, Yiddish theatres, and Yiddish music halls. In her analysis of what she calls ‘London’s Yiddish lyrics’, Lachs (Reference Lachs2018:2) notes that ‘[o]ver four hundred Yiddish poems, songs and verses … were written between 1884 and 1914 and published in local Yiddish newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, penny song-sheets, and songbooks’. The thriving Yiddish culture of the time was also clearly reflected in the city’s linguistic landscape, with shop signs, billboards and newspaper stands acting as visible markers of the Yiddish-speaking East End (Metzler Reference Metzler2014). Yet, while Yiddish life in London partly re-created aspects of the eastern European communities that the immigrants had left, it also gave rise to a new, more secular, Yiddish-speaking generation whom London had provided with ‘the necessary spaces to envision, experiment and perform new patterns of identity’ (Metzler Reference Metzler2014:16, 140). The flourishing of Yiddish-speaking life in the city continued in the period between the two World Wars. The Society for Yiddish Literature at the University of London thrived, and so did other cultural institutions (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2006). There were several Jewish film societies, and Yiddish cinema constituted an important part of the recreational life for many Ashkenazim in the city (Toffell Reference Toffell2009). Yiddish theatre also contributed strongly to London’s vibrancy in the interwar period (Mazower Reference Mazower1987). The stream of survivors who arrived in London after the Holocaust also briefly bolstered Yiddish life in the city. However, eventually Yiddish speakers had to come to terms with the fact that their language could never again expect any significant reinforcement from further newcomers, because its lifeline – the eastern European ethnocultural base of the language – no longer existed (Spolsky Reference Spolsky2004). Despite the presence of some remaining traditional secular speakers of the language and a growing group of new speakers (Hornsby Reference Hornsby2015b), the Haredim now constitute the majority of Yiddish speakers in the city.

As Parry-Jones (Reference Parry-Jones2017) establishes, London has always received the lion’s share of attention in studies concerning Jewish life in Britain and Ireland, and there is very little research into Ashkenazi communities and the Yiddish language outside of the metropolis. The only notable exception is Manchester, home to the second-largest Yiddish-speaking community in Britain, the vast majority of whom are also Haredim (Matras and Robertson Reference Matras and Robertson2015). Research in Manchester has focused primarily on the role of Yiddish in the city’s linguistic landscape, showing how the use of the language on semi-public signage is different from that of many other immigrant or heritage languages (see for example Pappenhagen, Scarvaglieri and Redder Reference Pappenhagen, Scarvaglieri, Redder, Blackwood, Lanza and Woldemariam2016). Rather than being used in an emblematic and/or commodified fashion, Yiddish signage is instead community-oriented and ‘completely inwards-looking’ (Gaiser and Matras Reference Gaiser and Matras2016:67). Yiddish is almost always used alongside the loshn koydesh (Hebrew-Aramaic) and English, and the prevalent division of roles between the languages in the linguistic landscape ‘mirrors the stability of functions of linguistic repertoire components in daily practice routines that include worship, institutional deliberations, domestic and everyday communication, and instrumental negotiation of the surrounding secular world’ (Matras, Gaiser and Reershemius Reference Matras, Gaiser and Reershemius2018:68). This reflects the aforementioned traditional triglossia of Ashkenazi communities.

Much less scholarly attention has been paid to Yiddish-speaking communities outside of England. In Wales, Swansea is home to the oldest Jewish community; the country’s largest Jewish centre can be found in Cardiff – and in addition to the industrial cities of the south, there were/are also several smaller communities in northern coastal towns such as Bangor, Colwyn Bay and Llandudno (Parry-Jones Reference Parry-Jones2017). However, research suggests that by and large, English has long replaced Yiddish as their main vernacular, following Fishman’s three-generation model (Fishman Reference Fishman and Fishman2001). Most newcomers were convinced that the English language would be key to ensuring their children’s socio-economic success, and as Parry-Jones (Reference Parry-Jones2017:127) notes: ‘The linguistic competence of the second and third generations … became greater in English than in Yiddish or German, with the linguistic gap widening markedly between the first and third generation’. While Welsh was used by some Ashkenazim as a language of business and communication with the local non-Jewish population, its role never surpassed that of English, and there was no intergenerational transmission of Welsh among the Ashkenazim (Parry-Jones Reference Parry-Jones2017). In Scotland, Glasgow and Edinburgh are the main Jewish centres. Current news media suggest that there is a small but active Yiddishist scene in the former (Judah Reference Judah2020), and previous research indicates that there are new speakers in the latter as well as in Stirling (Hornsby Reference Hornsby2015b). In what is now the Republic of Ireland, most Ashkenazim have always settled in Dublin, while in what is now Northern Ireland, Belfast is home to the largest community. However, overall, the Irish Jewish population has declined sharply since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, when many moved there for ideological and religious reasons, and in subsequent years, when others emigrated to the United States and elsewhere in the hope of bettering their socio-economic prospects (Keogh Reference Keogh1998). There do not appear to be any studies of Yiddish in an Irish context.

Overall, there is a paucity of contemporary linguistic research regarding Yiddish in Britain and Ireland.Footnote ⁷ Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2006:117) notes that, since the end of the Second World War, ‘political, ideological, and historical developments have led to the marginalisation of a diminishing secularised Yiddish-speaking population, making the haredim the principal group of Yiddish speakers’. There have certainly been enormous changes to secular Yiddish-speaking life, with most of the traditional Yiddish institutions and organisations no longer in existence, with the printing presses no longer rolling, and with the last theatre having closed its doors (Mazower Reference Mazower1987). However, as noted above, recent years have seen increased access to online – as well as offline – opportunities that facilitate new speakers’ acquisition and use of Yiddish. Moreover, the internet offers new speakers in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere the opportunity to read the online Yiddish language newspaper Forverts; to virtually attend Yiddish theatre performances; to watch Yiddish TV programmes, music clips and yoga videos, and more. Time will tell as to what extent new speakers of Yiddish make use of these new opportunities, and what effect this will have for the language’s maintenance and revitalisation among secular communities in Britain.

