What’s the native language of Britain?

LANGUAGE

In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at what languages are spoken in Britain and asking ourselves what the native language of Britain is.

If I ask you what the tok ples of Britain is, you will probably answer, “of course, it’s English”. That’s true, but not entirely true; there are many people in England and the other parts of Britain who don’t speak English, and English isn’t even the oldest language in the country.
Britain has always been a country that receives newcomers from elsewhere, and this is reflected in the many immigrant languages that you can hear in any large British city today, from the Bengali, Cantonese, and Hindi brought by immigrants from Britain’s former colonies to the Polish, Romanian, and other European languages brought by Britain’s closer neighbours, to the Arabic, Ukrainian, and Persian spoken by the many asylum seekers and refugees ending up in the United Kingdom. But even among indigenous British people, English is not everyone’s native language.
In fact, the English language itself is a relative newcomer that developed as a result of the mixing of three groups of newcomers – the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes – at the end of the Roman Empire four centuries after the birth of Christ. They came from the area of northern Europe that today we call Germany and Denmark. Not long after they settled and began to intermarry, they were joined by Viking settlers and then in 1066 by French invaders. The modern English language that I am using to write this article for you to read is a result of all of this language contact and mixing.
But there were people living in Britain long before all of these invaders arrived. They spoke Celtic languages. As the invaders arrived on the south and east coasts of Britain, they either intermarried with the newcomers and adopted their language or moved to the western and northern parts of the island. There these languages continue to be spoken today, with 57,000 people speaking Scottish Gaelic in Scotland and almost half a million people in Wales saying they use Welsh daily.

Of course, all of the Scottish Gaelic speakers and all but a few elderly Welsh speakers also speak English. Both the Scottish and Welsh governments support Gaelic and Welsh and have public schools where those languages, and not English, are used to teach all the school subjects except English class.
In Wales some university courses are even taught in Welsh and in all university courses, students have the right to sit for their examinations in Welsh, even if the subject was taught in English.
Gaelic and Welsh have official status for certain matters in Britain. For example, both can be used in courts in Scotland and Wales, and both are used together with English on British passports.
Welsh in particular is used in many public events in Wales. The man who is set to become the next king, currently Prince William, is known as the Prince of Wales. This tradition started after the English conquered Wales.
The Welsh leaders were unhappy at having an English ruler, so the English king promised he would give them a ruler who “did not speak a word of English”. This made them happy, as they assumed he meant he would make one of them the ruler of Wales. Instead, the English king made his baby son the Prince of Wales, tricking them.
Nevertheless, in recent years the Prince of Wales has studied Welsh. Before he became king and when he was still Prince of Wales, King Charles studied Welsh so well that he could give speeches and radio talks in the language.

The support for living Celtic languages is not limited to living languages. In Cornwall, the extreme south-western tip of England, another Celtic language, Cornish, used to be spoken, but the last native speakers died around the year 1800. One hundred years later, efforts were made to use old books to start to revive the language.
Today it is taught in schools in Cornwall and some parents have studied the language well enough to use it at home with their own children, who grow up bilingually in both Cornish and English. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) has recognised this as an example of a language that has moved from being extinct to once again being a living spoken language. This example shows the importance of having good language documentation, a lesson we should also learn in PNG.
Besides these ancient indigenous languages, there are two other languages that are particularly important for the royal family. One is French, which was the official language of England for several centuries after conquerors from France took control of the country in 1066.
Queen Elizabeth often gave speeches in French, especially when she was in Canada, a Commonwealth country where it is one of the official languages. She learned French from her French nanny, who spoke to her only in French.
German is also important in the royal family, as the current royal family is descended from German royalty. King Charles speaks German probably even better than French and has used it when speaking to the German Parliament.
As we have seen, although English is obviously the most important language in the United Kingdom and is its gift to the world, other languages are also important, both as languages spoken by modern-day Britons and as languages of the royal family. While the United Kingdom may not be as multilingual as Papua New Guinea, it is certainly not monolingual.

• Professor Volker is a linguist living in New Ireland and an adjunct professor in The Cairns Institute, James Cook University in Australia. He welcomes your language questions for this monthly discussion at [email protected].