Modern ethnicities English is the most widely spoken and de facto official language of the United Kingdom.

[21] The table below outlines living indigenous languages of the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland).

English is a West Germanic language brought around the 5th century CE to the east coast of what is now England by Germanic-speaking immigrants from around present-day northern Germany, who came to be known as the Anglo-Saxons.

The Norman conquest of England in 1066 gave rise to heavy borrowings from Old French, and vocabulary and spelling conventions began to give what had now become Middle English the superficial appearance of a close relationship with Romance languages.

The Great Vowel Shift that began in the south of England in the 15th century is one of the historical events marking the separation of Middle and Modern English.

These phenomena, also seen with other minority languages outside the UK, make it harder to establish an accurate and unbiased figure for how many people speak it fluently.

Outside Scotland, a dialect of the language known as Canadian Gaelic exists in Canada on Cape Breton Island and isolated areas of the Nova Scotia mainland.

However, this wording has no clear meaning in law, and was chosen to prevent the assumption that the Gaelic language is in any way considered to have "equal validity or parity of esteem with English".

The Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria stretched from south Yorkshire to the Firth of Forth from where the Scottish elite continued the language shift northwards.

Since there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots.

The UK has ratified[74] for the higher level of protection (Section III) provided for by the Charter in respect of Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish.

Foras na Gaeilge has an all-Ireland remit as a cross-border language body, and Tha Boord o Ulstèr-Scotch is intended to fulfil a similar function for Ulster Scots, although hitherto it has mainly concerned itself with culture.

It receives funding from the UK government and the European Union, and is the regulator of the language's Standard Written Form, agreed in 2008.

There are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, although a number of paradigms exist, which give sometimes contradictory results.

Since there is a very high level of mutual intelligibility between contemporary speakers of Scots in Scotland and in Ulster (Ulster Scots), and a common written form was current well into the 20th century, the two varieties have usually been considered as dialects of a single tongue rather than languages in their own right; the written forms have diverged in the 21st century.

According to the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey 1999, the ratio of Unionist to Nationalist users of Ulster Scots is 2:1.

The disparity in the ratios as determined by political and faith community, despite the very large overlap between the two, reflects the very low numbers of respondents.

In October 2007, the then Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure, Edwin Poots MLA, announced to the assembly that no Irish Language Act would be brought forward.

[82] Two areas with mostly Norse-derived placenames (and some Pictish), the Northern Isles (Shetland and Orkney) were ceded to Scotland in lieu of an unpaid dowry in 1472, and never spoke Gaelic; its traditional vernacular Norn, a derivative of Old Norse mutually intelligible with Icelandic and Faroese, died out in the 18th century after large-scale immigration by Lowland Scots speakers.

Public funding of minority languages continues to produce mixed reactions, and there is sometimes resistance to their teaching in schools.

Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 100 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's school children.

[90][91] Predominantly people of Bangladeshi origin in the UK speak Sylheti, which is mostly a spoken language with no standard form, and is also generally considered as a dialect of Bengali.

Modern and ancient languages, such as French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Urdu, Mandarin, Russian, Bengali, Hebrew, and Arabic, are studied.

Latin is also used to a limited degree in certain official mottoes, for example Nemo me impune lacessit, legal terminology (habeas corpus), and various ceremonial contexts.

[103] There are small numbers of second-language speakers of revived varieties of Cornish, and these appear in the table of living languages in this article.

The remote islands of Foula and Unst are variously claimed as the last refuges of the language in Shetland, where there were people "who could repeat sentences in Norn, probably passages from folk songs or poems, as late as 1893".

Pictish was probably a Brittonic language, or dialect, spoken by the Picts, the people of northern and central Scotland in the Early Middle Ages, which became extinct c.900 AD.

There is virtually no direct attestation of Pictish, short of a limited number of geographical and personal names found on monuments and the contemporary records in the area controlled by the Kingdom of the Picts.

Cumbric was a variety of the Common Brittonic language spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the Hen Ogledd or "Old North" in what is now Northern England and southern Lowland Scotland.

Place name evidence suggests Cumbric speakers may have carried it into other parts of northern England as migrants from its core area further north.