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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Britain Under the Microscope, our advanced episode.
On languages.
In our previous episode we talked a little bit about the native languages of Britain, but today we're gonna be talking a lot more around language learning in the UK, attitudes to language, and also some of the languages that you might hear on the street in the UK.
I mean the UK is a very multicultural country, especially if you live in London, you bound to bump into lots of people with a wide variety of native languages.
Yeah. What do you think are some of the most popular or some of the most widely spoken languages in the UK that are not English or native languages?
I'm not sure which is the most spoken, but I know it’s definitely not French.
Yes, French is relatively widely spoken but not as much as these languages the languages actually are...the first one is Polish.
噢，波兰语, ok, yes, that is… at least before Brexit, when I was in the UK I did notice a lot of Polish people.
Yep.
You have a lot of Polish immigrants or just workers.
Yeah, so you have Polish. Then you have Punjabi.
Punjab is the Indian language, Pakistani language?
Yes, it comes from the Punjab region of India Pakistan; so it’s a northern language. You also have Gujarati.
Sounds also Indian.
Yes, Gujarati is from the area around Mumbai.
So western India, then you have Hindustani, so Hindi, Urdu, and also Bengali.
So lots of Indian languages, lots of different regional Indian languages.
Lots of Indian languages, yeah.
Because you have a huge population that's originally from India.
Yeah, I remember when I was at school, I could have learned a few words of Punjabi, Hindi, Gujarati, but I was a kid, so they were mostly swear words, relatively rude words.
We're always doing that learning languages. You mentioned learning some of these curse words in foreign languages in school, but forgive me for saying this, but based on my understanding, British people are not the best at learning foreign languages.
We are notoriously bad at learning foreign languages.
According to some statistics about 62% of UK citizens can't speak a second language.
I think it's also because if you can use English to go around the world, then people are just a bit lazy, they just don't want to learn.
Well, say it a bit lazy but also there's not really much incentive. As an English speaker, if I go around the world it’s very rare that I find myself in a situation where I can't get by, I can’t find someone that speaks English.
Exactly.
But you compare the 62% of UK citizens with most other European countries where that's around 10% of the population that can't speak a second language.
Especially if you think about some central western European countries that are smaller, it is so common for them to speak 3, 4 languages fluently.
Yeah, particularly if you go up to Northern Europe, for example, the Dutch, when I go to Holland or go to the Netherlands, it's amazing that pretty much every Dutch person that you meet speaks flawless English.