Big rise in Romanian speakers with 7.5% speaking the language in Harrow, ONS reveals

Romanian has overtaken Panjabi to become the second most common language spoken in the UK excluding English, with the most speakers in Harrow, Greater London, new census data has revealed.

The Romanian language has seen the largest increase in speakers over the past decade, with 472,000 people now speaking it, up from 68,000 ten years ago, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed on Tuesday.

It became second in the list of top 10 main languages in 2021, excluding English, jumping up from position 19 in 2011.

This mirrors a similar increase in the number of people who listed Romania as their country of birth, and those who identify as Romanian only.

London had the most people who reported Romanian as a main language, 1.9 percent or 159,000 people,with Harrow having the highest percentage of its population speaking Romanian - 7.5 percent.

Romania, in southeastern Europe, has a population of around 19 million people.

Other languages in the top 10 excluding English are Polish, Panjabi, Urdu, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati and Italian.

French dropped from position 7 on the list in 2011 to 12 in 2021, while Portuguese and Spanish bumped up from 9 and 10 to 5 and 6 respectively.

Italian jumped from position 13 to 10 in the decade, with 160,000 residents now speaking the language.

Polish remained the most common language other than English in the UK, accounting for 1.1 percent of usual residents or 612,000.

The East Midlands was the region with the highest percentage of people who had Polish as a main language, 1.5 percent or 71,000, rising to 5.7 percent in the local authority of Boston in Lincolnshire.

The third and fourth most common languages, excluding English, both originate from South Asia - Panjabi and Urdu.

They are both widely spoken languages in India and Pakistan, as well as elsewhere in South Asia. In England, the highest percentage of people that had Panjabi as a main language was in the West Midlands at 1.4 percent or 83,000.

Wolverhampton was the local authority with the largest percentage of people with Panjabi as a main language (6.5 percent, 17,000). The English region with the overall largest proportion of people who had Urdu as a main language was the North West (0.8 percent, 59,000). However, Slough in the South East was the local authority with the largest proportion (4.3 percent, 7,000).

A total of 91.1 percent of residents in England and Wales had English as a main language, down slightly from 92.3 percent a decade earlier, the ONS said.

A further 7.1 percent of people were proficient in English, speaking it “well” or “very well”, but did not speak it as their main language.