Why Bilingual Londoners Are Leaving for More ‘Language-Friendly’ European Cities

The soundscape in any supermarket line on a weekday afternoon in Shepherd’s Bush, Peckham, or Hackney is amazing. London has more than 300 actively spoken languages within its borders, including Somali, Polish, Arabic, Yoruba, and Tagalog. This fact is so frequently cited that it is no longer surprising. The quiet, steady departure of those who actually speak more than one of them is a topic that receives far less attention.

Professionals who are bilingual—those who grew up speaking one language at home and another at school, or who came to London with a second or third language integrated into their professional identity—are increasingly discovering that the city’s remarkable linguistic diversity doesn’t translate into significant social or professional value for them. And a new image is beginning to emerge when they look across the Channel. In some cases, cities like Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, and Helsinki are formally reorganizing themselves around the reality of multilingual residents rather than merely tolerating them. Even though that change is still small, it has a pull that London is currently finding difficult to match.

The professional aspect is genuine and deserving of careful consideration. Over the past 20 years, English has emerged as the de facto language of the business community in Brussels, which is home to the administrative apparatus of the European Union and a workforce that is one-third non-Belgian. According to current estimates, the percentage of Brussels workers who use English professionally has increased from roughly 10% in 2001 to about half. In 2022, the commune of Schaarbeek, which is part of the larger Brussels Capital Region, officially recognized English as an administrative language, giving what was already common practice legal protection. The mayor of Helsinki has gone so far as to openly suggest that English be made an official city language in addition to Finnish and Swedish, in part to stop foreign talent from leaving after finishing their studies because they find it difficult to navigate Finnish bureaucracy.

These gestures are not symbolic. They stand for cities that are actively vying for the linguistically proficient, globally mobile workers that London has long believed would just come to it.

The calculus has changed since Brexit in ways that are still being worked out for a bilingual professional sitting in London right now, such as a French-English speaker or someone who switches between Spanish and English with ease. The loss of EU freedom of movement is significant both practically and symbolically. The idea that London, a city where language proficiency opened doors across the continent, sat comfortably at the center of a larger European professional world has faded. Brexit may have had a greater psychological impact on this specific group—those who identified in part with their European language identity—than the statistical data currently shows.

Additionally, something more structural is taking place, which relates to a conflict that has always existed in London’s multilingualism. On paper, the city is incredibly diverse, but at its institutional and professional core, it is still a monolingual place. The operating system is English. While second languages are acceptable in homes, restaurants, and community centers, they do not typically advance into the formal architecture of professional life as they do, for example, in an Amsterdam tech company or a boardroom in Brussels, where the working language alternates between Dutch and English depending on who is present. Londoners who are bilingual frequently discover that their language abilities are valued more as a pleasant personal quality than as a structural professional advantage. The difference between ornament and tool is more important than it may seem.

The irony is that English’s worldwide dominance has led to Britain’s monolingualism, which is a sort of success trap. English speakers don’t learn other languages because they don’t need to, and they don’t need to because everyone already knows English, according to a widely held viewpoint in language education circles. That reasoning is increasingly expensive and circular. Despite the fact that over 1.5 million British children are growing up bilingual, a disproportionate number of them never take an A-level or GCSE in the language they speak at home. The abilities are present. There isn’t the infrastructure to identify and use them in a professional manner. Seeing that disconnect firsthand—a bilingual child of Spanish and English growing up in Lewisham, attending a school where their Spanish is a curiosity rather than a curriculum asset—makes you wonder what London is subtly allowing to go unnoticed.
Whether this is a true talent exodus or a pattern that the data will eventually qualify for is still up for debate. In isolation, the numbers departing are not particularly striking. However, the characteristics of those departing—such as their international mobility, education, and linguistic adaptability—tend to be more significant than the actual number. Helsinki is making the case for English because it cannot continue to lose highly qualified employees due to linguistic barriers. London may be underestimating how much of its appeal has historically depended on being the most accessible European city for the multilingual professional class, despite its size and international prestige. Once taken for granted, that advantage is no longer automatic.