18.5 Influence: How English Has Affected Yiddish and Vice Versa

Whatever the future may hold, Yiddish has already left its mark on language varieties in Britain – and varieties in Britain have left their mark on Yiddish, in some cases short-lived and in others prevailing. As noted above, Yiddish is an ‘open’ language in the sense that it has always ‘readily absorb[ed] elements from its surroundings’: not only from Hebrew and Aramaic but also from the languages of the non-Jewish communities in which the Ashkenazim were living at the time (Soyer Reference Soyer and Shapiro2008:57). This is illustrated, for instance, by Daiches’ (Reference Daiches1957) description of the trebblers – that is, the Edinburgh-based Ashkenazim who worked as travelling salesmen, peddling goods in the small towns of Fife in the 1920s and 1930s. They developed ‘their own Scots-Yiddish idiom’ by ‘grafting’ Scots onto their native Yiddish (Daiches Reference Daiches1957:121). Examples of this variety include the term ‘trebblers’ itself (most likely derived from Yiddish traybn, as in the expression traybn a gesheft – ‘to run a business’) and the word ‘bleggage’ (meaning ‘scoundrel’ and taken by Daiches to be a corruption of ‘blackguard’; see also Philologos 2014). While the trebblers’ Scots-Yiddish idiom no longer exists because subsequent generations of Ashkenazim in Edinburgh grew up learning English, the term ‘trebbler’ survives in the Dictionary of the Scots Language to this day, with the definition ‘variant of traveller’.Footnote ⁸

Lachs’s (Reference Lachs2018) analyses of the aforementioned London Yiddish lyrics reveal that in the metropolis, too, Yiddish was influenced by the language surrounding it. She notes, for example, that many poems and songs are ‘scattered with anglicizations, such as … bavelkomt (welcomed), and votsh un tsheyn (watch and chain). The immigrant community was in a state of flux, and the anglicised Yiddish reflected the spoken language of the Jewish East End’ (Lachs Reference Lachs2018:2). But Yiddish has also left its mark on the English spoken in London, and especially the East End. Wright (Reference Wright1981:39–41) gives ‘bagel’ (from Yiddish bagel), ‘bubbler’ (a term of endearment for a child, derived from Yiddish bubeleh), and ‘pletsl’ (a thin crisp roll, from Yiddish pletsl) as examples of what he terms ‘Whitechapel language’. Further borrowings from Yiddish that can be found in English to this day include chutzpah (extreme self-confidence or audacity), shlep (to drag or lug something) and shmooze (to talk or mingle with people). Thus, while Yiddish may be an endangered minority language, it is nevertheless frequently on people’s lips – even though they may not be aware of it.

In the two previous editions of this book, both Reid (Reference Reid and Trudgill1984) and Gardner-Chloros (Reference Gardner-Chloros and Britain2007) deplored the fact that, at the time of writing, there were no comprehensive sources of data on the languages that were spoken in Britain and Ireland by people who were not considered indigenous to the region. Until 2001, the questionnaires used to collect census data in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland included questions about respondents’ abilities only in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish respectively. The questionnaire used in England included no language questions. No questions were included in any of the questionnaires about the languages of European immigrants (or any other immigrants, for that matter) or about the other ‘indigenous’ languages of Britain and Ireland, such as Angloromani or the British and Irish Sign languages; see Figure 19.1. Anyone interested in multilingualism had to collate information from various sources of different types and scopes, the most reliable (although not infallible) of which were surveys of the languages spoken by school pupils in the UK drawing their data from Local Educational Authorities (Baker and Eversley Reference Baker and Eversley2000) or the Annual School Census (von Ahn et al. Reference von Ahn, Lupton, Greenwood and Wiggins2010). The inclusion in future censuses of ‘a question on language skills’ was therefore put forward by Gardner-Chloros as an ‘extremely useful’ way (Reference Gardner-Chloros and Britain2007:329) to address this ‘conspicuous’ omission (Aspinall Reference Aspinall2005).

Figure 19.1 Language questions in the questionnaires used in the 2001 and 2011 censuses in the UK nations and the Republic of Ireland.

An important step in this direction was taken for the first time in 2011, when questions about all the languages spoken by the populations of Britain and Ireland were added to the census questionnaires in the two countries. This was generally received as a welcome and groundbreaking development, which officially acknowledged that multilingualism in Britain and Ireland extended beyond the use of the Celtic minority languages and had the potential to offer an extensive and consistent account of linguistic diversity. In the four datasets that were published in the years after the census, the five jurisdictions reported different numbers of languages in addition to Britain and Ireland’s ‘indigenous’ languages (Romani, British Sign Language, Cornish, English, Irish, Irish Sign Language, Manx Gaelic, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Traveller languages, Welsh):Footnote ¹

• • 66 languages were reported in the data for England and Wales;

• • 164 languages were reported in Scotland;

• • 79 languages were reported in Northern Ireland; and

• • 44 languages were reported in the Republic of Ireland.

All datasets provided the number of responses each language had received in the census. In addition to the numbers above and the ‘indigenous’ languages, the datasets also included categories that aggregated unspecified numbers of unspecified languages under broad headings such as ‘South Asian language (all other)’ in the England and Wales data or ‘Other stated languages (incl. not stated)’ in the Republic of Ireland, and gave the total number of responses for these, as well.

