How a small country exported its culture on its language

What language the country actually speaks

English is the language of the whole United Kingdom and about 95% of the population was estimated in 2013 to be monolingual in it. That figure is the starting point for everything else about British culture, because a country whose language became the world's second language exports culture on terms no other country gets.

Three indigenous Celtic languages are still spoken. At the 2021 census the Welsh-speaking population of Wales aged three or over was 538,300, or 17.8%, with about a further 200,000 Welsh speakers estimated in England. In Northern Ireland at the same census 12.4% of people had some Irish language ability and 10.4% some facility in Ulster Scots. In Scotland in 2001, over 92,000 people, just under 2%, had some Gaelic ability, including 72% of those living in the Outer Hebrides. Cornish became extinct as a first language in the late eighteenth century and is being revived by a small group of second-language speakers.

The direction of travel differs by language. The number of children being taught Welsh or Scottish Gaelic is increasing, which is a policy outcome rather than a demographic one. Scots, descended from early northern Middle English, has limited recognition without specific commitments to protection.

Immigration added the rest. Over 5% of the population was estimated in 2013 to speak languages brought by migration, South Asian languages being the largest group, and Polish was the most spoken language in England after English at the 2011 census with 546,000 speakers. Around 151,000 people used British Sign Language as of April 2020.

How religion moved to the margin

Christianity dominated religious life in the United Kingdom for more than 1,400 years, and the census now records a country where it is a minority identification. At the 2021 census of England and Wales, 46.2% of respondents reported being Christian, 37.2% stated no religion and 6.0% did not answer, with Islam at 6.5%, Hinduism at 1.7, Sikhism at 0.9, Buddhism at 0.5 and Judaism at 0.5.

Identification overstates practice by a wide margin. A survey in 2007 found one Briton in ten attending church weekly, and regular attendance has fallen sharply since the middle of the twentieth century. Between the 2001 and 2011 censuses the share identifying as Christian fell 12% while the share reporting no religious affiliation doubled.

The institutional position has not moved with the numbers. The Church of England remains established, its bishops sit in the House of Lords as Lords Spiritual, and the monarch is its supreme governor. A country in which fewer than half the population identifies with any Christian denomination retains a state church with seats in its legislature.

Why the literature travelled everywhere

William Shakespeare is generally regarded as the greatest dramatist there has been and as the national poet of England, and British theatre has had a continuous tradition since the Renaissance with roots going back further. That is the anchor, and the rest of the literary tradition was written in its shadow and in its language.

The reach is a function of the language rather than only of the quality. English became the medium of an empire and then of global commerce, science and the internet, so British writing arrived in places that had no other relationship to Britain, and it was read there in the original. No French or German writer of comparable stature has ever had that.

The consequence is a canon that is simultaneously national and not. Shakespeare is taught in schools on every continent, often to pupils who will never visit the country, and what he is taken to mean varies accordingly. A national literature read mostly by foreigners becomes something other than a national literature.

What the music did with the same advantage

The term pop music originated in Britain in the mid-1950s, according to the New Grove Dictionary, to describe rock and roll's fusion with the new youth music, and artists including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones drove the form afterwards.

The pattern since has repeated at roughly decade intervals: a British scene forms, is exported, is absorbed, and is followed by another. A country of this population producing successive globally dominant popular musical movements is not explained by talent alone, and the usual explanations are the language, an unusually concentrated media industry and art schools that funded a great many musicians while they were nominally studying something else.

The institutional support matters more than it looks. Public service broadcasting gave new music national exposure without a commercial gatekeeper, and the music press and independent labels supplied the rest of the infrastructure. Those conditions were specific and are no longer the same.

What public broadcasting built

The most consequential British cultural institution of the twentieth century was a broadcaster funded by a compulsory licence fee rather than by advertising or by the state budget, and the funding model is what made it consequential. A broadcaster answerable to neither advertisers nor a ministry could commission things with no obvious audience, and a great deal of what became internationally recognisable British culture began as exactly that.

The effect on music, comedy and drama compounded over decades. National exposure without a commercial gatekeeper meant a new form could reach an audience before anyone had established that the audience existed, and the model was copied by public broadcasters in dozens of countries afterwards.

