The United Kingdom has de jure proclaimed English as the only official language of Great Britain, although de facto Scotch-Gaelic, Anglo-Scottish and Welsh are still in circulation in the country. The first two are the national languages of Scotland, and Welsh has remained the language of Wales for the past 14 centuries.
Some statistics and facts
- The Welsh language in Wales has equal rights with English under the 1967 law. Inscriptions, names of objects, public transport stops in cities and villages of Wales are written in Welsh and only then duplicated in English.
- The main languages of immigrants are Arabic, Punjabi and Bengali. Speakers of Italian, Caribbean Creole, Kashmir and Polish with Russian are also present in the major cities of the United Kingdom.
- Gaelic is spoken in the highlands of Scotland. A fairly significant percentage of the population does not speak English there.
- In Great Britain, the state language is spoken by over 55 million people.
- Least of all subjects of Her Majesty speaks Cornish from the family of Celtic languages. There are no more than two thousand unique carriers in the country.
History and modernity
Oddly enough it sounds, the official language of Great Britain is a transformed West Germanic, which appeared on the territory of the present United Kingdom in the 5th-7th centuries. It was brought by settlers and conquerors from northern Europe. Mixing with the Anglo-Frisian dialects, he changed, taking along the way a lot of words from the language of the Normans. They appeared on the islands later, but there are especially many French words in modern English.
During British colonization, English spread throughout the world and today it is the official language in many countries in both hemispheres and on all continents.
English globally
As the official language of Great Britain, English is the most widely spoken on the planet. The number of native speakers is approaching 350 million in the world, and over a billion speaks English.
English is the language of international communication, business, trade and other types of economic cooperation. This was largely due to the large-scale colonization of a significant number of countries and territories in the world by the British Empire.
