Our community is made up of students and colleagues from all corners of the globe, and this makes us one of the most linguistically diverse universities in the UK. We would like to celebrate this as a real asset for everyone.
We know that more than 300 different languages are now spoken in London schools and in England, over 20% of primary school children use English as an additional language. This equates to over 900,000 children for whom English is not their first language and who are therefore multilingual! But how many languages do we have in our Westminster community?
Employers are constantly in need of people able to communicate in a wide range of languages – not just the ones commonly taught in schools, but also other languages from different parts of the globe. Having other languages - whether you have learnt just a little in school or on holiday, have grown up speaking them, can speak but not write, read but not speak, or have a high level of competence - is something to be proud of. It opens our minds to different ways of living and cultures. The capacity to move between languages demonstrates flexible thinking and creativity. Employers highly value it.
Add to this the medically proven fact that knowing more than one language benefits the brain and can slow down the development of dementia and being multilingual is a win-win situation.
We want you to be proud of your/our multilingualism and to know that your languages are welcome in our University.
We need your support
To put Westminster on the map as a ‘Multilingual University’, we need to know more about which languages and dialects people you can use to some extent. We know that people are more multilingual than they think – take our short survey to find out! It will only take 5 minutes.
We will be launching the results at an event in Fyvie Hall on Wednesday 31 January, 5pm to 7pm please put the event in your diary (further event/booking details will be published in due course) so need as many people as possible – students, academic and professional services colleagues to complete the survey.
