Languages spoken in Coventry
Coventry is a city in the county of Warwickshire, in the West Midlands region of England. Coventry has experienced increased international migration since the early 20th century and has transitioned from an industrial to post-industrial city. The city’s migration history is recognised in Coventry’s status as a “City of Peace and Reconciliation”, a “City of Sanctuary” and the “U.K. City of Culture 2021”. Due to increased international migration, Coventry has become more ethnically diverse: the percentage of Coventry residents whose ethnicity is one other than White British has more than doubled in the last twenty years and is considerably higher than the national average.
Excluding London boroughs, Coventry is the 46th most populated county in England yet the 7th most linguistically diverse: at least 17.5% of Coventry’s residents use one of over 86 languages other than English (LOTEs) as their “main language” (Census 2021).
Coventry’s linguistic diversity has increased since 2011, when Coventry was the 51st most populated county in England, and the 9th most linguistically diverse: at least 14% of Coventry’s residents used one of over 89 languages other than English (LOTEs) as their “main language” (Census 2011).
Coventry’s linguistic diversity is considerably higher than the national average: in England, 8% of residents used LOTEs as their main language in 2011, and 9.2% used LOTEs as their main language in 2021.
The census question “What is your main language?” is problematic as residents couldn’t choose more than one “main” language, and the full extent of Coventry’s multilingualism was not captured. Furthermore, the exact number of languages used in Coventry is unknown because some languages are not individually specified in the census data but are instead grouped into “other…” or “any…” categories.
Figure 1 (select to enlarge) shows the number of speakers of the next most widely used languages in Coventry, after English, in 2011: Panjabi, Polish, Gujarati, Urdu, Arabic, Tamil, Bengali (and Sylheti and Chatgaya), French, Persian/Farsi, Kurdish, Romanian, Hindi, Somali, Latvian, Russian, Swahili/Kiswahili, Shona, Slovak, Malayalam.
Figure 2 (select to enlarge) shows the number of speakers of the next most widely used languages in Coventry, after English, in 2021: Polish, Panjabi, Romanian, Tamil, Urdu, Arabic, Gujarati, Portguese, Persian/Farsi, Kurdish, Bengali (and Sylheti and Chatgaya), French, Malayalam, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Tigrinya, Pashto, Hindi.
Between 2011 and 2021, speaker/signer numbers of different languages changed in various ways in Coventry. This could reflect changes in birth and mortality rates, or changes in migration, or it could reflect changes in the way individuals selected languages between censuses. In the latter situation, it’s possible that an individual’s language use didn’t change but they changed their selection, or it’s possible that an individual’s language use did change, and a different language has become their “main” language. In such a case, we can say that language shift has occurred.
Dr Ellen Smith-Dennis, Applied Linguistics, University of Warwick, 2024