Home > Languages in the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom has no official language. English is the main language and the de facto official language, spoken monolingually by an estimated 95% of the UK population.However, some nations and regions of the UK have frameworks for the promotion of autochthonous languages. In Wales, English and Welsh are both widely used by officialdom, and Irish and Ulster Scots enjoy limited use alongside English in Northern Ireland, mainly in publicly commissioned translations. Additionally, the Western Isles region of Scotland has a policy to promote Scottish Gaelic.
Under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which is not legally enforceable, the UK Government has committed itself to the promotion of certain linguistic traditions. Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish are to be developed in Wales, Scotland and Cornwall respectively. Other native languages afforded such protection include Irish in Northern Ireland, Lowland Scots in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where it is known in official parlance as "Ulster Scots" or "Ullans" but in the speech of users simply as "Scotch", and British Sign LanguageThis article is about British Sign Language. BSL is also an abbreviation for Breed-specific legislation. British sign language BSL is the sign language used in the United Kingdom (UK). BSL is the first or preferred language of nearly 70,000 deaf or hearin.
1 Statistics
According to the most recent2001 is a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar), and also: The International Year of the Volunteer The United Nations Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations Events January January 1 A black monolith measuring approximately nine feet tall ap censusA census is the process of obtaining information about every member of a population (not necessarily a human population). It can be contrasted with sampling in which information is only obtained from a subset of a population. As such it is a method used f, Welsh is spoken by about 20% of the population of Wales, giving it around 600,000 speakers. However, there is some controversy over the actual number who speak Welsh. Some statistics choose to include people who have studied Welsh to at least GCSEThe General Certificate of Secondary Education GCSE is the name of a set of British examinations, usually taken by secondary school students at age 15 16 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (but not Scotland, where the equivalent is called Standard Gra standard, not all of whom could be regarded as fluent speakers of the language. Unlike Scottish Gaelic, which is sometimes viewed as a regional language even in Scotland itself, but like many other minoritised languages, Welsh has for a long time been strongly associated with nationalismNationalism is an ideology that creates and sustains a nation as a concept of a common identity for groups of humans. Nationalists base nations on various notions of political legitimacy. These can derive from the Romantic theory of " cultural identity",, making it harder to get an accurate and unbiased figure for how many people speak it fluently.
Scottish Gaelic has about 60,000 speakers according to the 2001 census (roughly 1% of the population of Scotland). In Northern Ireland, about 7% of the population speak Irish Gaelic according to the 2001 census (around 200,000 speakers) and 2% regional forms of Scots according to the 1999 Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (around 30,000 speakers). Alongside British Sign Language, Irish Sign Language is also used. Cornish is spoken by roughly 3,500 people (about 0.6% of the population of Cornwall). Lowland Scots is spoken by 30% of the Scottish population according to the 1996 estimate of the General Register Office for Scotland (approximately 1.5 million speakers), but it is debatable how accurate this estimate is, for a number of reasons (Which are?). British Sign Language is understood by less than 0.1% of the total population of the UK.
