What Are the Most Common Languages Spoken in the UK

The UK is a beautifully diverse place, where many different languages are spoken. If you’re looking to hire a translator or voice over agency to extend the reach of your business resources, it’s important to know which languages are the most common across the UK. This will help you choose the most useful and impactful languages to use for your content.

Here are the most common languages spoken in the UK:

English

|Not surprisingly, over 90% of people in the UK speak English as their first language, with only around 770,000 people in Britain having little to no English skills overall. Clearly in the UK all business content: written, spoken, visual will be in English unless it’s a very niche business with little in the way of customers in the UK. I suppose that’s possible, but unlikely.

Indigenous Languages

Indigenous languages of the UK are extensive, but the most commonly used are Welsh in Wales and Irish in Northern Ireland. Welsh is spoken by around 30% of people in Wales, which is a comparatively high number. In fact, Welsh is the only Celtic language that is not on the endangered list from UNESCO.

Polish

Polish is spoken by over half a million people in the UK and could be spoken by Polish people, or people from Belarus, the Ukraine, Lithuania and Germany as it’s a popular first or second language in many countries worldwide.

Punjabi

Around 275,000 people speak Punjabi in the UK and represents the largest portion of British Asian languages in the country.

Urdu

Urdu is spoken extensively across the UK with over 269,000 speakers, and with particular areas of the Pakistani community seeing higher numbers of Urdu speakers than elsewhere.

Bengali

Bengali is spoken across the UK but is spoken more often in certain areas. In Tower Hamlets, in London, for example around 18% of the population speak Bengali as their main language.

Gujarati

Gujarati is spoken across the UK, but is more prevalent in certain areas. Leicester, for example, has a high 11% of Gujarati speakers, so if your company is based in Leicester or other areas with a high level of Gujarati speakers, this might be an important language for you.

Arabic

Arabic is spoken across the UK, but large numbers of London residents speak the language making it the second most commonly spoken language in the capital, with over 11,000 people speaking it as their mother tongue, and 6,000 speaking it at home. Realistically, though this is a very small proportion of the population.

French

There are over 147,000 French speakers in the UK, but again this is a small percentage of the population, and so a French voice over for a UK project may not be your first choice compared to other languages. However, if you deal with French-speaking customers or provide business services in France or Switzerland, then it is still worth considering. Take the global service accommodation specialists Situ who have apartments for business travellers right across France – their resources can better appeal to their large number of French clients when available in their native language.

Chinese Languages

Lots of Chinese languages are spoken in the UK, including Cantonese and Mandarin. There are parts of the UK where there are large Chinese communities, with Manchester being the third largest after London and the Southeast, giving it a much higher percentage of Chinese language speakers. UK businesses dealing with Chinese suppliers – of which there are many – can improve client-supplier communication by translating important documentation into Mandarin.

Portuguese

There are over 133,000 speakers of Portuguese in the UK, making it a top ten language. That figure pales into insignificance when you realise that over 200 million people speak Portuguese in Brazil. So any company doing business with Brazil might want to consider the benefits of Portuguese resources.

Spanish

Over 120,000 people in the UK state that Spanish is their main language, making it a top ten language, but on the lower end.

Which Language Will You Choose?

If you want to learn a new language or apply different languages to a business project, do a little more research to pick the perfect option for your chosen application.

If you do use a company to do a voice over or subtitles, do ensure they are experienced in what they do so that the translation and pronunciation is accurate and brings you the kind of brand boost you’re expecting from creating multilingual content.