What are the main South Asian languages spoken in the UK?

Question

I mean like Punjabi. Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Miripuri etc....

Which are the most widely spoken laguages.. and what areas are they originally from and in which areas of the UK do speakers of these individual languages tend to live in?


Also how mutually understandable are they?
I have friends for example who speak Urdu who also understand punjabi etc... Are these languages different or linked together

Answer 1

1.Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Sylheti (Bengali), Miripuri are the some of the languages spoken widely here in the UK.

2.Hindi, Urdu, Gujrati and Sylheti forming the major proportion

3.languages-originally from..
hindi/ urdu - india
gujarati - gujarat, india.
sylheti - it is a more vernacular form of bengali,, originated from Sylhet a state now in bangladesh but was in Assam india before partition. Most of the bangladeshi communities who say speak bengali actually speak the sylheti version of it.

4. The speakers of these languages are widely spread throughout the uk but it is genarally said that places like Birmingham and Blackburn, Bolton have many urdu speaking communties. Lancashire, Manchester is full of Bangladeshi sylheti speaking people.Gujaratis are everywhere but mostly in London and Preston

5.People who speak hindi can generally understand urdu gujarati and punjabi to some extent. Bengali speaking people understand Sylheti vive versa..

i guess that must have answered ur question.. :-)


.

Answer 2

The 2001 census is not available online, but according to Wikipedia, the most widespread South Asian languages are Arabic, Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu) and Chinese dialects (Cantonese, Mandarin), if we can count them as South Asian.

Answer 3

No Idea about UK. I am trying to answer your third question only.

Hindi and Urdu originated simulteneously. The grammer is same and so is the language. When it looks for words in Arabic or percian and uses Urdu script (Similer to Percian, some letters extra), its called Urdu. When people adopt words from Sanskrit origin mostly and use Nagari script, they call it Hindi.

So unless one uses some difficult words from either percien , Arabic or sanskrit origin, these two are completely mutualy understandable.

My personal view is that Urdu was the Hindi used by rulers of India who were basically using percian as official language. They slightly added a few more chartacters to it to suit local language and called it Urdu. Since they already knew percian, hence they used more words from this language.

Writers/poets like Ameer Khusaro used word Hindvi for language they used. Khusaro is still seen as Hindi writer as he called himself that.

Punjabi literature is quite recent. Though it has its own script, based on Nagari script. earlier more educated class of Punjab often used Urdu..... It was the language f ruling class in a way.

Punjabi and Urdu/Hindi are mutualy understandable upto some extent. Most of the punjabi speakers can understand these languages . Punjabi words are taken from sanskrit or arabic or percian etc. But local dialect , pronounciation style makes it difficult to understant, if not used to hear it.

I dont know about miripui. It sounds like a variation of Punjabi ...spoken in Pakistani area, not India.

Bengali...different script , again based on Nagari ...uses plenty of sanskrit words. I speak Hindi only , but I can understand a bit of bangla and Punjabi... If I pay enough attention... but its not easy as I am not used to it.

Hindi is most widely spoken of them all. But it has numerous local styles in it. Avadhi, Brij, Bhjpuri, ..... many local languages and dialects(Boli) are also refered as Hindi . "Khari boli" among these is called official Hindi.

I hope it helps.

PS: Spell check suck. Its not working.