Manchester - the new Tower of Babel

Manchester is the most mixed-up, multilingual city in the world. Up to 200 languages are spoken there at any one time, a study by the Multilingual Manchester project has found.

Given the city’s population of roughly 553,000, this makes the city very linguistically confused - the result of decades of virtually uncontrolled immigration.

The study - the largest of its kind - estimated that half of the city’s adult population is multilingual. Meanwhile, four in 10 young people speak more than one language.

The research also showed that jobs were being advertised in the city asking for local candidates with knowledge of Arabic, Cantonese, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, and Panjabi.

The most widely-spoken non-English language in the city is Urdu - the result of immigration from the Indian subcontinent from the 50s. Arabic, Cantonese, Polish, Bengali and Somali are also all widely spoken.

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