How to lose a language while trying to save it

Richard Morgan

The Welsh Language is in trouble. It has been for years. At the heart of the problem is something seldom acknowledged, at least by those who most need to wake up and smell the Daffodils.

A huge proportion (62% – National Survey for Wales 2017-18) of the non Welsh speaking population would like to speak Welsh, but yet speaker numbers are at their lowest since 2013 and falling.

Peer reviewed research suggests that the lack of enthusiasm for learning Welsh is significantly rooted in the behaviour of the community that already speaks it.

There is significant evidence that summarises attitudes toward English people, the English language and Native Welsh people who speak English as a first language: English in-migrants to Wales are variously viewed as colonisers, diluters and threats to the Welsh language.

Native Welsh English speakers are considered inauthentic, inadequate or complicit in the diminution of the Welsh language, and critics of Welsh Language policy are framed as fragile, hostile and ignorant.

What this amounts to is “othering”.

Othering, for those not familiar with it, is a social mechanism by which one group establishes and reinforces its own coherence and dominance by marking another group as categorically not belonging.

It operates through a combination of social behaviour and institutional structures, and importantly it does not require malicious intent.

What is genuinely tragic about the Welsh Language advocacy ecosystem is that it thinks it is helping; while simultaneously multiplying the problem it is trying to solve.

Among the ways in which this is having a disastrous effect on Wales, and there are many, one is the terrifying growth of support in Wales for Reform UK.

The relationship between Welsh Language policy and Wales’ socio-economic underperformance is seldom made explicit. It should be.

Without inspecting the mechanism and motivation, because remember, intent is not the issue here, let’s look at the net effects on a labour market that has introduced a Welsh language requirement across virtually every major public sector, regardless of whether the role requires it… and before the objection is raised that this is a gross over simplification and simply not true, be reminded that in 2023 the Welsh Government itself removed the option for anyone within Welsh Government to advertise a job as not requiring Welsh Skills, effectively making some level of Welsh language skills mandatory for any job in Welsh Government. There is no proportionality test.

Only 17.8% of the population of Wales speaks Welsh. Imagine then, that you are a member of the 82.2% who do not, and imagine further, if you will, that you are from one of the most densely populated parts of Wales; a member of one of the communities most affected by economic decline, deindustrialisation and poverty.

The post industrial valleys communities of Wales do not count among the Welsh speaking heartlands.

They are places where Welsh disappeared in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Places that have been overlooked and ignored, where economic growth has been weakest, and where the perception that the Welsh Government acts in the interests of a culturally distinct minority is strongest.

The Welsh language is not experienced as a cultural treasure, it is experienced as just another thing they don’t have, in this case acting both as diminished cultural identity and a job qualification, administered by institutions that they feel no connection to, and enforced by a political class that has forgotten them.

The Welsh language did not cause the deprivation that these communities have been subject to, but its supporters have consistently, since the very beginning of devolution, inadvertently stumbled down the road of adopting policies that deepen a sense of cultural exclusion.

Farage is like a shark. You think he hasn’t noticed?

Reform poses an existential threat to the Welsh language; its policy (I use the word policy in the loosest sense of the word) amounts to opposing the use of Welsh in schools, local and national government and the public sector.

These measures aren’t a red line for potential reform supporters in deprived areas, not because they are openly hostile to the Welsh language, but because the best that can be said about their native tongue is it denied them opportunities and made them feel even further looked down upon.

The best way the Welsh language and its supporters have of defending against the advances of reform is not by adopting frameworks, or legislation or top down policy flows… Welsh must be encouraged, Welsh must be used in the public sector, Welsh must be given prominence in Education…

Implicit in these policies is the notion that if the language is imposed to a sufficient degree, that favourable cultural conditions will follow. Have fun unpacking that.

No. It is a Welsh speaking community that is, first and foremost forgiving and generous, one that is so open, so welcoming, so culturally irresistible that the idea of trying to stifle it looks like what it is; an act of horrific cultural vandalism, not a sensible policy decision.

The problem the Welsh language has is, to date, no such community exists, at least on a national scale.

But such a society could exist; the raw materials are all in place. The music, the literature, the Bardic traditions, the poetry, the landscape, the history… and the sport.

The Welsh language advocacy ecosystem almost completely fails to address why anyone would want to learn Welsh for reasons of joy, curiosity, cultural richness or aesthetic pleasure.

Not one single Welsh language civil society organisation makes the case that Welsh is worth learning because it is beautiful, because its musical and poetic traditions are extraordinary, because a life lived speaking and understanding Welsh is one that opens up an intoxicating relationship with landscape, history, culture, community and identity.

All the evidence points to Welsh language community built around obligation, rights, survival, exclusion and compulsion, and a reluctance, sometimes visceral, to forgive the English for the awful things they have done to Wales.

One which ignores peer reviewed research on what motivates learners, choosing instead a strategy based on the one motivational framework which evidence shows is least effective for voluntary uptake of the language.

Every act of exclusion: Every Trefor housing proposal, every school where speaking English is punished, every Welsh born non Welsh speaker mocked or told to ‘sit this one out’ makes Reforms job easier.

I lived for a while in France. When people found out I was Welsh they would ask me about the country and more often the language.

I didn’t tell them the reason I’m not a fluent Welsh speaker (that is a story for another time)… I would tell them about the lyricism of the language. I would tell them that the word for Butterfly, literally translated means Living Coal or Living Ember, or that the word for Kingfisher means Blue of the Riverbank.

I would show them photographs of Tryfan and Nant y Benglog. I would read them ‘Song of a Pole’ by Islwyn Ffowc Elis, or play them ‘Campfire Classics’ by Ysbrydion, or ‘Mwng’ by Super Furries, who as it happens used to go by the name of Ffa Coffi Pawb. I used to explain what that meant, and the subversive word play.

Ironic really, given what we might be about to go through, and why.