‘What’s in a name?’ you might ask. Why is the title of this volume different from the two previous editions? The answer is that during the period between the second edition and the current volume, the ‘British Isles’ element of Language in the British Isles has become increasingly less commonly used. Of course, the term as it refers to the previous editions of this book was used in its value-free geographical sense but it has become invested with other meanings, primarily linked to continued territorial claims and political domination over the Republic of Ireland by the United Kingdom. For this reason, the use of the term has become unacceptable for many scholars, and in particular Irish scholars. For these reasons, and in the spirit of language change, ‘Britain and Ireland’ is adopted here, and the title of the book has become Language in Britain and Ireland. Some may consider that there are problems with that, too. Pocock (Reference Pocock2005:29), for example, prefers to use ‘Atlantic archipelago’ as a neutral geographical term for the collection of islands located off the north-west coast of continental Europe which includes Britain and Ireland, and MacCulloch (Reference MacCulloch2003:xxvi) uses ‘the Atlantic Isles’, but both of these terms seemed too far removed from the title of the previous editions. Some of the contributors to this volume suggested ‘United Kingdom and Ireland’ but the UK does not include the Crown Dependencies of the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, both included in this volume. There does not, then, appear to be any consensus on the matter, but ‘Britain and Ireland’ seems to be the ‘more favoured expression’ (see, for example, Hazlett Reference Hazlett2003:17; Davies and Sinclair Reference Davies and Sinclair2000:9; The Guardian 2021), and also offers some continuity with the title of the previous editions. Where the term ‘British Isles’ remains in the book it should be noted that it is used in its geographical sense, as far as that is acceptable, and that its use remains because the author considered it to be appropriate within the context in which it is used. Perhaps it is worth emphasising here that the volume pays attention to the language practices of those living alongside each other in the territories described in this volume, however we may wish to label those territories.

Since David Britain’s (2007) edition, a great deal has happened. Of course, Brexit was a major event, and the UK formally left the European Union on 31 January 2020. We do not yet have a clear idea of the linguistic consequences of this decision, but we know that it has had an impact on the movement of people. For example, an EU passport or national identity card is no longer valid proof of someone’s right to work in the UK (with the exception of Irish citizens), and UK nationals now need a visa for stays in any EU country of longer than 90 days in a 180-day period. A second major event to take place was the Covid-19 pandemic that started in 2020. Studies have shown that for young people in particular, lockdown was associated with poor emotional outcomes, leading to psychological distress, loneliness, boredom, fear and stress (Panchal et al. Reference Panchal2023). How this might have affected their communication and language skills is as yet unknown. Also since the last edition, there have been two government censuses in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and three in the Republic of Ireland (where a census is carried out every five years). The data from these censuses show that there have been many social and demographic changes in the population, many of which will be discussed in the following chapters.

In 2021, the population of England and Wales was 59,597,300 (England 56,489,800; Wales 3,107,500), an increase of 6.3% since 2011 (ONSFootnote ¹). Northern Ireland’s population was 1,903,175, up by 5.1% (NISRAFootnote ²). The Ireland Census 2022 reported that the Republic of Ireland’s population went above five million for the first time to 5,149,139, up by 8% since 2016 (CSOFootnote ³). Scotland’s CensusFootnote ⁴ results from 2022 (postponed for one year due to the Covid-19 pandemic) report that the population of Scotland was also up by 2.7% and reached 5,436,600. Combined, then, Britain and Ireland’s population is now over 72 million.

