Main language spoken

Key points

Estimates from Census 2021 show that:

• The main language spoken in the Lancashire-12 area was English (94.7%)
• The chief minority languages spoken were Polish (11,764 speakers), Urdu (8,044), Panjabi (6,993), Romanian (4.388) and Gujarati (3,247)
• In 493,912 households (94%) in the Lancashire-12 area all adults used English as their main language
• In Wyre 98.5% of households used English as their main language
• In Preston only 85.6% of households had English as the main language and the rate in Pendle was 85.9%
• In the unitary authority of Blackburn with Darwen only 83.5% of households had English as the main language
• At the ward level there were five wards in the Lancashire-14 area where in more than 20% of households no adult used English as their main language. 

The figures in this article are derived from two main Census tables, the topic summaries TS024 - Main language (detailed) and TS025 - Household language . These tables have different bases, resident populations and households. TS025 does not indicate which language is spoken in households apart from English. TS024 is not available for small geographies like wards. To identify which are the chief minority languages spoken at ward level we have built a custom table for main language of household reference persons. This uses a less detailed main language variable which does not specify any of the chief languages listed above in Key points. South Asian languages include Urdu, Panjabi and Gujarati. Polish, Romanian and Hungarian are classed as 'any other European languages (EU)'. These appear as counts of the household reference person in the tooltips for individual wards on the ward map: third slide of the Microsoft Power BI report below. Tooltips are visible when you move your cursor over the map if your device has a cursor, otherwise tap the ward to select.

Main language (detailed)

The first slide of the report shows main languages spoken in the Lancashire districts and higher geographies. For Lancashire-12 the top six are English, Polish, Urdu, Panjabi, Romanian and Gujarati. In Preston Gujarati is third behind Polish. Gujarati is much less important in Burnley where the top eight are English, Urdu, Panjabi, Polish, Bengali, Romanian, Bulgarian and Pashto. Pashto is a language from Afghanistan and Pakistan and is classed as a West or Central Asian language.

Main language in households

The second slide shows the degree to which English constituted main language as spoken in households. In the Lancashire-12 area 94% of households had all adults speaking English as their main language.  Of the three other categories 'no people in household have English as main language' comes next at 2.7% followed by 'at least one but not all adults in household have English as main language' at 2.6%. There are very few households where only a child aged 3 to 15 is the main English speaker.

In Wyre 50,000 households, or 98.5% of the total, contained adults who all used English as their main language. The rate was also high in Ribble Valley (98.2%), South Ribble (97.5%) and Chorley and Fylde (both 97.3%). Only 303 households in Wyre contained no-one who spoke English as their main language. This was just 0.6% of the total.

In just over 51,000 households in Preston all adults used English as their main language. This was only 85.6% of the total. Conversely as many as 4,475 households (7.5%) had no people using English as their main language. This compares to 6.2% in Blackburn with Darwen, 6% in Pendle, 5% in England, 4.7% in Burnley, 3.1% in the Lancashire-14 area and 2.7% in the Lancashire-12 area.

Ward level analysis

At the ward level there were five wards in the Lancashire-14 area where in more than 20% of households no adult used English as their main language. These were Daneshouse with Stoneyholme in Burnley (25.5%), St. Matthew's ward in Preston (22.2%), Whitefield and Walverden in Pendle (22%), Fishwick & Frenchwood in Preston (21.9%) and Bastwell & Daisyfield in Blackburn with Darwen (20.2%). Because figures are not published for the detailed main language table at ward level we cannot list the languages spoken in these wards but we see that at Daneshouse with Stoneyholme over 600 households had a South Asian language as main language along with over 180 using mainly one of the other EU European languages while a further 123 households were speaking a West or Central Asian language. Urdu and Panjabi are the main South Asian languages spoken in Burnley, Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian are the main other EU European languages while Pashto is the only West and Central Asian language spoken by more than a hundred Burnley residents. For St. Matthew's in around 500 households one of the South Asian languages was main language while in another 500 odd households one of the other EU European languages was mainly spoken. At district level we see that after English, Polish and Romanian were the main European languages spoken in Preston, while Gujarati and Urdu were the main South Asian languages. South Asian languages predominated among minority languages in Whitefield and Walverden with over 800 households compared to 260 speaking Eastern European languages. At district level in Pendle Panjabi and Urdu were second and third ranked main languages followed by Polish, Romanian and Lithuanian. Around 400 households in Fishwick and Frenchwood spoke one of the other EU European languages, compared to 472 speaking a South Asian language.

In 244 of Lancashire-14's 271 wards (2022 boundaries) over 90% of household reference persons had English as their main language.

Interactive report for the Lancashire-14 area

Source: Census 2021 topic summaries TS024 - Main language (detailed) and TS025 - Household language plus