While the practice of aggregating responses into groups may have been justified for statistical disclosure control reasons, it did obscure linguistic diversity to a significant extent. Upon closer examination of the full classification for the language variable in the information documentation for England and Wales (Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2013a, b), we find that the ‘South Asian language (all other)’ category encompassed sixty-one languages, which had received 27,359 responses altogether. Perhaps more surprisingly, the count of the number of languages other than the UK’s ‘indigenous’ ones that were labelled and coded by the ONS for England and Wales revealed a total of 588 languages, a much higher number than the 66 languages that were reported in the published dataset. In contrast to the latter, the full classification categorised responses to the language question in great detail. For example, ‘Albanian (Gheg/Kosovan)’, ‘Albanian (Tosk)’, ‘Albanian (not otherwise specified)’, ‘Arberesh’ and ‘Arvanitika’ all appear as separate labels each having its own code. In the published dataset, the first three codes are reported as a single ‘Other European Language (non-EU): Albanian’ category, presumably because the corresponding varieties are considered by the ONS to be spoken by Albanian and Kosovan nationals, while the last two codes are included in the ‘Any other European language (EU)’ category alongside a number of other coded languages (see Table 19.4), as these varieties are seen as spoken by Italian and Greek nationals, respectively. Arberesh and Arvanitika are Albanian linguistic varieties spoken in the south of Italy, including in Sicily, and in parts of Greece, especially in the south of the country such as in the regions of Attica and Boeotia.

Unpublished data obtained from the ONS in 2020 offer an insight into the three-level processing that language data in the census went through. The responses that citizens wrote in the relevant box of the language question (raw data) were grouped into a long list of language labels (primary data), which were in turn grouped further into the language categories that were ultimately reported in the published dataset (structural data). See Figure 19.2 for the processing of the Albanian data. The exact criteria and methods the ONS used to group write-in responses (Level 1 in Figure 19.2) into language labels (Level 2) and language labels into table categories (Level 3) are not known. It would seem, however, that a combination of information about respondents’ language, ethnicity and nationality was used. Numbers of responses seem to have been less central in the process. For example, Slovenian received 1,235 responses and was included as a table category, presumably because it is one of the official languages of the European Union. Other table categories, like ‘South Asian language (all other)’ mentioned above, were much larger in size.

Figure 19.2 Example of relation between write-in responses, write-in response groupings (labels) and published language data (table categories) in the 2011 census in England and Wales.

In Table 19.1, the top twenty most frequently reported languages across the four datasets are given, excluding the ‘indigenous’ languages and aggregate categories. Polish tops all four lists, with a combined total of 618,091 responses in the UK. A clear reflection of the growth of the Polish community after Poland joined the EU in 2004, this finding was widely reported in the media, which branded Polish as the second (most spoken) language in the UK. In terms of other European languages in the four top 20s:

• French, German, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish are listed in all four top 20s.

• Italian and Romanian appear in three lists each: Italian in England and Wales, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland; Romanian in England and Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

• Czech, Hungarian, Latvian and Slovak are each listed in the two Irish top 20s.

• Bulgarian is listed only in Northern Ireland.

• Dutch appears only in the Scottish top 20.

However, multilingualism experts highlighted that the census results (or, more precisely, the published datasets) were not in line with the findings of independent academic surveys conducted in parts of Britain and Ireland. For example, Baker and Eversley (Reference Baker and Eversley2000) had recorded 283 languages spoken only among London’s schoolchildren (cf. von Ahn et al.’s (Reference von Ahn, Lupton, Greenwood and Wiggins2010) finding of ‘over 300 languages’). There was also research showing that, apart from the number of languages, the numbers of speakers for named languages were also under-reported in the census data (Matras and Robertson Reference Matras and Robertson2015).

The formulation of the language question in the questionnaires used in England, Wales and Northern Ireland was put forward as the principal reason for under-reporting. In these three jurisdictions, people were asked to answer the question ‘What is your main language?’. If that was not English, they were asked to write in only one other answer and subsequently self-assess their ability to speak English; see Figure 19.1. Sebba’s (Reference Sebba2018) critique identifies several problems with these questions. In the glossary of the terms used in the census, ‘main language’ is defined as ‘a person’s first or preferred language’ (Office for National Statistics 2014a:30). The term ‘main’, however, is open to a range of interpretations by respondents: it can be the language they are more proficient in and/or feel more confident using, the language they first acquired as children, or the language they use the most during the day either at home or in work. Ambiguity aside, there is an assumption that respondents have only one ‘main’ language (or variety) in their repertoires across all contexts and modes of use (inside and outside the home; inside and outside their families, friends, and community networks; formal and informal; spoken and written), which makes multilingualism invisible. The questionnaire also incentivises respondents to choose English as their main language in order to avoid having to report a less than optimal ability of speaking the majority language.

The language question was more specific in Scotland, where people were asked if they used a language other than English at home. Despite this, the Scottish questionnaire also allowed respondents to provide only a single answer and designated this as the language of the home, thus obscuring the use of multiple languages in other domains as well as of multiple languages within the same household. The formulation in the Republic of Ireland was similar to Scotland (‘Do you speak a language other than English or Irish at home?’), but the number of reported languages was rather low. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that a high number of unspecified languages have been aggregated under the ‘Other stated languages (incl. not stated)’ category, judging by the number of responses listed under it (38,997, or 7.6 per cent of the overall number of people who answered they spoke a language other than English or Irish at home). Akan, the last-named language on the Irish data, received 1,007 responses, which means that the languages under the ‘Other’ category received 1,006 responses or fewer.

