On a Saturday morning, take a fifteen-minute stroll through Southall and you’ll hear something that doesn’t quite happen anywhere else. A mother is reprimanding her son in Tamil, two elderly men are arguing in what sounds like Pashto but may be Dari behind her, and Punjabi spills out from the candy stores and Somali from the phone-card kiosks. No one appears shocked. Really, no one notices. Strangely enough, that’s the whole point.
The majority of London’s residents haven’t really noticed that the city is becoming the most linguistically diverse in human history. Although linguists who actually knock on doors believe the true number is higher, the most recent counts place the number of languages spoken throughout the city somewhere above 300. With its frequently cited 700 languages, New York is typically crowned, but an increasing number of scholars believe London is the true record-holder once daily use rather than ancestral memory is taken into consideration. Which city is actually at the top of the list is still up for debate. There is no question that something remarkable has occurred on the Thames.
The causes are more ancient than most people realize. After all, immigrants founded London. Around AD 47, the Romans set up camp on the riverbank, constructed their walls, drained the marshes, and left behind a settlement that wasn’t particularly British in the modern sense. The city was an outsider’s project from the start. It was the Vikings’ turn. Theirs was taken by the Normans. London had been practicing the art of learning new languages for over a millennium by the time the Huguenots arrived in the 1680s, escaping religious persecution in France. Strangely enough, this is where the term “refugee” was first used.
A sort of accelerating layering ensued. Nineteenth-century Irish dockworkers. In Spitalfields, Russian and Polish Jews fled pogroms and settled in the same winding streets that the Huguenots had just left. Clerkenwell’s Italian population. The Windrush generation, who arrived from Jamaica and Trinidad in 1948, followed by waves from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cyprus, and Hong Kong, was the great post-war invitation. Every group infused the city’s bloodstream with its own grammar.
If you walk slowly enough, you can still identify the migration routes in store signs and church names. In Rotherhithe, there is a Norwegian church. A Finnish one as well. Hackney’s Vietnamese community is persevering. Long before Soho appropriated the concept in the 1970s, Limehouse had its own Chinatown.
Something faster and more modern was introduced during the years of the European Union. In less than ten years, Polish emerged as a second language in London. You would hear it in the line at Greggs, on buses, and on construction sites. Bulgarian, Lithuanian, and Romanian came next. Brexit was meant to slow this down, and it did in some ways, but the demographic momentum was already in place. Youngsters who grow up bilingual or trilingual don’t find it noteworthy.
Walking around some parts of the city gives you the impression that you are seeing something that has never been done before. The cliché reach is Babylon, but it doesn’t quite work. Babylon was a place of confusion. London is a strange place where a man can order coffee in broken English from a barista whose first language is Tigrinya, and neither of them finds the exchange noteworthy. It’s a kind of practiced, slightly tired tolerance.
Linguists warn that half of the world’s 7,000 languages could disappear this century. Some of them have entire worlds inside their heads, with their last fluent speakers residing here in Tooting, Walthamstow, or Wood Green. It remains to be seen if London will be able to retain that inheritance. However, the city continues to operate as it always has for the time being. paying attention. Including. absorbing. Rarely closing the door, but occasionally mishearing.
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