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19 - European Immigrant Languages

from Part III - Multilingualism in Britain and Ireland: Minority Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2024

By
Petros Karatsareas
Edited by
Susan Fox
Susan Fox
Affiliation:
Universität Bern, Switzerland
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Summary

This chapter charts the European aspect of the linguistic mosaic of Britain and Ireland drawing on data from the 2011 and 2021 censuses as well as data from the UK’s EU Settlement Scheme. It offers a critical assessment of the practices that statistical authorities adopted for publishing language data they collected by means of the censuses, showing that the aggregation of respondents’ write-in responses into so-called ‘main language group classifications’ and ‘table categories’ led to a significant under-reporting of the number of languages spoken in Britain and Ireland including languages classified as European. It further presents arguments that have been raised by linguists regarding the phrasing of the language question in census questionnaires and suggests new sources of statistical information that could be used in conjunction with census data in order to obtain a fuller picture of European multilingualism in the British Isles. It finally takes issue with the labelling of particular languages as ‘European’ based on essentialist and hierarchising assumptions about the links between language, ethnicity, nationality, ancestry and identity, arguing that all languages that are spoken by citizens who identify as European should be considered European languages.

Keywords

European languagesimmigrant languagesmultilingualismlanguage statisticslanguage censusOffice for National Statistics
Type
Chapter
Information
Language in Britain and Ireland , pp. 425 - 438
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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