As part of 2020 Black History Month we sent a survey to SSLP schools asking teachers and students what languages they know other than English. This is what we found out.
Thank you to the 283 people from the SSLP community who participated.
40% of respondents speak one or more language other than English at home – some speak as many as four languages!
There are forty-eight different languages being used in our SSLP homes. Ten are purely spoken languages, whilst six can only be written and read. The most common language spoken in our homes is French.
Our languages are Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Ancient Greek, Arabic, Bosnian, BSL, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Flemish (Dutch), French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hungarian, Igbo, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latin, Lithuania, Mandarin, Montenegrin, Nepalese, Norwegian, Pashto, Patios, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Somalian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Tigrinya, Turkish, Twi, Urdu, Welsh and Yoruba.
Forty-five percent of people have learnt their non-English Languages from their families – it is either native language, their parents’ native language or the language of their extended families.
A further nine languages are spoken by people’s wider families. They are Algerian, Belarussian, Bengali, Gaelic, Hindi, Makaton Sign Language, Maltese, Tamil and Taiwanese.
Seventy-seven percent of SSLP respondents are currently learning a language. One hundred and two people are learning two languages, some are learning five.
Twenty-two different languages are currently being studied. They are (in order of popularity) Spanish, French, Latin, German, Japanese, Italian, Mandarin, Chinese, Dutch, Polish, Amharic, Arabic, BSL, Danish, Farsi, Korean, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Slovak, Swedish, Tigrinya and Urdu.
The most popular combination of languages currently being learnt is Spanish with French.
Thank you to Dulwich College for conducting this survey on behalf of the SSLP.