With these shortcomings in mind and with a view to improving the data on multilingualism, linguists and independent campaigners engaged with statistical authorities in the run-up to the 2021 census, calling for the wording of the language question to change in a way that would allow respondents to give a full(er) account of their linguistic repertoires (Matras et al. Reference Matras, Bak, Sebba and Ayres-Bennett2018; Payne Reference Payne2018). ONS officials, however, were keen to remind them what the census is and what it is not. The line that Sebba (Reference Sebba2018) reports, according to which the census is not an exhaustive survey of UK citizens’ full gamut of languages but rather aimed at establishing the languages that government can use to provide public services to citizens (Office for National Statistics 2014b:13), remains the same. Indeed, the language questions remained unchanged in the questionnaires that were used across the four UK nations and the Republic of Ireland for the purposes of the 2021 and 2022 censuses (in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, the censuses that were planned for 2021 took place in 2022 due to the Covid-19 pandemic). In 2021, however, the following definition of ‘main language’ was provided in the UK: ‘This is the language you use most naturally. For example, it could be the language you use at home.’. The definition was only available to people who completed the census questionnaire online, however; the paper questionnaire did not include the clarification; see Figure 19.3. Details on how the ONS researched, developed, and tested the language question used in the 2021 census for England and Wales are provided by the ONS in a dedicated report (Office for National Statistics 2020).

Figure 19.3 Language questions in the online and paper questionnaires used in the 2021 census in England.

Given that (a) the formulation of the language questions did not change; (b) the clarifications that were given for ‘main language’ limit the domain of usage to the home and introduce the rather vague quality of naturalness; and (c) the methodology for the analysis of the language data did not change significantly in 2021 (the ONS stated that the language data in the 2021 census is highly comparable, meaning that it can be directly compared with the data from the 2011 census), the 2021 census data will have to be approached with the same caveats as the 2011 data. These considerations aside, the publication of data about main language, English language proficiency and household language in England and Wales in late 2023 revealed interesting changes in the number of speakers of European languages (and other languages, for that matter) and in the composition of the top twenty most frequently reported languages ranking. Table 19.2 shows the top twenty main languages spoken in England and Wales, excluding English and Welsh. It compares the number of responses each language received in the 2011 and 2021 censuses and indicates the increase or decrease in responses as well as the changes in the ranking of each language on the top-20 table.

Overall, the changes reflect demographic developments that England and Wales underwent in the decade between the two censuses, most notably the increase in the number of people who migrated to the two nations from the southern European countries that were worst affected by the 2008 financial crisis, namely Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal (Pratsinakis et al. Reference Pratsinakis, King, Himmelstine and Mazzilli2020). All the languages associated with these countries saw increases both in the number of responses, ranging from 52.72 per cent (Greek) to 78.89 per cent (Spanish), and upward moves in the language ranking. As a result, Greek is now included in the list of the top twenty languages in England and Wales. The most striking changes, however, were seen in the case of Romanian and, to a lesser extent, Bulgarian. The number of responses for Romanian increased by 598.3%, from 67,586 to 471,954, moving the language seventeen places up the ranking, from nineteenth position in 2011 to second position in 2021. The increase reflects the rise in the number of Bulgarian and Romanian citizens living in the UK, which is in turn linked to the lifting in 2014 of the employment restrictions that had been put in place immediately after the accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the European Union in 2007 (Ruhs and Wadsworth Reference Ruhs and Wadsworth2018). Bulgarian and Romanian speakers also arrived in the UK from Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal as onward migrants pushed by the financial crisis. At the same time, the number of people responding that they have other European languages as their main languages either decreased, as in the case of French (−18.25%), or increased less pronouncedly, as in the case of Polish (+12.02). German also fell down fifteen places in the ranking, from sixteenth language in 2011 to thirty-first language in 2021, with the number of respondents decreasing by 39.9 per cent, from 77,240 in 2011 to 46,421 in 2021. Even though studies that address these particular cases were not available at the time of writing, it could be hypothesised that the changes in French, Polish, German, and other languages may be due to a combination of people leaving England and Wales, including EU citizens leaving because of Brexit (Stawarz and Witte Reference Stawarz and Witte2023), and language shift to English among linguistic groups with a longer presence in the country.

The 2011 England and Wales census was the only one that classified languages on the basis of region. In the published dataset, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish appeared as individual categories; eighteen other languages were listed as ‘Other European language (EU)’; Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian and Ukrainian were categorised as ‘Other European language (non-EU)’; and Romani and Yiddish as ‘Other European language (non-national)’. There were also three aggregate categories. The number of responses for each of these is shown in Table 19.3. In the full classification, a total of seventy languages were distributed across the seven categories (Table 19.4).

The number and range of languages in the full classification are comparable with the EU’s official estimate that a total of eighty-three languages are spoken in its geographical area. These are either the official languages of European nation states (23 languages) or the languages of ‘indigenous’ communities which may or may not enjoy official recognition of their minority status in European states (60 languages; Eurobarometer 2012). However, as McPake et al. (Reference McPake, Tinsley, Broeder, Mijares, Latomaa and Martyniuk2007) point out, the notion of linguistic diversity should incorporate all the languages that are in use in a society so that, in addition to official and regional languages, migrant languages, non-territorial languages (the languages of travellers and historically displaced groups) and sign languages are also included. In the census, Romani and Yiddish are included as European non-territorial languages (non-national in ONS terminology), whereas sign languages are distributed across three categories: ‘British sign language’, ‘Sign language (all other)’ and ‘Any sign communication system’. Migrant languages, however, are geographically classified on the basis of their origin so that Panjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati – the four most commonly reported languages after Polish in England and Wales – are under the ‘South Asian language’ category.

