This chapter charts the European aspect of the linguistic mosaic of Britain and Ireland drawing on data from the 2011 and 2021 censuses as well as data from the UK’s EU Settlement Scheme. It offers a critical assessment of the practices that statistical authorities adopted for publishing language data they collected by means of the censuses, showing that the aggregation of respondents’ write-in responses into so-called ‘main language group classifications’ and ‘table categories’ led to a significant under-reporting of the number of languages spoken in Britain and Ireland including languages classified as European. It further presents arguments that have been raised by linguists regarding the phrasing of the language question in census questionnaires and suggests new sources of statistical information that could be used in conjunction with census data in order to obtain a fuller picture of European multilingualism in the British Isles. It finally takes issue with the labelling of particular languages as ‘European’ based on essentialist and hierarchising assumptions about the links between language, ethnicity, nationality, ancestry and identity, arguing that all languages that are spoken by citizens who identify as European should be considered European languages.

The chapter provides an overview of the ways in which English has existed within a framework of multilingualism in all countries where it is spoken. The first part considers English beyond the shores of Britain, where it was initially introduced to contexts in which indigenous populations and their languages already existed, such as America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Later, as English was introduced to countries in Africa and Asia that were colonized by the British, such as Nigeria and India, it added to the multilingual patterns that already existed in those places. English has continued to rise in importance in countries that have no links to a colonial history or where it has no official function; this is often linked to processes of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In these countries, English is often part of an individual’s multilingual repertoire. The chapter finally returns to Britain, where the myth of English monolingualism probably persists the most. Both historical and modern-day multilingualism are discussed and a case study is presented to demonstrate how multilingualism has impacted on the English variety spoken in London today.