In England and Wales, 81.7% (48.2 million) of people identified their ethnic group within the high-level ‘White’ category, and of those who identified as part of this ‘White’ ethnic group, 74.4% (44.4 million) identified their ethnic group as ‘English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British’, which is a continued decrease from 80.5% (45.1 million) in 2011. The largest increases were seen in the number of people who identified in the next most common high-level group of ‘Asian, Asian British or Asian Welsh’ and accounted for 9.3% (5.5. million) of the total population, up from 7.5% (4.2 million people) in 2011. London remains the most ethnically diverse region of England and saw an 8.1% decrease of people who identified as ‘White: English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British’ (36.8%, 3.2 million in 2021, down from 44.9%, 3.7 million in 2011) (ONSFootnote ⁵). London has the largest number of migrants among all regions of the UK: 3,346,000 – or 37% of the UK’s total foreign-born population (Migration ObservatoryFootnote ⁶). In Northern Ireland, 96.5% (1.8.million) of the population identified their ethnic group as ‘White’, with the next three highest groups being ‘Asian: Indian’ (0.5%), ‘Asian: Chinese’ (0.5%) and ‘Black: Black African’ (0.4%) (NISRAFootnote ⁷). Scotland’s Census 2022 results for ethnicity were not available at the time of writing, but in 2011, 96% of usual residents identified their ethnic group as ‘White’, with 87% of that ‘White’ group identifying as ‘White Scottish’. The next highest group identified as ‘Asian, Asian Scottish or Asian British’ (2.7% of the total population). In 2022, there were 4.3 million people who usually lived in Ireland who indicated that they had either Irish only or dual Irish citizenship. This made up 84% of the population of usual residents. The number of non-Irish citizens increased in 2022, accounting for 12% of the population. The largest non-Irish groups were Polish and UK citizens, followed by Indian, Romanian and Lithuanian.

Importantly, questions about language use were included for the first time in the 2011 censuses (although in Wales, a question about Welsh language has been included in the census since 1891). This information not only helps linguists to keep track of the linguistic diversity in Britain and Ireland but also helps planners to formulate future language (and other political) policies. For example, all of the Celtic Languages (except Welsh) are on the UNESCO list of endangered languages, with Welsh considered as ‘potentially vulnerable’. With the census data to hand, revivalists are able to see where the languages are spoken, by whom and in which contexts, and are then able to plan language revitalisation strategies accordingly. These issues are discussed in the relevant chapters in this volume.

In England and Wales, 91.1% of usual residents aged three years and over (52.6 million out of 57.7 million) had English (English or Welsh in Wales) as a main language. This is a percentage decrease compared with 2011, when 92.3% (49.8 million) had English (English or Welsh in Wales) as a main language. In 2021, a further 7.1% (4.1 million) of the overall population were proficient in English, so they spoke English either ‘well’ or ‘very well’ (English or Welsh in Wales), but did not speak it as their main language. Additionally, 1.5% (880,000) could not speak English well, and a small percentage (0.3%, 161,000) of the overall population could not speak English at all. The top three main languages spoken in England and Wales, excluding English (English or Welsh in Wales) were Polish, Romanian and Punjabi (ONSFootnote ⁸). In 2021, an estimated 538,000 usual residents in Wales aged three years and over (17.8%) reported being able to speak Welsh, which is a decrease since 2011 (562,000, 19.0%). Among children and young people aged three to fifteen years, the percentage who could speak Welsh decreased in all local authorities between 2011 and 2021 (ONSFootnote ⁹). In addition to spoken languages, British Sign Language (BSL) was the main language of 22,000 (0.04%) usual residents aged three years and over across England and Wales, an increase of over 6,000 since 2011 (15,000, 0.03%) (ONSFootnote ¹⁰). Scotland’s Census 2022 results on language were not available at the time of writing, but in 2011, 93.8% of people in Scotland aged three and over said they could speak, read and write English. More than 1.5 million people said they could speak Scots. Another 267,000 people said they could understand Scots but not read, write or speak the language. Just over 57,000 people said that they could speak Gaelic and 23,000 people said they could understand Gaelic but not read, write or speak it. In addition to spoken languages, 13,000 people used BSL at home, representing about 0.2% of the total population (Scotland’s CensusFootnote ¹¹). In Northern Ireland, 96% of usual residents aged three and above reported English as their main language. The top three languages (used as the main language) after English were Polish (1%), Lithuanian (0.5%) and Irish (0.3%). There were separate questions related to Irish: of all usual residents aged three and over (i.e. 1,836,619), 126,743 people said that they could speak Irish, of which 43,557 spoke Irish daily and 9,758 reported that they never spoke Irish. There were also separate questions related to Ulster-Scots: of all usual residents aged three and over (i.e. 1,836, 619), 61,032 people said that they could speak Ulster-Scots, of which 30,449 spoke Ulster-Scots daily and 2,363 reported that they never spoke Ulster-Scots (NISRAFootnote ¹²). According to the census data, only 629 of usual residents aged three years and over had either BSL or Irish Sign Language (ISL) as a main language, but the Department of HealthFootnote ¹³ reports that approximately 8,000 people use sign language in Northern Ireland including BSL and ISL. In Ireland, the Census 2022 data shows that the number of people aged three years and above who indicated that they could speak Irish increased by 6% between 2016 and 2022 to 1,873,997. Of the people who said they could speak Irish, 623,961 spoke Irish daily within and outside the education system. This accounts for 33% of the Irish-speaking population, compared with 36% in 2016. Among those who could speak Irish, one in four (472,887) indicated that they never spoke the language (CSOFootnote ¹⁴). In addition to spoken languages, the Sign Language Association of IrelandFootnote ¹⁵ report that ISL is the first and/or preferred language of 5,000 Deaf people in Ireland, and approximately 40,000 people in general will communicate in ISL (family, friends, co-workers, etc).

