Welsh English: A National Language (original) (raw)
Welsh Not: Elementary Education and the Anglicisation of Nineteenth-Century Wales
Welsh Not: Elementary Education and the Anglicisation of Nineteenth-Century Wales, 2024
The Welsh Not was a wooden token given to children caught speaking Welsh in nineteenth-century schools. It was often accompanied by corporal punishment, and is widely thought to have been responsible for the decline of the Welsh language. Despite having an iconic status in popular understandings of Wales’s history, there has never before been a study of where, when and why the Welsh Not was used. This book is an account of the different ways children were punished for speaking Welsh in nineteenth-century schools and the consequences of this for children, communities and the linguistic future of Wales. It shows how the exclusion of Welsh was not only traumatic for pupils but also hindered them in learning English – the very opposite of what it was meant to achieve. Gradually, Welsh came to be used increasingly in Victorian schools, making them more humane places but also more effective mechanisms in the anglicisation of Wales.
Wales: (Still) a Problem of Translation? Language Choice in Wales at the End of the Anglo-Welsh Era
2019
In 1996 the poet R. S. Thomas claimed that 'my country, Cymru, to be understood presents a problem of translation, and if it is to maintain a separate and valuable identity, it must continue to do so.' Thomas, a native speaker of English, and a self-taught user of Welsh, seemed to be questioning the value of English to reflect the reality of Wales, and with it his own status as an 'Anglo-Welsh' poet. This inner conflict mirrored the language situation in Wales, and the lack of language choice facing writers, since native Welsh speakers carried the psychological onus of remaining faithful to the 'old language', and non-Welsh speakers had no choice but to use English. But the last two decades have seen considerable social, political, and linguistic change in Wales. An extensive bilingual education policy, the emergence of a Welsh language television channel, and the establishment of the Welsh assembly, seem to have halted the decline in the number of Welsh spea...
Organon, 2018
The genesis of a Welsh literature written in the English language can be found in the turbulent middle ages, from the earliest Anglo-Saxon settlements on the island of Britain, to the Norman invasion and occupations of the late Medieval period. However, the emergence of this body of literature, sometimes referred to as Anglo-Welsh writing, can be attributed to many socio-political factors and events of the Victorian Age. At the apex of the British Empire the English educational system was implemented in Wales and an industrialization process meant that thousands of foreign immigrants were effectively diluting the native population driving the Welsh language and ancient culture to near extinction and promoting the use of the English language. As a consequence, Anglo-Welsh writing emerged fully towards the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century.
THE CONSERVATIVE GOVERNMENTS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF WELSH LANGUAGE POLICY IN THE 1980s AND 1990s
The Historical Journal, 2011
ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the advances made to safeguard the future of the Welsh language under the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s. These advancements included the establishment of a Welsh language television channel, advancements in the field of Welsh language education, the formation of a Welsh Language Board, and, finally, the implementation of a new Welsh Language Act in 1993. Challenging popular assumptions regarding the nature of Conservative governance during this period, the article examines the background and context of these developments by highlighting the limitations of ‘Thatcherite’ dogma not only in ‘second order’ areas of policy, but also in a nation where Tory roots were not deeply embedded.
Has what was ‘Too far for you to see’ come any closer? Language and Identity in Wales
Gyermeknevelés Tudományos Folyóirat
This article examines issues of language usage in Welsh and the identity of this region’s residents. The stress is upon people and language as they are inseparably inter- and entwined when forming one’s identity (Evans, 2018, p. 7). In accordance with this approach, I focus on three aspects (of this people, language, and identity): 1) the “diachronic” analysis of the Welsh language; 2) bilingual language use in general and in Wales in particular; 3) the recent period and research that slowly led to Welsh becoming an official language, effective in 2012. In this paper I will discuss what has happened since the poet, R. S. Thomas, captured the feelings and thoughts of his era while expressing his worries for his nation’s fate in the poem, The Welsh Hill County. I believe that my inquiry suits the environment of languages and cultures as the success story of an almost extinct language that survived its foretold death may provide valuable insight into the actual problems minority groups...
