London’s Secret Bilingual Empire: Inside the City Where 300 Languages Are Spoken Every Day

On a Tuesday afternoon, stand in any supermarket line in Peckham, Southall, or Hackney, and you will be surrounded by an amazing sound. Not very loud. Not disorderly. Just layered — phrases that resolve into Somali, then Gujarati, then something that might be Tigrinya or Amharic, then the particular London English of someone who grew up speaking both languages and now speaks neither quite as their parents did. It is quite commonplace. No one says anything about it. In a sense, that’s what makes it so amazing.
For longer than most of its citizens realize, London has been the world’s most linguistically diverse city.

The most often quoted number, 300 languages spoken regularly within the city limits, comes from a 1993 study by the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, which counted 275. Subsequent research brought the figure closer to 300, and the revision was an improvement in measuring what had always existed rather than an increase in diversity. One of the most eminent phoneticians in Britain, Professor John Wells of University College London, observed at the time that the figure was more of an acknowledgement of something that had been quietly and steadily developing for generations than a statement about London’s recent transformation.

All of this never had a theoretical business case. Air France chose Wembley in northwest London over any other location in Europe when it decided to close nine European telephone reservation centers and consolidate them into a single location in the late 1990s. This decision was made purely for commercial reasons. The new center’s manager, Frederic Verdier, put it simply: London was the best place to hire multilingual employees. The same conclusion had already been reached by American airlines like Delta and TWA, who favored London as a hub for pan-European operations due to the city’s unparalleled language pool. That was back in 1999. In the decades that have passed, the reasoning has only grown stronger.

Although it differs from the concentrated ethnic geography of New York, where Marian Storkey of the London Research Centre observed that London’s communities were more dispersed, the geography of London’s linguistic diversity has its own internal logic. Totteridge and Finchley are the hubs of the Japanese community. the neighborhood of Barnet in Hong Kong. Stockwell is traversed by the Portuguese. Restaurant menus on Brick Lane still translate into Bengali almost automatically because the language is so deeply ingrained in Tower Hamlets. However, the linguistic texture changes if you walk a mile in any direction. Within London’s borders, there are 33 communities with more than 10,000 residents who were born outside of England, as well as 12 additional communities with more than 5,000 residents. Over 200,000 people who were born in Ireland, which has historically been one of the largest immigrant populations, have been joined, encircled, and overlaid by waves of new arrivals that have never stopped.

The city may never have made up its mind about what to do with this inheritance. With one city and more than 300 languages, the GLA’s City of Languages initiative appropriately presents it as a cause for celebration. Language and culture classes are supported by the Greater London Authority, and the numbers are not insignificant. However, in London’s schools, where EAL caseloads are among the highest in Europe, the topic of discussion can quickly change from resource to problem that needs to be managed, or from asset to administrative challenge. The conflict between the institutional challenges of supporting all those languages and their cultural and economic worth permeates London’s self-perception in ways that have never been entirely resolved.

It seems as though the city has created something truly remarkable without ever fully committing to it as a conscious project when you stand on any busy London street and listen to what it actually sounds like. In 2020, The Spectator stated that London’s hundreds of languages were the city’s greatest asset. This is a startling statement in a publication that doesn’t usually celebrate immigration. However, it was also just true. Arrivals founded London, and they have continued to shape it ever since. The languages are not a byproduct of that past. They are still being spoken and serve as its record.