Punjabi has been revealed as the third most spoken language in the United Kingdom after English and Polish, according to 2011 census data released by the Office of National Statistics.
Polish is now the main language spoken in England and Wales after English and Welsh, followed by the south Asian languages of Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali and Gujarati and then by Arabic, French, Chinese and Portuguese, the Guardian reports.
The statisticians said they recorded over 100 different languages and 49 main languages with more than 15,000 users. Chinese people alone listed 67 different languages or dialects, although a minority of those were different spellings of the same language, the paper added.
Some of the languages are in a tiny minority. For example, there was only one person in Barnet who said they spoke Caribbean creole and one person in Bexley, the paper said.
58 people speak Scottish Gaelic, 33 speak Manx Gaelic and 629 speak Romany.
Slough is nation's hot spot for the Punjabi and Urdu language, Ealing is for Polish speaking, Leicester for Gujarati, Kensington for French and Manchester for Cantonese and Mandarin, it further said.
One million households have no residents with English as a main language , although most had some proficiency in English, the stats revealed with only 138,000 people not being able to speak English at all, the paper concluded.
