Wikipedia in wir ain leid!

Gàidhlig (Scots Gaelic), a language spoken by a few thousand in the Highlands and Islands (and Argyl). Its a beautiful language, similar to Irish and Manx, and its used quite a lot on signs here. I'd love to learn my native language. Dispite English being our language, I'd love to be able to speak Gàidhlig, its important to have your own national identity, when the
Gàidhlig programmes come on the telly, I love to listen to it, such a nice language.

I wish people were encouraged more to try and learn it, perhaps by getting an optional Gàidhlig Learners language in more Schools along with French, Italian, Spanish and German.

Many people would just say i was a Nationalist fanatic though.

How many languages do you guys speak over there?

Just the one, English.

The United Kingdom is a strange country, the strange thing is that its made up of different countries within the country! These being England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Hence, four completely different cultures (five if you count Cornwall, a county of England, which has its own language too)

The Kingdom of England annexed the Kingdom of Wales, introducing the English language as the way of doing things, with Welsh being the main language before.

Meanwhile the Kingdom of Scotland was split in two, the North-West, where people spoke Gaelic (Similar to Irish and Manx) and the Central and South, where people spoke Scots, a germanic language, similar to English (Scots is also historically spoken in parts of Northern Ireland).

With the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 (Wales being part of England), creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain, English became the main language of Britain. And because of this, its hard to determine wether Scots still exists, or wither its just a dialect of the Queens English.

So today, you have the majority of British people talking English, with very small minorities speaking Scots Gaelic and Cornish, with a larger minority speaking Welsh and perhaps some Irish in Northern Ireland.

And the thing is, if it was Mary Queen of Scots that had gotten the English crown rather than Elizabeth I, we might be living in a union between Scotland, England, Ireland and France where French is spoken widely. How different would things have been then?!

Language wise I'd imagine fairly similar to the Channel Islands as they have their own Anglo/French/Norman language.

There was a form of sign language only in Kent as there were so many people who were deaf from birth.

I used to work with someone who spoke Romani (Gypsy) Welsh. He took great pride in telling pretty much everyone he met that "cushty" comes from the Romani "kooshti" which in turn comes from "kushi" (sp?) in Hindi/Punjabi