While this designation may be accurate in reflecting the historical provenance of these (and many other) languages, it conceals the fact that, in today’s times of increased mobility, they are spoken by people for whom Europe is an important part of their trajectories of migration and Europeanness an important dimension of their identities. Consider, for example, the case of onward migrants who relocated to the UK after first having migrated to another European country and whose linguistic repertoires include ranges of ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ languages such as the Italian Bangladeshis (Della Puppa and King Reference Della Puppa and King2019), Dutch Somalis, Swedish Iranians, or German Nigerians (Ahrens, Kelly and Van Liempt Reference Ahrens, Kelly and Van Liempt2016). Allowing census respondents to name multiple languages in response to the language question will capture the extent of multilingualism in Britain and Ireland to an unprecedented extent, while at the same time calling into question labels that reproduce simplistic and hierarchising views about the correspondences between language, ethnicity, nationality, ancestry and identity. If, to name just one example, Bengali is spoken across Europe, including in the UK by large numbers of people many of whom were born in and are citizens of one or more European countries, there should be no ideology-free reasons for which Bengali cannot be said to be a European language.

20.1 British Sign Language

British Sign Language (known as BSL) is the majority language of the British deaf communities, historically related to Auslan (the majority sign language of Australia) and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) (Schembri et al. Reference Schembri, Cormier, Johnston, McKee, McKee, Woll and Brentari2010). BSL also has more distant connections, for example, to some varieties of South African Sign Language, Maltese Sign Language and Maritime Sign Language (in Canada) (Johnston and Schembri Reference Johnston and Schembri2007). It is not, however, generally considered to be mutually intelligible with sign languages used in other majority English-speaking countries, such as Irish Sign Language (which we discuss below) or American Sign Language (ASL). This is because, like other sign languages, BSL has a vocabulary and grammar that are distinct from those of the surrounding majority spoken language, English. Like many bilingual communities, however, both the vocabulary and the grammar of the British deaf community’s sign language reflects considerable language contact with English (Quinto-Pozos and Adam Reference Quinto-Pozos, Adam, Schembri and Lucas2015). The term British Sign Language appears to have become widely accepted after a 1975 publication by the British linguist Mary Brennan (Brennan Reference Brennan1975). This name and the initialism ‘BSL’ are both now widely accepted in the British deaf community, although some have also suggested that national sign languages in the constituent countries of the UK also be recognised as separate varieties (e.g. Northern Ireland Sign Language, Scottish Sign Language) (Palfreyman and Schembri Reference Palfreyman and Schembri2022). The number of signers in the United Kingdom is not known, although published estimates suggest it may include as many as 125,000 people. The 2021 Census for England and Wales reported that there were 22,000 sign language users in these two countries within the UK, with some 70 per cent of these (i.e. 15,000) explicitly identifying BSL as their primary sign language (Sebba and Turner Reference Sebba and Turner2021). BSL is the language of classrooms for deaf children alongside English in the small number of bilingual schools across the country. It is also taught as a university subject at a number of higher education institutions, including the University of Wolverhampton, York St John University and the University of Central Lancashire in England, as well as at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. Courses in BSL are also provided by community colleges and private organisations with awarding bodies accredited by the UK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. Some BSL interpreting is regularly provided on British television, and See Hear, with deaf presenters using BSL, is a regularly broadcast programme.

The origins of BSL are not known, as relatively few historical descriptions of sign language use exist (Kyle and Woll Reference Kyle and Woll1985). Linguists generally assume that BSL is, however, a relatively ‘old’ sign language when compared to many of the sign languages used elsewhere in the world. The earliest records of sign language use in the UK date back to the fourteenth century, and there is evidence to link modern BSL with signing varieties described in the seventeenth century (Sutton-Spence and Woll Reference Sutton-Spence and Woll1999). The beginning of the modern BSL community, however, probably dates from the opening by Thomas Braidwood in Edinburgh of the first school for deaf children in 1760. Since deaf children are very rarely born to deaf parents who sign, deaf schools play an important role in language transmission for sign languages such as BSL and act as a child’s first point of exposure to a large community of signers. Braidwood also opened a school in London in 1792 which would later become the Royal School for Deaf Children Margate. This school closed in 2015, but some historians have suggested that, with its over two hundred years of operation, this represents the beginning of the continuous transmission across the generations of the sign language varieties now known as BSL (Brown Reference Brown2021). By the early twentieth century, over a hundred schools for the deaf had been established in the UK. Most of these were residential schools, with BSL being passed on, primarily from child to child, in classrooms, playgrounds and dormitories. Adult deaf communities formed in the towns and cities where these schools were located, and soon organisations began to be established to meet their needs. The Royal Association for the Deaf, the oldest charitable organisation for the welfare of deaf adults, opened in 1841, and the British Deaf Association was established in 1890. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many different social, church and sporting groups for deaf British people formed, and the social networks of deaf signers created as a result led to the consolidation of BSL as the language of the UK deaf community.

20.2 Irish Sign Language

Irish Sign Language (ISL) is the majority sign language of the Irish deaf community and the third official language of Ireland (Leeson, Saeed and Grehan Reference Leeson, Saeed, Grehan, Bakken Jepsen, De Clerk, Lutalo-King and McGregor2015). It has been suggested that there are over 5,000 deaf signers of ISL in Ireland, with many thousands more hearing signers (Matthews Reference Matthews1996). ISL is also a minority language in the United Kingdom, with some use in Northern Ireland, Scotland and England by Catholic deaf people. Historically, ISL was also used by some Catholic deaf people in Australia (Adam Reference Adam2014) and South Africa (Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). Due to a tradition of educating boys and girls in separate schools, ISL has had significant gender differences in vocabulary, although this has reduced over time (LeMaster and O’Dwyer Reference LeMaster and O’Dwyer1990; Leeson and Grehan Reference Leeson, Grehan, Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen2004).

