The most commonly spoken language after English in all Lincolnshire areas

Polish remains one of the most common languages after English in Lincolnshire according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics.

The data, taken from the most recent Census in 2021, shows that nationally in England and Wales 91.1% of residents aged three years and over had English or Welsh as a main language.

This is down slightly from 92.3% in 2011.

In Lincolnshire the figure is generally much higher, with the highest proportion living in East Lindsey where 98.5% of the population – around 136,945 people – spoke English as their main language.

Lincoln, South Holland and Boston all fell below the national average with 90,922, 81,955 and 54,259 English speakers respectively.

The highest proportion of Polish speakers was in Boston with 3,886(5.68%) residents putting the language down as their main.

A further high scorer in Boston was Lithuanian, with 5.04% of residents (3,452) putting the language down.

Despite some high figures, however, the majority of languages other than English were spoken by less than 1% of the overall population.

Secondary languages appearing in the top slots included Hungarian, Romanian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Latvian and, in North Lincolnshire, Bengali.

Below are the percentage of English speakers along with the top five languages other than English, spoken by council district.

ELDC

• English – 98.5%
• Polish – 0.41%
• Hungarian – 0.12%
• Romanian – 0.09%
• Lithuanian – 0.09%
• Portuguese – 0.05%

WLDC

• English – 98.42%
• Polish – 0.34%
• Lithuanian – 0.14%
• Romanian – 0.08%
• Russian – 0.07%
• Spanish – 0.06%

NKDC

• English – 97.99%
• Polish – 0.48%
• Lithuanian – 0.21%
• Romanian – 0.12%
• Latvian – 0.11%
• Russian – 0.10%

SKDC

• English – 95.71%
• Polish – 1.30%
• Lithuanian – 0.49%
• Portuguese – 0.29%
• Romanian – 0.26%
• Hungarian – 0.25%

Lincoln

• English – 90.23%
• Polish – 2.37%
• Romanian – 1.21%
• Lithuanian – 0.92%
• Bulgarian – 0.62%
• Russian – 0.56%

SHDC

• English – 88.74%
• Polish – 4.05%
• Lithuanian – 2.32%
• Romanian – 1.40%
• Latvian – 0.89%
• Russian – 0.58%

Boston

• English – 79.29%
• Polish – 5.68%
• Lithuanian – 5.04%
• Romanian 2.02%
• Russian – 1.87%
• Latvian – 1.65%

NEL

• English – 96.13%
• Polish – 1.03%
• Romanian – 0.79%
• Latvian – 0.26%
• Bulgarian – 0.17%
• Lithuanian – 0.16%

NL

• English – 93.61%
• Polish – 2.01%
• Romanian – 0.96%
• Lithuanian – 0.87%
• Portuguese – 0.36%
• Bengali – 0.32%

According to the ONS statistics, 4.1 million people were proficient in English or Welsh but did not speak it as their main language.

The most common main languages, other than English (English or Welsh in Wales), were: Polish (1.1%, 612,000), Romanian (0.8%, 472,000), Panjabi (0.5%, 291,000), and Urdu (0.5%, 270,000).

Romanian moved into the top 10 main languages in the largest increase over the decade from 0.1% of the population in 2011 to 0.8% in 2021.

Others who moved up the charts were Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, while Panjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Arabic, French and “All other Chinese” fell down the list.