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England has become home to citizens from all across the world, enriching the cultural and linguistic tapestry of the country in the process. And the number of foreign languages being spoken across the UK is increasing with every passing year.

Over 300 different languages are spoken just in London alone, according to official data. While most people speak English as well as their native language, around one million people in England and Wales speak little to no English. Besides the foreign languages, there are still some native to the UK which are widely spoken on the whole.

These include, of course, Scots, Welsh, Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and even Cornish. Cornish has perhaps the fewest number of speakers, who are estimated to be no more than 500.

By comparison, there are some 800,000 Polish-speakers in the UK, the largest concentration of whom are to be found in west London, Slough, Southampton, Birmingham and Leeds.

According to the 2021 census from the Office for National Statistics, Polish is actually most commonly spoken non-native language in the majority of England's boroughs.

Romanian was the second most spoken by borough with 472,000 people speaking it and is most popular in Penrith, Ipswich, Chelmsford, Northampton and more.

In third place is Punjabi, which is the most common Indian language in the UK.

However, there are other languages from the subcontinent, which include among them Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati.

These four languages together are the main languages of the large Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations in the UK, who together number over 2 million speakers.

Bengali is the second most spoken language in London after English, according to the website lingoda.com. Large concentrations of Punjabi speakers are to be found in Birmingham, Bradford and Derby.

Other languages spoken frequently in English borough include Lithuanian (West Norfolk), Portuguese (Great Yarmouth), Turkish (Luton), Yiddish (Southend on Sea), Hungarian (Nottingham), Filipino (Ulverston) and Tamil (Chessington).

Arabic is also a language that can be sometimes heard in English cities, particularly in London, Cardiff and the South Shields area near Newcastle.

It is, in fact, the fifth most spoken foreign language in the UK - the mother-tongue of some 200,000 people.