The first school for deaf children in Ireland was the Claremont Institute, established in 1816. It had links to the Braidwood school in Edinburgh, so it is likely that a sign language variety related to BSL was used as the language of instruction. Many of the children admitted into the school were reported to know some sign language already, so we know that an older variety of ISL was in existence prior to this time (Conama and Leonard Reference Conama and Leonard2020).

As the school was Protestant in orientation, schools for Catholic deaf children were established in 1846 and 1857 (McDonnell Reference McDonnell1979). The language of instruction was influenced by French Sign Language (LSF) (due to some links with the Le Bon Saveur school for deaf children in Caen), as well as BSL and existing sign varieties in Ireland. While our understanding of ISL is growing, especially after the establishment of the Centre for Deaf Studies at Trinity College Dublin in 2001, there are many linguistic features and sociolinguistic contexts of ISL use that remain underexplored.

20.3 Structure of BSL and ISL: Phonology and the Lexicon

BSL and ISL share similar structural properties with other sign languages in their phonological, morphological, syntactic and discourse organisation (Sutton-Spence and Woll Reference Sutton-Spence and Woll1999; Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). Signs can be analysed into smaller recurring sublexical features, and these contrastive features are combined and recombined to build the vocabulary of the language (Fenlon, Cormier and Brentari Reference Fenlon, Cormier, Brentari, Hannahs and Bosch2017). The formational features can be modified meaningfully and assembled into clauses in rule-governed ways. Clauses are organised systematically in distinct ways into larger units of discourse, such as personal experience narratives or expository lectures. Also, like other sign languages, BSL and ISL also have features of their organisation that differ from those found in spoken languages, such as the grammatical use of space around the signer’s body.

BSL and ISL signs contrast in meaning using the same four manual parameters first identified by ASL linguists in the 1960s and 1970s, together with non-manual features (Brennan et al. Reference Brennan, Colville, Lawson and Hughes1984; Brien Reference Brien1992; Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). The distinctive features are (1) handshape (the configuration of the hand created by different combinations of finger extension, finger spread and bending at the joints), (2) location (the place on or near the body where the sign is produced), (3) orientation (the direction of the fingers and palm of the hand), (4) movement (the motion made when producing the sign) and (5) non-manual features, including facial expression, movements of the head and body, and mouth actions. Examples of BSL signs contrasting in handshape include work versus talk (see Figure 20.1): the former sign is made with a flat handshape, while the latter uses an extended index finger handshape. In all other respects, the manual features of the signs are identical: the dominant hand makes two small downward movements, contacting the radial side of the subordinate hand with its ulnar side. An ISL example is know and understand – these also contrast in handshape, with the former made with a flat handshape contacting the side of the head, while a handshape with two fingers extended and held together is found in the latter (Leeson and Saeed, Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). Brennan et al. (Reference Brennan, Colville, Lawson and Hughes1984) demonstrated that BSL uses a limited set of around thirty-five distinctive handshapes, although many of these also have variant forms. This variation in phonological parameters is often conditioned by the phonological context. BSL studies have shown, for example, that signs produced with an extended index finger handshape in citation form, such as the sign me or think, may be produced with co-occurring thumb or little finger extension when they precede or follow another sign using a handshape that also has an extended thumb or little finger (Fenlon et al. Reference Fenlon, Schembri, Rentelis and Cormier2013). As noted above, signs in ISL and BSL are also accompanied by a range of non-manual features, including mouth gestures or the silent mouthing of English words (Sutton-Spence and Woll Reference Sutton-Spence and Woll1999; Mohr Reference Mohr2014). Research indicates that there is variation in the use of mouth actions in BSL and ISL signers (Proctor and Cormier Reference Proctor and Cormier2023; Fitzgerald Reference Fitzgerald2014), although it is clear that mouthing plays a vital role in comprehension (Stamp Reference Stamp2016; Rowley and Cormier Reference Rowley and Cormier2021).

Figure 20.1 BSL signs contrasting in handshape.

Source: T. Johnston and A. Schembri, A. (Reference Johnston and Schembri2007). Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 83. Reproduced with permission from Cambridge University Press.

Signs in the BSL and ISL lexicon can be categorised into three major types (Cormier, Tyrone and Schembri Reference Cormier, Tyrone and Schembri2008; Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). First, lexical signs are relatively more fixed in form, such as BSL sister or have, with a specific meaning associated with a specific combination of handshape, orientation, movement and location. These BSL signs may sometimes be arbitrary, with little discernible link between the sign’s form and its meaning (e.g. the signs brother, false or expect), or they may be iconic, with some relationship between the form of the sign and its meaning (e.g. drink, run or house) (Vinson et al. Reference Vinson, Cormier, Denmark, Schembri and Vigliocco2008). Second, depicting signs (also known as classifier signs), such as vehicle-move or circular-shaped-object, are consistently iconic, however. As a result, they vary in form, depending on specific contexts, and can be used to produce a wide range of meanings. Third, fingerspelled forms use signs to represent individual letters of the Roman alphabet and are used to spell out words borrowed from written English, such as the names of people, and proper nouns for animals, objects and places (Sutton-Spence Reference Sutton-Spence1999). In BSL, a two-handed fingerspelling alphabet is used, while ISL uses a one-handed manual alphabet (Leeson et al. Reference Leeson, Sheridan, Cannon, Murphy, Newman and Veldheer2020).

