Hello cgp314,
A document from the Greater London Authority gives the following data
on the top languages spoken in London, which were taken from the
survey Multilingual Capital by Philip Baker and John Eversley, which
was published in 2000:
Number of  speakers  (for comparison, English speakers are estimated
at 5,600,000)
Punjabi	        150,000	
Gujarati	140,000	
Hindi/Urdu	130,000	(The same spoken but use different scripts)
Bengali/Sylheti 125,000	
Turkish	        70,000	
Arabic	    	50,000	
English Creole  48,000 (As spoken in, for example,Jamaica, Sierra
Leone)
Cantonese	46,000	
Yoruba		45,000	
Greek		30,000	
Portuguese	28,000	
French		26,000	
Akan (Ghana)	26,000	
Spanish	        25,000	
Somali		21,000	
Tamil		18,000	
Vietnamese	16,000	
Farsi		15,000	
Italian		12,000	
In total, over 300 languages are spoken in London
The document is available in rtf format at:
http://www.london.gov.uk/assembly/scrutmtgs/
scrutjul4/papers/scrutjul4item7.rtf
You can also look at this document in html format by going to Googles
cache at:
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:W9dEiCSvspsJ:www.london.gov.uk/assembly/scrutmtgs/scrutjul4/papers/scrutjul4item7.rtf
Multilingual Capital costs £15 and is available from:
http://www.battlebridge.com/Books/MultilingualCapital.htm
Search strategy on Google: top languages "spoken in London"  |