Taking over 110 UK towns and cities, international learning platform Preply has shown research predicting the UK hubs set to raise the next multilingual generation – Manchester has ranked fourth!
The study considers bilingual/international schools, local demand for learning a language and the size of the bilingual community (bilingual population), to reveal the country’s top locations for nurturing multilingualism.
Relevant highlights include:
- Cambridge takes the crown and London fails to make the top three, placing in a respectable fifth place, whilst Reading, Ipswich and Manchester complete the top five respectively
- Manchester’s top ranking is owed to its appetite for learning new languages, registering over 8000 searches in 2022 for “Learn X” across a variety of languages
- Also to its merit, Manchester is home to the UK’s fifth largest bilingual community, as 18.3% of its population register as speaking more than one language
- Manchester also places among the UK’s top ten for largest BSL-speaking communities, with 0.03% of its population being proficient in the language
- In 2022 the most-searched-for language in Manchester was Spanish, followed by French and Arabic
One-third of Brits (36%) are bilingual but the world’s topmost bilingual nation Indonesia, where ¾ of the population speak a second language. With bilingualism/multilingualism being proven to have many social, psychological and lifestyle advantages, the benefits of having more than one language at our disposal are more than threefold.
For the full data set, you can visit Preply’s interactive tool HERE.