Power and Language Policies in Wales
This chapter examines language policy in Wales before and after the devolution of powers in the UK and shows that the promotion of Welsh in various policy domains has significantly improved in the post-devolutionary era. The chapter also compares the promotion of Welsh with allochthonous languages and concludes that Welsh is prioritised over such languages. However, in common with policies in the EU and Luxembourg, macro-level policymaking considers the needs of minorities in healthcare and social welfare. Even in the domains of business and legal safeguards for minority languages, certain statutes allow the use of languages other than Welsh and English. In addition to offering further evidence for the pattern of including minority languages in the domains named above, the most important finding of this chapter is showing that socio-political changes are reflected at the textual level, precisely in the use of modal verbs may and shall. Over the course of time, statutes made a shift from 'Welsh may be used' to 'Welsh shall be used' which mirrors the growing importance of Welsh in the UK.
Translatingy Cofnod: Translation policy and the official status of the Welsh language in Wales
Translation Studies, 2016
It might safely be said that no issue is as politically contentious in Wales as that of the status of the Welsh language in society in general and in public life in particular, along with its relationship to the English language. This article draws upon a range of papers from within the National Assembly for Wales (NAfW) and the Welsh Government, some of which have been made available only as a result of a series of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, in its careful examination of how the translation policy of the Welsh Assembly became the subject of a very excited and divisive public row. Moreover, the article shows how this translation problem evolved into a matter of constitutional difficulty, as yet unresolved, at the highest level of public life in Wales.
Ideological Directions in Welsh Language Policy: A Discourse Historical Analysis
Abstract: The Welsh Government’s plan to ‘create a bilingual Wales’ is ambitious – aiming for significant increases in Welsh use across Wales, a country with no Welsh monolinguals, and including areas where everyday use of Welsh has become negligible. How the devolved Welsh legislature promotes the Welsh language as a national icon touches on the fractious territory of heritage, identity, authenticity and cultural survival – all politically charged issues in the context of post-devolutionary nation-building. This paper examines ideological orientations in three Welsh language policy documents – 'texts' which are informed and contoured by overarching national and international legislation. Discourse historical analysis (a form of critical discourse analysis) is used to weigh up their ideological orientations. The orientations are categorised using De Schutter’s (2007) tripartite framework of language ideologies: - ‘instrumental’ (language is a means to achieve other non-linguistic human capabilities); - ‘constitutive’ (language influences identity); - ‘intrinsic’ (language is valuable irrespective of human interests). The findings show that the intrinsic ideology predominates significantly and consistently across the three texts. Action is planned not in the interests of human capabilities or even identity, but of the Welsh language as an independent entity. Furthermore, there are instances where potential discriminatory effects on non-speakers of Welsh are acknowledged, and explicitly justified within the pursuit of increased Welsh usage. Overall, these ideological orientations make Welsh language policy quite unusual when compared to other areas of Welsh social policy (e.g. Sayers, Rock & Coffey, in prep.). References: De Schutter, Helder (2007). Language policy and political philosophy: On the emerging linguistic justice debate. Language Problems and Language Planning 31(1): 1–23. Sayers, Dave, Frances Rock & Michael Coffey (in prep.). Speeding up or reaching out? Efficiency and unmet need as policy priorities in Wales.
Minority Language Survival : Obsolescence or Survival for Welsh in the Face of English Dominance ? 1
2004
Cymraeg, Welsh, is one of the two surviving languages that formed the Brythonic branch of the Celtic family of languages. All of the four modern Celtic languages–Welsh, Breton (Brythonic), Irish Gaelic, and Scottish Gaelic (Goedelic)–are under threat of extinction. Centuries of political and social pressures from the English and French have contributed to their decline, both in status and usage (Dalby, 1998). Such pressure has led to the near-obliteration of Manx and Cornish. (Manx is a Goedelic language of which only a few hundred speakers remain, most of whom learned it as adults, although some claim to have learned it as a first language from their grandparents. Cornish is a Brythonic language that died out in the 18 century; however, it has since undergone a revivalist movement–Crystal, 1994). Due to such pressures, most native Welsh speakers (excluding infants) are by now Welsh-English bilinguals. However, although “the history of the Welsh speaking population in the 20 century...
