Greetings from London

London boasts over 300 different spoken languages – more than any other city in the world. The capital’s lingua franca, of course, remains English: 78% of Londoners cited it as their ‘main’ language in the 2011 Census. The other 22% speak in different tongues, including Urdu, Somali and Tagalog. This map from London: The Information Capital celebrates the city’s linguistic diversity by mapping how you’d say ‘hello’ in the most frequently spoken languages aside from English. Each ‘hello’ has been scaled to show the percentage of people in each area who use it. Bengali is now the third most spoken language in the capital, behind Polish. So next time you are heading east of the City, give salaam a try, or hola south of the river. You might just get a labas or olá in return.