20.4 Structure of BSL and ISL: Morphology and Syntax

Both BSL and ISL morphology involve the potential for significant grammatical modification of lexical signs (Sutton-Spence and Woll Reference Sutton-Spence and Woll1999; Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). Reduplication of some nouns (e.g. child), for example, is an optional means of indicating plurality (e.g. children). Some noun signs, such as signs week, yesterday and tomorrow, use numeral incorporation – where the ‘1’ handshape in the citation form can be replaced by the handshape from the number signs two or three to signal ‘two weeks’ or ‘in three days from now’. Reduplication of verb signs is a means of signalling aspectual meanings, such as iterative (e.g. go-regularly) or continuative aspect (e.g. wait-a-long-time). Note that tense is not marked morphologically in either BSL or ISL but is indicated instead by separate temporal adverbial signs. Completive aspect is marked by an auxiliary sign finish, which may occur before or after the main verb. Indicating (or ‘agreement’) verbs may be directed towards the location of referents which are physically present, or towards locations associated with absent referents. This directionality is used to signal subject and object arguments of the verb (i.e. who does what to whom). Research on BSL indicates that this process is optional (Fenlon, Schembri and Cormier Reference Fenlon, Schembri and Cormier2018), although influenced by a number of factors, such as co-reference, definiteness and animacy. Depicting (or ‘classifier’) verbs may include a variety of handshapes which represent different classes of entity and are used to show the location and motion of referents. Other depicting signs include a variety of different handshapes to represent the handling of objects, and others use various combinations of handshape and movement that show relative size and shape of referents.

BSL and ISL syntax appears to be somewhat flexible. Although subject-verb-object word order might be used to distinguish between subject and object arguments in both languages, various alternative constituent orders are possible (Sutton-Spence and Woll Reference Sutton-Spence and Woll1999; Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). Indicating and depicting verbs can include information about the relevant subject and/or object argument by the incorporation of directionality or the appropriate classifier handshape, and this makes the presence of a noun or pronoun unnecessary. In such cases, sentences may consist of a verb only. Moreover, the use of constructed action, in which the signer uses their body to re-enact the actions of some person (Cormier, Smith and Zwets Reference Cormier, Smith and Zwets2013), also allows the subject or object argument to be understood from context. Furthermore, simultaneous constructions, with each hand signing different constituents at the same time, are also possible (Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson, Saeed, Vermeerbergen, Leeson and Crasborn2007, Reference Leeson and Saeed2012, Reference Leeson and Saeed2020). Non-manual features are used to distinguish sentence types: raised eyebrows often accompany yes/no questions, and furrowed brows may signal a wh-question. An emphatic declarative might be accompanied by head nods, and a negated statement by a headshake (as well as by manual negation signs, like not or never).

20.5 Sociolinguistics of BSL and ISL

BSL exhibits considerable sociolinguistic variation (Schembri et al. Reference Schembri, Cormier, Johnston, McKee, McKee, Woll and Brentari2010). Unlike regional accents in British English, however, the differences mostly appear to consist of variation in vocabulary items (Stamp et al. Reference Stamp, Schembri, Fenlon, Rentelis, Woll and Cormier2014). Significant lexical differences appear to be between the varieties used in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, as well as within each of these four countries. This is particularly true of some semantic domains, such as signs for colours and numbers, place names for cities in the UK, and signs for other countries. For example, within England, place-name signs clearly mark local identity, with the signs birmingham, manchester and newcastle differing depending on whether you live in or outside these urban centres. Traditional signs six, seven, eight and nine also differ in London, Bristol and Manchester: six in London is represented by a thumb extended from the fist and bent at the middle joint, in Bristol by an extended little finger, and in Manchester by a two-handed sign in which the dominant-hand index finger is placed on the subordinate fist. Much of this traditional variation is changing, however, with studies indicating that younger signers use fewer of these traditional regional variants, and instead adopt more widely recognised signs, such as those used in larger cities such as London. Given the closure of many residential schools for deaf children (which appear to be the sources of the regional variation across the UK), and increasing mainstreaming of deaf children with their hearing peers, many of the established forms of transmission of the language in the residential school playground and dormitory have changed.

There is some evidence of regional variation in ISL as well, with the Mid-West region of Ireland using a distinct variety (Conama Reference Conama2008), and usage in Northern Ireland varying from that in the Republic (Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012), but this has not yet been the focus of systematic study. This contrasts with gender variation resulting from segregated schooling for boys and girls, which was the focus of a number of specific studies. For example, LeMaster and O’Dwyer (Reference LeMaster and O’Dwyer1990) analysed 106 different male and female signs and found that 63 per cent of the signs were related to each other in some way, with the remainder unrelated. LeMaster (Reference LeMaster, Benor, Rose, Sharma, Sweetland and Zhang2002) evaluated semantic lists for gender variation and demonstrated the occurrence of variation across all lexical categories analysed, including, for example, girl (noun), work (verb) and yellow (adjective). Leeson and Grehan (Reference Leeson, Grehan, Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen2004) report that while the widespread lexical differences described by LeMaster were specific to an older generation of signers, and thus are not generally used by younger signers, contemporary signers have another lexicon of gendered signs which originated in the segregated schools for the deaf in Cabra. That is, gendered signing continues to be found in the Irish deaf community but it is more reduced than in previous generations.

20.6 Sign Language Research in Britain and Ireland: Descriptive and Applied Linguistics

Research on the linguistics of BSL began in the 1970s, with the first books on the language appearing in the 1980s (Brennan et al. Reference Brennan, Colville, Lawson and Hughes1984; Deuchar Reference Deuchar1984; Kyle and Woll Reference Kyle and Woll1985). The first documentation of ISL formed part of a language planning exercise, resulting in the publication of a 1979 Dictionary of Irish Sign Language (National Association for the Deaf 1979). The first edition of a BSL dictionary organised according to linguistic principles was published in 1992 (Brien Reference Brien1992). In 2008, work on creating a corpus (i.e. an online searchable collection of language data) for BSL began (Schembri et al. Reference Schembri, Fenlon, Rentelis, Reynolds and Cormier2013), while the Signs of Ireland ISL Corpus began in 2004 (Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). In 2014, an online dictionary based on the BSL corpus data, known as BSL SignBank, became available (Fenlon et al. Reference Fenlon, Cormier, Rentelis, Schembri, Rowley, Adam and Woll2014). The BSL and ISL corpora have provided data for doctoral dissertations, publications and research projects on aspects of the structure and use of the grammar of both sign languages and they will serve as permanent records of the languages as used in the early twenty-first century.

