Pupils at schools across the district speak a bewildering array of first languages, we can reveal.

They range from common languages like French, German and Cantonese to tongues few people will have heard of like Igbo, spoken in south-east Nigeria, and Seychelles Creole.

Details released under the Freedom of Information Act show that children at primary and secondary schools in Canterbury, Faversham, Herne Bay and Whitstable speak more than 70 different first languages.

And they illustrate the increasingly cosmopolitan make-up of the district.

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The Simon Langton Grammar School for Girls, Canterbury, has the widest range with 35 languages including Afrikaans, Japanese, Lithuanian and Shona, a language spoken in southern Africa.

Headteacher Jane Percy said the school had a mentoring system in place to help pupils with English as an additional language.

“We provide specific support and help for these pupils and it’s clear that they learn very quickly and become good very quickly,” Mrs Percy said.

“They also help with the multi-cultural awareness within the school.”

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With 32, St Stephen’s Juniors in Canterbury is the primary school with the highest number of children whose first language is not English.

Headteacher Stuart Pywell reckons that about a third of the school speaks English and another language or virtually no English at all.

Among the latter is 10-year-old Tomi David from Hungary who joined the school last week.

“Tomi speaks hardly any English, but we’ve bought him an English-Hungarian dictionary and like all our pupils with little or no English he has been put on a structured programme to learn it,” Mr Pywell said.

“One of the reasons we have so many non-English speaking children coming here is that parents have become aware of how well we accommodate them and how effective the teaching programme is.

“Many pupils have parents at the universities or working at Pfizer and perhaps our reputation is getting around by word of mouth.”

Romanian Ioana Kovac, 10, could only say hello and goodbye when she arrived at St Stephen’s.

Within a year she has become near fluent and is helping Tomi acclimatize to life in an English school.

She said: “I found it hard when I came here, but the best way to learn the language was to make friends.”