First Languages of Our Students
Students at West London English School come from different parts of the world, to study and improve their English here in London. To show this diversity we created a pie chart of our students' mother tongues and wrote a little bit about the most popular languages our student's speak as their first. Some languages didn’t make it as there were too many to list in one chart, so we added native speakers of those languages to the chart as the other group.
Chart is based on data from January and February 2020
Polish is a Slavic language spoken primarily in Poland and the native language of the Poles. Today, Polish is spoken by over 38.5 million people as their first language in Poland. It is also spoken as a second language in western parts of Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine, as well as northern parts of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. There are 40 million Polish language speakers around the world.
Learn more about Polish language here
Japanese is an East Asian language spoken by about 125 million speakers, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. It is a member of the Japonic (or Japanese-Ryukyuan) language family, whose relation to other language groups, particularly to Korean and the suggested Altaic language family, is debated.
Learn more about Japanese language here
Arabic is the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century and its modern descendants excluding Maltese. Arabic is spoken in a wide arc stretching across Western Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Arabic belongs to the Afroasiatic family.
Some of the spoken varieties are mutually unintelligible, both written and orally, and the varieties as a whole constitute a sociolinguistic language. This means that on purely linguistic grounds they would likely be considered to constitute more than one language, but are commonly grouped together as a single language for political or religious reasons.
If Arabic is considered a single language, it is perhaps spoken by as many as 422 million speakers (native and non-native) in the Arab world, making it one of the six most-spoken languages in the world. If considered separate languages, the most-spoken variety would most likely be Egyptian Arabic with 89 million native speakers. Arabic also is a liturgical language of 1.6 billion Muslims.
Learn more about Arabic language here
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Italy, parts of Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City. Many speakers are native bilinguals of both standardised Italian and other regional languages.
According to the Bologna statistics of the European Union, Italian is spoken as a native language by 65 million people in the EU (13% of the EU population), mainly in Italy, and as a second language by 14 million (3%). Including the Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland and Albania) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is around 85 million.
Learn more about Italian language here
Spanish, also called Castilian, is a Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain and today has hundreds of millions of native-speakers across the world.
It is estimated that more than 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language, which qualifies it as second on the lists of languages by number of native speakers. Instituto Cervantes claims that there are an estimated 470 million Spanish speakers with native competence and 559 million Spanish speakers as a first or second language, including speakers with limited competence and more than 21 million students of Spanish as a foreign language.
Learn more about Spanish language here
Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24 million people as a native language, primarily in Romania and Moldova, and by another 4 million people as a second language. Romanian speakers are scattered across many other countries, notably Australia, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Bulgaria, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Cyprus, France and Germany.
Learn more about Romanian language here
German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and (co-)official language in Germany, Austria,Switzerland, South Tyrol (Italy), and Liechtenstein; it is also an official, but not majority language of Luxembourg and Belgium. Major languages which are most similar to German include other members of the West Germanic language branch, such as Afrikaans, Dutch, and English.
One of the major languages of the world, German is the first language of about 95 million people worldwide and the most widely spoken native language in the European Union.
Learn more about German language here
Portuguese is a Romance language and the sole official language of Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe. It also has co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau.
Portuguese is a part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia. With approximately 215 to 220 million native speakers and 260 million total speakers, Portuguese is usually listed as the fifth most natively spoken language in the world, the third-most spoken European language in the world in terms of native speakers, and a major language of the Southern Hemisphere.
Learn more about Portugese language here
Turkish, also referred to as Istanbul Turkish, is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages, with around 10–15 million native speakers in Southeast Europe (mostly in East Thrace) and 60–65 million native speakers in Western Asia (mostly in Anatolia). Outside of Turkey, smaller groups of speakers exist in Germany, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Cyprus (only recognized by Turkey), Greece, the Caucasus, and other parts of Europe and Central Asia.
Learn more about Turkish language here
Other languages spoken as their first by our students include French, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Hindi, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Swahili.
Sources:
Wikipedia 2016