Students speak in 64 different languages

Insync

oi-Staff

By Staff

Friday, April 3, 2009, 14:01

James has just got himself admitted in Woodside High, a school in Tottenham, London. He is all excited and looking forward to the first day in school. His friends say that he will soon be reincarnated to an all new person; Silvia, his sister, has already been one – now it's his turn. Quizzed? Well, here, the transformation we are talking about slightly differs from its prototype, the usual type of change in a child when he starts attending school.

Woodside High is one of Britian's most popular multi-cultural schools with majority of them not speaking English. Yes, you heard it right – English, which supposedly is the native language of the country. Students going to this school can actually speak in 64 different languages.

But there seems to be a problem now. The MP's seems not very happy with the multilingual feature of the school. Their apprehension is with the fact that one in seven children in the U.K don't speak English at home. The school authority, however, gets away shrouded by a modest explanation. "The thing about the one-in-seven figure is that you're going to get tremendous variation across the country. In some schools it could be just one or two pupils. In urban schools like ours, it can be 80 per cent," said Woodside's head teacher, Joan McVittie.

Ah, almost forgot mentioning about the languages spoken by the pupils in this 'one-of-its kind' school. Don't be surprised, but the languages these students speak includes: Bengali (Sylheti and Indian), Arabic, Greek, Filipino, Flemish, Punjabi, Persian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Somali, Russian, Igbo, Hungarian etc. And mind you, this is just to mention the few languages of all that's been actually spoken. So, does India still brag of the fact of being the multilingual country. Time to think!