7. Other Dialects and Languages

For many of us, ethnic, national and other forms of identity may be as significant as local identity. It is important, for instance, for Welsh and Scottish people that they are not, and do not sound, English.

At any one time there are also many speakers of overseas varieties of English such as American and Australian in the country. And different from these forms of English are those that have been brought to England by speakers from countries where English is not a foreign but a second language. In countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Tanzania, Singapore, and Malta, English is so widely used as the language of education, government and wider communication, even though there are no or very few native speakers, that distinctive forms of English have developed. Indian English, for instance, as spoken by highly educated Indians, has its own distinctive characteristic words and pronunciations in the same way that American English does.

Different again are the forms of English, now widely spoken in England, that are of Caribbean origin. Some of these forms are clearly English. Other types of Caribbean English, sometimes known as 'patois' or 'creole', are so unlike other varieties of English that it would be better in some ways to regard them as languages related to English rather than actually English. In some parts of England new forms of creole-influenced English are spoken by some people of West Indian origin, and, among certain groups of young people, by their non-West Indian friends.

In addition to these forms of English, many English cities are now very multilingual places, with London's schoolchildren in particular speaking many scores of different languages as their mother tongue. Languages such as Panjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Italian, Greek, Maltese, Chinese, Turkish and many others are very widely spoken in different parts of the country.

These languages have come from overseas in relatively recent times, but England has a long and continuous history of being multilingual. Cornish, like Welsh a survivor of the original Celtic language spoken all over Britain before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, was spoken in western Cornwall until at least the 18th century. And a form of Scandinavian called Norn and resembling Norwegian or Faroese, introduced by the Vikings, was spoken in Orkney and Shetland, also until the 18th century. The influence of Cornish and Scandinavian can still be noted in the English of these areas, as can the influence of Welsh and Gaelic on the English of Wales and the Scottish Highlands

The Roma (Gypsies) arrived in Britain in late mediaeval times and brought with them their language, originally from northern India and historically related to Panjabi and Gujarati, called Romany. Anglo-Romany, a variety of Romany, survives in England and Wales and consists of Romany words spoken with English grammar and English pronunciation. This has donated a number of words to English such as cosh and pal.

In the early years of this century very many speakers of the German-based Jewish language Yiddish were concentrated in the East End of London, and Yiddish still has a number of speakers in the country. This has given English words such as nosh.

Another indigenous language in Britain is British Sign Language, the language used by the deaf community. This is a genuine language in its own right, with its own structures and expressive power. It does not bear a particularly close relationship to English, and is quite different from American Sign Language. It is a rich and subtle means of communication for those who are congenitally deaf, and without it their lives would be much the poorer. BSL has recognizable regional dialects, with differences in the signs used in different parts of the country.

Compared to many other parts of the world - Papua New Guinea has more than 700 languages, for example - Britain is relatively poor in languages. It is true that immigration in the last 50 years has brought many new languages with it, but many indigenous languages such as Norn have fared poorly over time and lost their last mother-tongue speakers decades ago. But even though a majority of us are monolingual in English, we can be pleased that English itself still has a wealth of regional accents and dialects which reflect our rich history of contact between languages and peoples, our patterns of migration, and our complex island geography.