Which tube line in London is the most linguistically diverse? Where on the tube are you most likely to hear French or Portuguese? UCL’s Oliver O’Brien’s map of the most common second languages by tube stop will give you a clue

Walk along the streets of London and it’s not uncommon to hear a variety of langauges jostling for space in your eardrums. Step inside a tube carriage on the underground and the story is no different.

Oliver O’Brien, researcher in geovisualisation and web mapping at University College London’s department of geography, has created a map showing what the most common second language (after English) is at certain tube stops across the capital.

Using a map of tube journeys and busy stations that he had previously created, O’Brien used 2011 Census data to add the second most commonly spoken language that people who live nearby speak.

Having analysed output areas that lie (wholly or partially) within 200m radius of the tube station and Census aggregate data for the metric, O’Brien ended up with the below map:

Click here to explore the interactive map

The circles overlaid on each tube station are coloured by the language most spoken (after English) by locals, with the area of the circle being proportional to the percentage of people speaking that language. As O’Brien writes on his blog:

So a circle where 10% of local people primarily speak French will be larger (and a different colour) than a circle where 5% of people primarily speak Spanish

He also highlights the strengths and weaknesses of what language data can illustrate:

Language correlates well with some ethnicities (e.g. South Asian) but not others (e.g. African), in London. So some familiar patterns appear – e.g. a popular, and uniform, second language appearing at almost all Tower Hamlets stations. Remember, the map is showing language, not origin – so many of the ‘Portuguese’ speakers, for instance, may be of Brazilian origin.

“Conventional maps of demographic data can be quite abstract to look at - they can be quite hard to relate to where people live,” explains O’Brien. “By combining statistical data from the census with the familiar lines of the London Underground network, the graphic becomes more relatable to a city where everyone knows their nearest tube station.”

“A buffer around each tube station was created, and the languages of the local population in each buffer were extracted, to produce a ‘second language’ (after English) most likely to be spoken by the local community there. An interesting and sometimes surprising set of clusters appear.”

Below are some interesting snapshots from the ‘Tube Tongues’, with added descriptions by the author of the maps.

Mapping London’s ‘tube tongues’

Using the tube lines in inner and central London as a geographical “anchor” to show the most commonly spoken language (after English) around each station. [It shows that] many languages cluster into distinct parts of the capital.

Language clusters on the DLR

Looking at the DLR network, two major language clusters stand out - Bengali (in Tower Hamlets) and Lithuanian (in Royal Docks).

The Bakerloo - “A line with a distinct language along its length”

A tube line with a distinct language along its length, a journey on the Bakerloo passes through areas with large proportions of Gujarati, Portuguese, French and Tagalog languages speakers, as well as the varied Chinese languages spoken in Chinatown.

Turnpike lane - the most linguistically diverse tube station

By analysing the data, O’Brien was able to locate the most linguistically diverse tube station:

Turnpike Lane on the Piccadilly line in north-east London, which has 16 languages spoken by more than 1% of the population there

In addition to the tube map of tongues, O’Brien has just published a map showing the top occupations of people living near each tube stop.



Mapping ‘work lines’

The map shows the most popular occupation of people living around each tube station - from the legal experts around Temple to artists in Hackney and protective services for the wealthy and famous of Knightsbridge



Northern line - teachers, artists and business administrators

The northern line reveals itself as a tube line of teachers and artists in the north, and business administrators in the south.

The maps above were created by Oliver O’Brien from the department of geography at UCL, using aggregate data from the Office of National Statistics and the tube network as drawn by OpenStreetMap contributors.