Ideological Directions in Welsh Language Policy
The Welsh Government’s plan to ‘create a bilingual Wales’ is ambitious – aiming for significant increases in Welsh use across Wales, a country with no Welsh monolinguals, and including areas where everyday use of Welsh has become negligible. This paper uses a form of discourse analysis to examine ideological orientations in three Welsh language policy documents. These orientations are categorised using De Schutter’s (2007) tripartite framework of language ideologies: ‘instrumental’ (language is a means to achieve other non-linguistic human capabilities); ‘constitutive’ (language influences identity); and ‘intrinsic’ (language is valuable irrespective of human interests). The findings show that the intrinsic ideology predominates. Action is planned not in the interests of human capabilities or identity, but of the Welsh language as an independent entity. Furthermore, possible discriminatory effects on non-speakers of Welsh are justified as acceptable collateral. These ideological orientations make Welsh language policy quite unusual compared to other areas of social policy. -- De Schutter, H. 2007. Language policy and political philosophy: On the emerging linguistic justice debate. Language Problems and Language Planning 31(1): 1–23.
“Here in Britain”: William Fleetwood, His Welsh Translators, and Anglo–Welsh Networks before 1717
Huntington Library Quarterly, 2021
r t e rly 8 4 (4) , p p. 8 2 5-8 5 2. 1 0. 1 3 5 3/ hl q. 2 0 2 1. 0 0 4 5 'Here in Britain': William Fleetwood, his Welsh translators and Anglo-Welsh Networks before 1721 The following article explores the circumstances and content of the first privately financed political translations from English into Welsh, both renderings of a thanksgiving sermon preached by William Fleetwood, Bishop of Ely, in 1716. It understands itself as a contribution to explaining the beginnings of a process which confirmed Wales's separate linguistic and cultural identity while binding it politically into a British nation demarcated by the Anglican Church rather than by ethnic identities, and to explore a hitherto relatively uncharted Welsh-language dimension to eighteenth-century British pamphleteering. Linda Colley's work has explored the process of British nation building in the long eighteenth century with reference to the importance of religion, of war, and most recently of political 'texts that were easily replicated', 1 but extra-parliamentary Anglo-Welsh cross-border interactions and Welsh-language texts have remained underexplored, especially for the earlier eighteenth century. 2 Historians have tended to stay on either side of geographical and linguistic borders instead of exploring the cross-border workings of the bilingual translation networks which underscored Wales's separate cultural and religious identity, while embedding the Welsh in the British political nation. 3 This is different to the long nineteenth 1
The streets of Bethesda: The slate quarrier and the Welsh language in the Welsh Liberal imagination
A B S T R A C T Sociolinguistic debates about the fate of the Welsh language have since at least the mid-20th century posited the relationship between language and political economy as a central factor in the death or rebirth of the Welsh language since the Industrial Revolution. Such studies have been concerned primarily with empirical head counts of actual speakers and the movements of populations and distributions of languages as determined by political economic independent variables. This article argues that the relationship between language and political economy was also crucially and consequentially construed in the 19th century in terms of " imagined " exemplary speakers of Welsh. In the imagined voice of the Welsh slate quarrier, Welsh elites of the 19th century found a " modern " Welsh-speaking figure who participated in industry while remaining Welsh, both linguistically and culturally, thereby associating the Welsh language itself with the desirable properties of modernity, particularly industrial productivity, and this allowed it to be imagined as a language at home in modernity. (Welsh, political economy, language, ideology, modernity.)*
On Both Sides of the Menai? Planning for the Welsh Language in North-West Wales
In this article, the legitimation of the Welsh language by two contiguous local government entities, Gwynedd Council and the Isle of Anglesey County Council in northwest Wales, is contrasted with its increased institutionalisation by means of language policies carried out within the two entities over a period of 40 years. Using grey and professional literature as well as field interviews, political claims around the increased use of the non-statewide language are mapped onto language planning activities impacting upon both internal administration and external engagement with local communities and national stakeholders. Contrasts between legitimation and institutionalisation activities within and across the two entities are explained in terms of interaction between local, substate and statewide political actors. ALS DOS COSTATS DEL MENAI? LA PLANIFICACIÓ DE LA LLENGUA GAL·LESA AL NORD-OEST DE GAL·LES Resum En aquest article es compara la legitimació del gal·lès per part de dues entit...