Welcome to the UK languages area of TeachingEnglish. Did you know English is not the only language native to the UK? You can find out about these other languages on these pages. 

• Welsh
• Scottish Gaelic and Lowland Scots
• Irish Gaelic and Ulster Scots
• Manx
• Cornish

Click on the map below to find out more about where these native languages come from, as well as the varieties of English in other UK regions. In addition to general background, there are some teaching ideas and resources. Note that we are still adding content for some of the regions so do come back to check for new materials.

Below on this page, you can find out more about:

Language teachers also teach culture
Nearly every language in the world is a product of a culture or combination of cultures. Also, just as a language is informed by its culture, a culture is informed by its languages. Therefore, language teachers often need to explain aspects of a culture in order to explain a piece of language. Teaching about another culture represents its own challenges for English language teachers today. The most obvious problem is when the teacher is unfamiliar with the culture they’re trying to teach their students about. Also, most current qualifications in English Language Teaching do not really help teachers with methodologies for teaching cultural content or teaching language via an ‘intercultural studies’ approach. We have therefore created these UK Languages and Cultures web pages to help develop and support teachers around the world.

Understanding the British
A student may have an advanced level of English, but when they visit the UK they are often shocked to find that they cannot understand what British people are saying. Well, many British people can’t understand each other either. Not only does each region of the UK have its own dialects (unique accent and sometimes vocabulary), but a number of regions also have their own language(s): Manx, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic, for example. Even though 94% of the English that’s spoken in the world today is used between people whose first language is not English (English Next, David Graddol), such speakers are still concerned with being able to communicate successfully with someone whose first language is English. These web pages on UK Languages and Cultures provide resources to help teachers become familiar with the varied languages, dialects and regional cultures of the UK.

The death of languages
With the rise of global English, new international cultures have begun to emerge that are not owned by any individual country. After all, the English language itself has been formed by a great number of different cultures and languages: not only Anglo-Saxon, Latin and Norman French, but also a range of other Indo-European languages such as Persian, Arabic and Malay. These influences can be seen in words like pyjamas, coffee, yoghurt, caftan, bosh, caviar, turquoise, and bazaar, for example. At the same time, however, there has been a decline in the number of people speaking other languages. For example, the region of the UK called Cornwall has/had its own language called Cornish (Kernewek). The last native speaker of Cornish was John Davey, who died in 1893. Some have since called Cornish a ‘dead’ language, but it has seen a revival in recent decades. The concern is that if a culture is informed by its languages, does the death of a language therefore represent the loss of culture, identity and a unique understanding? Is it a decline in our civilization? If our civilization continues to decline, where will we end up? These UK Languages and Cultures web pages will help teachers to consider and debate the socio-political issues involved in promoting global languages and preserving local cultures.

Download our UK languages poster (see below) to see how English has been influenced by so many different cultures and languages, and to see the origins of other UK languages.