In addition to this work on language description, there has been a lot of recent research into language ideologies surrounding BSL and other sign languages (Kusters et al. Reference Kusters, Green, Moriarty, Snoddon, Kusters, Green, Moriarty and Snoddon2020). Language planning and language use are largely driven by language ideologies. BSL is an unwritten minority language and one produced in the visual-gestural modality, thus historically, much of the ideology surrounding BSL has been negative. While now the tides seem to be turning, there are still many misconceptions about BSL, all of which have an impact on its structure, vocabulary and use. As Steiner (Reference Steiner1998) so aptly put it, ‘language oppression is not embedded long ago in the history of deaf people; it is an ongoing, constant social reality’.

Changes in BSL and ISL over time, since the dawn of deaf education, have largely been influenced by changes in educational policies. For example, prior to the 1950s, the fingerspelling method, which is communicating by spelling out English words and sentences in their entirety, was widely used in deaf education. This method died out in favour of other methods such as the oral method, educating deaf children via spoken language only, and total communication, the combination of speech and signs (following an English word order). These changes are evident amongst BSL and ISL signers, where you see fingerspelling being used more frequently by older signers compared to younger signers (Brown and Cormier Reference Brown and Cormier2017), and in Ireland more frequently by older male signers (Leeson and Saeed Reference Leeson and Saeed2012). Research looking at the use of fingerspelling amongst See Hear presenters, a British deaf magazine television programme, between the years of 1981 and 1990 shows a steady decline in the use of fingerspelling (Sutton-Spence, Woll and Allsop Reference Sutton-Spence, Woll and Allsop1990).

In the late 1970s, it emerged that British policies surrounding raising and educating deaf children (i.e. advice given to parents of deaf children and communication methods used in schools) were failing. On average, UK deaf sixteen-year-olds were leaving school with a reading age equivalent to nine-year-old hearing children (Conrad Reference Conrad1979). This sparked yet another change in policy, moving towards a more total communication approach (i.e. using both spoken and signed languages). As most deaf children are born to hearing parents, deaf schools are seen as a repository for BSL, where it can be transmitted horizontally, from peer to peer, as well as by intergenerational transmission, picking up signs from deaf educators (De Meulder and Murray Reference De Meulder and Murray2017). Unfortunately, in 1978, in a report commissioned by the British Government, Baroness Warnock recommended that deaf and disabled children be taught in mainstream schools (Warnock Reference Warnock1978). This was due to a push from disability groups who wanted a more inclusive approach to education. Deaf lobbyists argued that education needed to be different for deaf children as they were a cultural and linguistic minority who would struggle to have full access to mainstream education. This move cut off the transmission of BSL (Ladd Reference Ladd2003). Currently, 78 per cent of severely and profoundly deaf children attend mainstream schools with no specialist provision, 6 per cent have some specialist support and only 3 per cent now attend deaf schools (Consortium for Research on Deaf Education 2019).

BSL signers recognise that changes in BSL are intertwined with educational policy. For example, BSL signers believe that regional variation in BSL is linked to where deaf schools were based in the past (Rowley and Cormier Reference Rowley and Cormier2021). Quinn (Reference Quinn2010) called this process ‘schoolisation’, where regional variation in BSL was largely driven by deaf individuals who attended school. Signers believe that current educational policies threaten the vitality of BSL and that mainstream education has had a devastating impact on the lives of deaf people (Rowley and Cormier Reference Rowley and Cormier2023). BSL signers place enormous value on BSL, even those who did not grow up signing, and current policies do not reflect that value. Many, if not all, of those policies have been determined by hearing educators, with little or no input from BSL signers or members of deaf communities (Ladd Reference Ladd2003).

Despite barriers and difficulties within education, BSL has flourished in other areas. There has been a large increase of BSL in the media since the establishment of See Hear in 1981. There are many sign language programmes available on channels such as BSL Zone, and many programmes, including BBC News, are interpreted into BSL. There is also a presence of deaf actors using BSL on mainstream television programmes, such as Rose Ayling-Ellis, who plays Frankie in EastEnders and who went on to win BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing. In addition to the increased profile of BSL, a bill on BSL recognition was passed by the Scottish Government in 2015 and Scotland now has a BSL Act. This means that deaf BSL signers have a legal right to access public services in BSL across Scotland (De Meulder Reference De Meulder2015). In 2022, the UK Government also passed a BSL Act. Interestingly, many of those positive changes have come from within deaf communities, who have actively campaigned for increased access and for the recognition of sign languages (De Meulder and Murray Reference De Meulder and Murray2017).

The increased visibility of BSL and ISL on mainstream television over the years and the government recognition of BSL and ISL as community languages has instilled pride in deaf signers in Britain and Ireland. In the past, older signers experienced language shaming and did not feel comfortable signing in public places (Kyle and Woll Reference Kyle and Woll1985). It has also encouraged many hearing people to learn BSL and ISL. While this is a positive change, it does have its downside. The number of hearing learners of BSL now outnumbers deaf signers. This has implications on how BSL evolves as a language, as hearing learners of BSL with highly variable levels of fluency are often the only signing role models deaf children have in mainstream schools. This is seen as a threat to the vitality of BSL, with BSL signers questioning the authenticity and validity of some BSL signs, which is not unlike other minority languages such as Irish, where second language learners now outnumber native speakers of Irish (Rowley and Cormier Reference Rowley and Cormier2023; Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey Reference Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey2018).