LONDON — Last week, Bobby Hogg, the last native speaker of the Cromarty fisherfolk dialect, passed away. His language, native to the Black Isle area in Scotland, is one of countless regional dialects dying out across the United Kingdom. Few outside academic circles are making any efforts to preserve these dialects, but larger languages have been the subject of much government action and debate in recent years.

Though over 95 percent of the U.K. population speaks English as a primary language, six minority languages are also officially recognized by the government: Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Lowland Scots, also know as Ulster Scots, Cornish, Irish and British Sign Language. Most of these languages were recognized as such only in the past two decades, Cornish most recently in 2002 under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This charter commits its signatories’ governments to recognizing and respecting their peoples’ minority languages, a sentiment easy to agree upon at its signing in 1992 but difficult to put into practice in a culturally complex, globalized Europe.

The debate over what some see to be linguistic imperialism, in which speakers of these minority languages feel their culture is being suppressed by unfair governmental and business practices, is often misconstrued as resurgent nationalism. This debate, however, is largely an apolitical microcosm of the perennial British struggle over their national identity and how diversity, globalization and localism can coexist.

Wales and its native language of more than 600,000 speakers is a shining example of an answer to this complicated question. On one hand, some Britons are hostile to Welsh linguistic equality; it is inconvenient for governments and businesses to employ translators, and it offends those who prefer pan-British cultural unity. Others disagree: They believe such diversity, linguistic and otherwise, is a proud heritage to be celebrated and is definitive of Britain. A majority of Welshmen fell in with the latter. Therefore, from 1998, bilingual official communication became common. It became required in 2011 when Welsh and English were made legally equal in Wales. In fact, the number of Welsh speakers has been increasing over the past two decades. But this change has not come easily: The cultural stigma associated with speaking a minority language like Welsh prevents accurate statistics and effective counteraction.

The United Kingdom is struggling with a linguistic reality in which local identity is being subsumed by what some would see as a greater cause and others would decry as a cultural empire 2.0. The legal progress in Wales, mirrored by that of Gaelic in Ireland and Scotland, Scots in the Lowlands and Cornish in Cornwall, is to be applauded — but it is only step one. In a country such as the United Kingdom, which is a magnet for so many languages and populations, indigenous as well as immigrant, it is one thing to foster growth in these minority languages but another to accept them as equal. It sets a precedent Britain must be prepared to deal with as the number of Punjabi speakers in the United Kingdom is equivalent to the number of Welsh speakers, and British Urdu speakers outnumber the combined number of Scots, British Sign Language, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Cornish language speakers. In 2012, it is becoming more and more difficult to say that South Asian languages are any less British than those originating in the British Isles.

With millions of immigrants joining the conversation on national identity, this question can no longer be relegated to fisherfolk dictionaries. If Britain is to embrace its linguistic diversity, it must learn to do so fairly, and this will require a reconsideration of what it means to be British.

Catherine Addington is a foreign correspondent. Email her at [email protected].