Multilingual Capital: The Languages of London's Schoolchildren and Their Relevance to Economic, Social and Educational Policies (review)

This book, in quarto format and therefore containing more information than the small number of pages would suggest, is an annotated description of the existence and consequences of the sheer variety of languages used by London’s schoolchildren (some 350 languages, spanning all parts of the world, were listed as each being used by at least one London schoolchild, according to the data available for 1998–1999 which underpin this book). Figures for language knowledge in private schools are not included, and this may be significant in regard to certain languages. For example the Hasidim in the suburb of Stamford Hill in the borough of Hackney speak Yiddish among themselves and do not send their children to state-run schools; the figure of sixteen Yiddish-speaking schoolchildren, eleven of them living in the borough of Barnet, is certainly an underestimate.

Baker, the chief researcher for the more directly linguistic and statistical parts of this volume, has assembled and processed a huge amount of data provided by teachers in London’s 32 Local Education Authorities. On pages 5–60, he and the cartographer, Yasir Mohieldeen, present B’s exploration of the data, including an alphabetical listing of all the securely-identified languages. Languages listed in a slightly earlier survey as having at least one speaker among London schoolchildren but which did not appear to have one in 1998–1999 are marked with an asterisk; readers of this journal may care to know that Burushaski is in this category.) The number of schoolchildren using each language is duly given, together with the number of schoolchildren using such languages in the London borough with the highest number of them, and the language’s location within the hundred ‘language zones’ in the language-scheme drawn up by David Dalby. (These classifications are neither purely geographical nor purely [linguistically] genetic; the scheme of these zones is provided on pp. 8–9.) This discussion is accompanied by the feature which is the real strength of this book: 32 strikingly-colored yet eminently legible maps, drawn by Mohieldeen using GIS (Geographic Information Systems). These maps indicate the proportion, in terms of the total school population of each London borough, of school-age speakers of some 30 languages. Indeed on some 38 pages out of 96 are found maps or well-chosen montages of photographs. (The six montages each reflect a theme, for instance the diversity of London food.) Also welcome are guidelines drawn up by B to assist teachers in more accurately reporting the language backgrounds of their children.

The rest of the volume consists of short, themed papers, and an index (91–92). Some of the papers are standard local government boilerplate in substance, but two especially interesting ones are Tim Connell’s discussion of languages and the Square Mile (73–80) and, on page 85, three short memoirs by people who came to London as children knowing little English and their narratives of the problems they encountered.

Overall, this is a fascinating book, with a punning title and contents which are easily accessible to the general reading public; it is a trailblazer in presentation which deserves to be imitated by similar works on other conurbations.