Tanisha and Rafedah at the library on Wednesday

HOW many languages can you speak?

Rafedah, 10, speaks Arabic, Malay, Spanish, English and a bit of Albanian and Kurdish.

Her friend Tanisha, also 10, has several languages under her belt too, including Bengali, Spanish and a little Turkish.

Tanisha and Rafedah are year five students from Parkwood Primary School, Finsbury Park, who visited a pop-up multilingual library in Holloway Road on Wednesday. Created by senior lecturers at London Metropolitan University Hannah King and Gonzalo Pérez Andrade, the library featured around 110 picture books in more than 40 languages.

At Wednesday’s event there were even more languages represented, through books loaned from London Met’s own library.

There was also a multilingual storyteller from South Africa, who entertained children and adults alike with a fable that included snippets of the isiZulu and Afrikaans languages.

Ms King and Mr Pérez Andrade created the Multilingual Library last year in connection with a research project they did at an east London primary school, where 80 per cent of students have English as a second language.

Ms King said: “Parents and educators tend to prioritise English, but then children lose the possibility of learning their home languages.

“But our research shows that reading in other languages actually enhances young people’s English literacy, as well as helping them connect to their own cultural heritage.”

Ms King hopes they will one day have the funds to make the library mobile and bring it to schools across London.

Asked if she liked the Multilingual Library, Rafedah said: “I don’t like it – I love it.”