How Romanian became Britain’s second most spoken foreign language
The Romanian community in the UK is now a million strong, yet while pupils can sit GCSEs in everything from Urdu to Portuguese and Biblical Hebrew, this vast cohort remains overlooked, with no formal exams able to be taken in Romanian. It’s got to change, argues Tessa Dunlop
It used to be a secret code that I shared with my half-Romanian daughter. We could talk freely on the tube and people had no idea what we were saying. Not anymore. Romanian is now the second most-spoken foreign language in the UK and second only to English in London, with massive communities in Harrow, Enfield and Stratford. I hear it everywhere I go. The last time I gave blood, the man next to me was Romanian. My dentist’s assistant is Romanian. The leader of the parents’ group at our primary school? Romanian. Emma Raducanu’s dad is Romanian; Oti Mabuse’s husband, dancer Marius Iepure, is Romanian.
But for the most part, the size of the Romanian diaspora – 1 million plus – goes unnoticed. Unlike the proud Poles, always quick to remind you they are from central Europe, who’ve had a community and associations with Britain since the Second World War, the Romanian story in the UK is more recent and fraught. Poorer than Poland, with a more challenging start in the free world post-1989, thanks to a darker past under communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania was for too long the whipping boy of Europe.
Latecomers to the EU party in 2007, their diaspora spread rapidly across Europe, first into Italy and Spain, where the majority live. They arrived in huge numbers from early 2014 when transitional restrictions were lifted and anti-migration attitudes had hardened.
Caught in the ugly crosshairs of Brexit, the vast majority of arrivals to the UK became all too good at hiding in plain sight. Unlike the Poles with their “Polski sklep” grocery outlets, Romanians were much more shy about advertising their presence. Can you blame them? Damning tabloid headlines cast them as “lesser Europeans” and focused exclusively on their poorest, most visible minority. The damage done was lasting. Only now, nearly 15 years later, are the Romanians in the UK finding their voice, and it is a beautiful one – Latin and lyrical.
For me, married to a Romanian with two mixed heritage children, I have skin in the game. I have learned Romanian. Ditto my daughters, but to what end?
As the language exams of thousands of GCSE students roll out this week, including in Portuguese, Polish, Biblical Hebrew, Urdu and Bengali, there is one group who will not be sitting an oral exam in their native tongue. Romanians, because it does not exist.
You can read the article, first published by The Independent on April 29th, in full here.