A census of every household in England and Wales will be held in March 2011 by the UK government. The census forms will be printed in 57 different languages, more than double the number of the last census a decade ago, says the right-wing paper Daily Telegraph.

The languages range from Twi, spoken in southern Ghana, to Sinhala, spoken in Sri Lanka.

The bill for the translation only accounts for £50,000 or the £428million cost of the census but it appears to contradict the claims by David Cameron, the Prime Minister, that fewer Government forms would be put into foreign languages.

However, a Downing Street spokesman said the decision to use all the languages was taken by Labour when it was in power and it had been too late to change it when the Conservative-led Coalition took office.

Other African languages on the list include: Ibo (spoken in Nigeria), Amharic (Ethiopia), and Swahili (Kenya). Asian ones include: Bengali (Bangladesh), two types of Kurdish (Syria and Iran), and Tigrinya (Eritrea). Others span Albanian, Bulgarian, Lingala (Congo), and Vietnamese.

The same newspaper published in June 2008 an article titled “Surge in Eritrean population in Britian”, reporting the British Eritrean community had grown over the past 60 years to a population around 20,000 and that more than 17,000 of that number live in London.

The numbers speak for themselves and a printing a version in Tigrinya will most probably help to raise the quality of the census.

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