For the majority people living in Wales, English is their first and only language. This was not always so..
Only 400 years ago English had only 7 million speakers and was mostly unknown outside the British Isles. Welsh was the language of most of Wales, apart from a few Englishries such as South Pembrokeshire and the Gower peninsula. It was even spoken in some parts of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, across the border in England
Between the reign of Elizabeth I (1603) and Elizabeth II (1952), the number of English speakers increased to about 250 million. Since the 1950s the speed of expansion has been even more staggering. An estimated quarter of the world's population now has some English, and the number is still growing.
Despite being one of the first countries to experience the spread of English, Wales was not anglicised overnight. Different parts of Wales have a very different history in relation to the English language, and this is reflected in the local English accent or dialect. Some regions became English-speaking many centuries ago (for example South Pembrokeshire), while in areas such as the industrialised south-east, English has taken over comparatively recently. There are still parts of Wales where English is very much a second language with Welsh being the everyday means of communication. In some Welsh accents of English you can hear the influence of neighbouring English counties, such as Cornwall or Herefordshire In others, the vocabulary and patterns of the Welsh language can still be heard in today's English.
Ray Smith comes from Radnorshire. Listen to the way he speaks. It is very far from the stereotypical Welsh accent, though it has as much claim to being called Welsh as any.

There have been Somalis in Cardiff since the 1870s. The city has one of the longest established Somali communities in the UK. The first settlers were sailors who came here shortly after opening the Suez Canal in 1869, when Cardiff was developing as a major international seaport. During the 1980s, another wave of Somali immigrants arrived, fleeing from the civil war in the Horn of Africa. It is estimated that currently over 8000 Somalis live in the Cardiff, Newport and Swansea areas, making them the largest ethnic minority community in Wales.
There are about 10-15 million Somali speakers worldwide. It is a language which has a long, rich tradition of poetry and literature. However it was only in 1972 that the Somali language became the official language of Somalia, replacing the colonial languages of English and Italian in government and education.
Listen to Faisal Mohamed Hashi talking about his Somali-speaking background in Newport, Gwent. His father was a merchant seaman who came to Wales with the British Merchant Navy.

Panjabi is spoken by about 93 million speakers. It is one of India's many official languages. Punjabi speakers came originally from the Panjab, which was divided between India and Pakistan after partition in 1947. About 70 per cent of Panjabi speakers live in Pakistan, and 30 per cent in India. Those who live in Pakistan are mostly Muslim and use Urdu as the language of religion and high culture. Panjabi-speaking Hindus look to Hindi as the language of religion. For Sikhs, however, Panjabi is the main language of their holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib.
Panjabi speakers form one of the most significant south Asian communities in the UK. Many Panjabis came to the UK in the period from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. They settled around the London area, the Midlands and the textile towns of northern England. Not all Panjabi speakers came from India and Pakistan. Many were business and professional people who came from East Africa, where people from the Panjab had settled as traders earlier in the 20th century.
In Wales, education authorities have reported Punjabi speaking-pupils in Carmarthenshire, Denbighshire, Cardiff, Flintshire, Merthyr Tydfil, Swansea/Neath/Port Talbot and Torfaen. Listen to Swinder Chadha, who was raised in Delhi but came to Wales in the 1980s via Iran. Those Sikhs who worship at her local Gurdwara in Cardiff have come to Wales from all over the world - from East Africa, Burma, Singapore and Iran as well as directly from the Punjab.