As the above statistics show, Britain and Ireland are becoming increasingly multiethnic and are homes to a rich array of languages and dialects. This volume surveys the histories and sociolinguistic status of the many spoken varieties, as well as covering the implications of this linguistic diversity for language policy and planning, and education issues.

Overview of the Volume

The volume is organised into five parts. Here, I will briefly describe the contribution of the individual chapters to the focus of the respective part.

In Part I, Auer sets the scene with a history of English, providing an overview of the development of the English language from its beginnings as a West Germanic dialect in the Old English period to the present day. Sections within the chapter are dedicated to the Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Later Modern English periods, including discussions of the major orthographic, lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic developments. It also includes recent historical sociolinguistic findings that complement traditional accounts of the development of English. Following this, Levey discusses the relationship between standard and non-standard English. He reviews structural aspects of spoken English that have benefited from careful quantitative analyses to demonstrate that much of the confusion about what constitutes standard spoken English often derives from the failure of the prescriptive grammatical tradition to draw systematic distinctions between writing and speech. The chapters in the remainder of this part review phonological, grammatical and discourse-pragmatic variation across many varieties in England, as well as English in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and insular varieties of English.

Part II is the first of three sections on multilingualism in Britain and Ireland. This section is dedicated to the Celtic languages. Russell provides an overview of the history of the Celtic languages, and this is followed by chapters on Scottish Gaelic (Nance), Irish Gaelic (Doyle), Welsh (Willis) and Cornish and Manx (Davies-Deacon and Sayers).

Part III continues with multilingualism in Britain and Ireland but the focus shifts to minority languages. Here, there are chapters on Channel Islands French (Jones), South Asian languages (Sharma), Chinese (Li Wei), Yiddish (Kircher), European immigrant languages (Karatsareas) and sign languages (Schembri, Rowley and Leeson).

Part IV considers the role of language contact in the emergence of urban contact varieties. Fox discusses the social and historical conditions that have led to the emergence of Multicultural London English, while Sharma and Wormald focus on varieties of British English that have developed in South Asian communities around the United Kingdom. Drummond’s chapter considers the possibility of using Multicultural British English to describe urban varieties that have emerged in British cities and have similar histories of cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity, this being an overarching (or underlying) variety of English, with each city then having its own sub-variety.

Finally, Part V concludes with three chapters on applied sociolinguistic concerns. Sayers and Henderson provide a broad economic and political account of how language policy and planning (LPP) emerged and evolved in Britain and Ireland from the 1970s to the present day. Snell’s chapter then looks at the implications of ‘non-standardised’ English in education. Throughout the chapter, she exposes and challenges the hierarchies and inequalities that a standard language ideology (i.e. the belief that there is only one ‘correct’ way to speak) reproduces. Finally, Rampton, Leung and Cooke discuss educational issues for users of languages other than English.

Overall, the volume presents an up-to-date survey of the spoken and signed varieties of language, and issues related to them, used in Britain and Ireland today.