Saesneg y frenhines

An example of a Cornish language sign.

Many of our American friends probably realise that not all Brits sound like the queen. What you may not realise though is that the UK has seven non-English indigenous spoken living languages, the BBC supports television channels devoted to two of those languages and that one of these seven even is an official language in part of the UK.

Apart from English, Welsh is the most widely spoken of these indigenous languages and shares official language status with English in Wales. Many over here treat Wales almost as a fictitious place that you might somehow wander into, like you would Narnia, but it's a real place with a real language, with real people speaking it. (It's probably the second most spoken language in the UK, but we'll have to see what the newest census figures show when they're released this week, Punjabi, could pass it up.) Welsh has a type of sing-song quality to it, and just looks ridiculous on signs. The BBC produces Welsh language content for S4C, an independent publicly broadcast station in the country.

The BBC also produces content for the Scottish Gaelic television channel BBC Alba. This puzzles me a bit since Scottish Gaelic, out of the seven indigenous languages is spoken by the second least amount of people. To me, Scottish Gaelic sounds exactly like a language you'd imagine Scots to speak, if they didn't speak English. (Although to hear some of them, you might think that they don't speak English.)

Out of the seven indigenous languages in the UK, four (Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Cornish) stem from the Celtic language. Two are mixed languages spoken mostly by gypsies (yes that's a politically correct term over here) and one is very closely related to English and is considered by some to not be a language, but rather a dialect of English.