Network of Stops of London Tube Used to Create Map of London’s Second Languages

There was a fun experiment that Oliver O’Brien did and he was able to create a map of the second languages (after English) spoken in London based on the network of stops of the London Tube.

We all know that London is a diverse city and the experiment Oliver O’Brien made showed how the city’s linguistic diversity is distributed by analyzing data collected from the research of users of the London Tube.

Oliver O’Brien is a web mapping and geo-visualization researcher from the Department of Geography, University College London. Through his analysis he was able to create a map of the most spoken second languages by users of the Tube at each stop.

Data

O’Brien used the data from the 2011 Census to add the list of second languages used along the Tube’s many stops across London, placing them on the map that he had created of the busy stations and the tube journeys. He analyzed the output locations that are partially or wholly located within a 200m radius of the tube stop. The results were surprising and very informative. His study is only focused on the second languages spoken and not on ethnic origins. Central and inner London Tube lines were used as the geographical anchor of the study.

Research highlights

The results of the research showed how interesting the study was and how different language clusters are spoken in different arms of the Tube network.

At the DLR, Lithuanian in the Royal Docks and Bengali in the Tower Hamlets were the two major languages spoken by users of the Tube. There was quite a mix of several languages at the Bakerloo, including various Chinese languages, Tagalog (Filipino), French, Portuguese and Gujarati, which is a common language in Wembley. A high number of residents in Perivale on the other hand speaks Polish.

While the Bakerloo stop already has a diverse group of various language speakers, the Turnpike lane, according to O’Brien is the most linguistically diverse, as he found 16 languages spoken by users here. After English are Polish, Turkish, Bulgarian, Spanish, Bengali, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Hungarian, Arabic, French, Kurdish, several Chinese languages, Somali and Albanian, from the highest to the lowest number of speakers.

Deviating from languages, O’Brien was also able to pinpoint some of the basic occupations of Tube users from their own particular stops. For example, many legal experts used the Tube from Temple, while artists were numerous at Hackney. On the other hand, several of the users from Knightsbridge were protective services workers. Artists top the list of users from the Hackney stop with 9.6 percent. Second highest was design, followed by sales assistants. From there the list continued to education, media, various other occupations, marketing and business administration.

In East London especially in Shadwell, about a third of the residents are Bengali speakers. French is the major language spoken by residents using the lane going to Earl’s Court, Gloucester Road and South Kensington. This is followed by Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese and Arabic.

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