The Push to Make London the First Officially Bilingual City in England

The question practically answers itself when you stroll down Kingsland Road on a Tuesday afternoon. A Polish grocery store, a Vietnamese pho restaurant, and a Caribbean takeaway with a hand-painted sign that reads both English and patois are all adjacent to a Turkish bakery. For a hundred years, the buses have rumbled past with the same uncaring rhythm.

However, the conversations that spill out of the doorways—in Bengali, Yoruba, Urdu, Spanish, Albanian, and occasionally three of them combined into a single sentence by a teenager texting their mother—indicate that there is more going on than just menu variety.

This is the texture that almost unavoidably gave rise to the movement to make London the first bilingual city in England, which has been quietly gaining traction over the past eighteen months. The political class is still largely silent, the proposal is loose, and the coalition supporting it is unofficial. However, the concept is no longer novel. It is being discussed in academic seminars at SOAS, on community boards in Tower Hamlets, and in the kind of comment threads where people engage in surprisingly civil debate.

The advocates’ argument is both emotional and demographic in nature. Approximately one-third of Londoners do not speak English as their first language. That number rises in some boroughs, especially Newham and Hackney. Between 2004 and 2010, sociolinguists studying Hackney discovered friendship groups of five-year-olds whose parents were from Cockney, Bangladesh, Morocco, Albania, Turkey, and the Caribbean. The Cockney of their grandparents was not the English those kids grew up speaking. Drawing from a “feature pool” as one researcher put it, it was something looser and constantly evolving.

The messier part of the conversation is what “bilingual” would actually mean in practice. Some advocates want a second language to be officially recognized; depending on the neighborhood, they typically recommend Bengali, Urdu, or occasionally Polish. Some advocate for a Welsh-style model in which government communications, public services, and signage would automatically appear in two languages. In a city where there are already more than 300 languages spoken, a third, smaller but more vocal group says it is impossible to choose just one second language. They say you insult the others if you choose one.

When resistance occurs, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that it’s not always where you would anticipate it. Long-term immigrant communities have expressed some of the strongest opposition, fearing that official recognition would freeze their way of life and transform reality into bureaucratic categories. Others see it as another deterioration of something they can’t quite put their finger on, especially older residents who still identify as East Enders. There is an unspoken sense that London has been evolving more quickly than any city has the right to, and that this would just be another declaration of a reality that has already been achieved.

The statement made by Sadiq Khan last year that London is “an English and a British city” runs counter to all of this. He was correct. In the most recent census, about 3.5 million people in London identified as English, which is more than Birmingham’s total population. Lord’s, Twickenham, Wembley, and the kind of folk-music institutions that subtly demand a more profound Englishness than the tourist-postcard version are all located in the capital. None of that would be replaced by a bilingual London, should it ever come to pass. It could just formalize what people have been saying on the streets for decades.

It remains to be seen if Westminster is interested in the discussion. Most likely not—at least not just yet. However, it is unlikely that the campaign will end. Cities ultimately have a tendency to enact laws only after experiencing their reality for a considerable amount of time.