It also shaped the language of the country in a narrower sense. A single national broadcaster reaching everyone standardised a prestige accent for much of the century, and the later decision to put regional and national accents on air was a cultural policy choice with political content.

The model is now under pressure from every direction at once: streaming services with larger budgets, an audience that no longer watches at fixed times, and a funding mechanism attached to a piece of hardware fewer households use. What replaces it is the open question in British cultural policy, and no answer proposed so far preserves what the arrangement was good at.

What the empire left in the culture

The United Kingdom is culturally the product of an empire in a way the country discusses unevenly. The language, the legal tradition, the sports and the institutions were exported; the people, the food, the music and the population of the modern cities came back.

The demographic consequence is the plainest. Post-war migration from the Caribbean, South Asia and Africa rebuilt the workforce and then rebuilt the culture, and the popular music, food and literature of the past sixty years are largely unimaginable without it. Immigration also produced the most spoken language in England after English at the 2011 census, Polish with 546,000 speakers, which is a European rather than an imperial legacy and shows the pattern is not only about empire.

The unresolved part sits in the museums and in the history teaching. The collections were assembled when taking objects was normal and are held in institutions built to display them, and the argument about restitution runs alongside a separate argument about how the imperial period should be taught. Neither has an agreed answer.

What can be said without controversy is that the culture is not homogeneous and has not been for a long time. A country describing itself through Shakespeare and the countryside is describing a real part of itself and leaving out the cities where most of its people actually live.

Why so many sports were invented here

Association football, tennis, table tennis, badminton, rugby union, rugby league, rugby sevens, golf, boxing, netball, water polo, field hockey, billiards, darts, rowing, rounders and cricket all originated or were substantially developed in the United Kingdom, and the rules and codes of many modern sports were written here. Football's rules were first drafted in 1863 by Ebenezer Cobb Morley, and FIFA recognises England as the birthplace of club football.

The reason is institutional rather than athletic. Codification requires bodies willing to write rules and clubs willing to accept them, and nineteenth-century Britain had schools, universities and clubs that did both, at the moment industrial cities were producing large populations with leisure time and railways were making fixtures between distant towns possible.

Football is now the most popular sport in the country by survey, and the four countries compete separately in it, as they do in rugby. A visitor watching a Scotland or Wales international is watching one of the clearest surviving expressions of the fact that the United Kingdom contains four national identities and one state.

What people eat and where it came from

British food has a reputation the country has spent forty years revising and the reputation was earned. Rationing lasted until the mid-1950s, industrial food processing arrived early, and the domestic cooking tradition was thinner than in comparable European countries to begin with.

What changed it was immigration. Indian and Chinese restaurants and takeaways are among the most popular sources of prepared food throughout the country, Chinese takeaways are a common sight in towns of every size, and many serve a cuisine adapted to western tastes rather than the original. The point is not authenticity: a national diet was rebuilt by arrivals within two generations, and dishes invented in Britain by South Asian cooks are now among the country's most recognisable foods.

The regional traditions survived underneath all of it, and they differ across the four countries and within England. Beer is brewed locally and regionally, the pub remains a social institution in decline, and the food revival of the past three decades has been built on rediscovering domestic produce rather than on importing a technique.

What the country keeps and shows

The United Kingdom holds 35 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, 29 cultural, 5 natural and 1 mixed. The list runs from prehistoric monuments and Roman frontier works through cathedrals and country houses to industrial landscapes, which is a reasonable summary of what the country produced and in what order.

The national museums are free at the point of entry and hold collections assembled during the imperial period, which is the source of the argument now running about them. Objects taken from places that are now independent states sit in institutions that were built to display them, and the question of what should be returned is live, contested and not going to be settled by either side conceding.

The cultural map is four maps. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own arts funding, their own broadcasters in their own languages and their own national collections, because culture is devolved. What is described abroad as British culture is largely English culture plus the parts of the other three that travelled, and that gap is the thing most often argued about at home. United Kingdom: travel covers reaching the places and United Kingdom: politics the settlement that divided the responsibility.