Another one of these 'what is this language' questions

[imluxionverdin]

To get citizenship in the UK you have to do a 'Like in the UK' test. There's a study guide that I think is official called "British Citizenship Test: Study Guide". Knowing English is a requirement to get citizenship, and the book is in English, of course

Comments

[tom_mouse]

I thought it was Somali, there's a sizeable Somali population here, and I've seen a lot of NHS leaflets in Somali.

[tee_sama]

Yeah, I agree. It looks Somali.

[pne]

And to mine...

[laura_anne]

Definitely not Swahili. Somali would make a lot of sense, there's a lot of Somali speakers in the UK.

Do they seriously have binge drinking listed as an unfamilar term? I'm hoping it's a joke, but it could so easily be true...

A "British idiom", not an "unfamiliar concept"

[darth_spacey]

Binge drinking is far more of a national sport in Britain than in some other places ;-)

More importantly (and seriously), although the term is transparent if one knows the meaning of the word "binge", there are two problems:

1) One seems to rarely encounter "binge" without "drinking". It seems to me that it's a word that's hard to decipher unless the reader manages to glark it from context.

2) It's possible that English-speaking foreigners have a different term for the phenomenon, so they too would be unfamiliar with the usage.

Re: A "British idiom", not an "unfamiliar concept"

[laura_anne]

Yeah, to clarify, my incredulousness was more at binge drinking being so ubiquitous that it's necessary to include it in a primer on British life, rather than the concept being difficult to understand for non-natives.

Re: A "British idiom", not an "unfamiliar concept"

[gorkabear]

Spain has copied binge drinking. We have a word for that "Botellón" (big bottle).

[hkitsune]

It's definitely not Swahili, and admittedly I think I would have pegged it as Somali too. The Xerox language "identifier" thinks it's Swahili at first, and then thinks it's Indonesian.

What a mystery :O

[muckefuck]

What's with the tag?

[imluxionverdin]

I don't know. I didn't do anything consciously to put on a tag, so it must have defaulted somehow?

[biascut]

I found a link to an Excel spreadsheet showing the most widely spoken languages amongst children whose first language wasn't English in England. (From here.) Panjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati and Somali seem to be the top five, so Somali seems like a reasonable guess from that point of view, too.