Preferred Language?

Dr Huw Dylan Owen

We’ve all heard different versions of the old tourist trope in Wales, as wonderfully noted by a Google reviewer in 2018, John G about a pub in Bethesda, Gwynedd:

A group of us turned in after a walk in the area. Straight away when we ordered the locals realised we were English and then started talking in Welsh and laughing.

It’s an incredible and laughable story that would fail to survive the slightest scrutiny. And it’s still occasionally heard today. Nowadays it tends to be laughed at and accepted as the desperate utterances of an old world, the old Empire and colonial attitudes.

The thinking goes that of course only English should be spoken in Britain. Anyone speaking another language is certainly only choosing to do so in order to be deliberately annoying. Or maybe it’s an extreme politically divisive choice.

I hope that you are reading this thinking it’s a blast from the past. Those old-fashioned ideas are, well, old fashioned! And yet, when you think about it, this attitude can be seen everywhere!

Exceptionally rare

The idea that we choose our spoken language can be seen in government policy documents; on public service forms; in the National Health Service; and even in the Welsh Language Standards!

I recently attended a conference on the Welsh language and heard the following from keynote speakers:

“Preferred language.”
“The patient’s chosen language.”
“Dewis iaith.”

As a first language Welsh speaker I can honestly say that making a decision about which language to speak is rare. Exceptionally rare.

When I see friends down the pub, I know whether they speak Welsh or English and I speak accordingly naturally, without decision.

Awkward

In fact, speaking the ‘other’ language feels awkward and strange. It’s not a choice. However, it does happen in some extraordinary circumstances, such as that one time many years ago that the Welsh speaking mortgage advisor offered to explain the intricacies of overpayments and compound interest.

Jargonistic discussions can lead to diaglossia (where people speak different languages according to situations), and it’s worth noting that people DO choose languages when reading or writing for a variety of reasons.

So why do we insist on asking for, and recording, people’s ‘preferred language’ for speaking?

It reduces their communication options and limits their identity. In the world of health and social care the Welsh Government introduced the Active Offer more than a decade ago.

It requires Local Authorities and Health Boards to ensure that people do not need to request health and social care services in their language. The service should be available to Welsh speakers without them having to explain which language they ‘choose’ to speak.

This old ‘colonial’ mindset of a ‘preferred language’ should not have any part to play and people should be empowered to speak whichever language they naturally feel comfortable speaking. Welsh, English, Wenglish.

Services should ensure that they know from initial referral which languages the individual speaks and ensure that the practitioners working with that person are able to speak that language.

This is a person-centred approach with clinical safety and safeguarding at its heart. The idea is straightforward and positive.

And yet, the challenges are numerous to enabling the Active Offer, such as ensuring that the percentage of Welsh speaking practitioners employed by these services reflect the percentage of Welsh speaking service users in the area; and not least in empowering the Welsh speaking public to speak in their first language.

The first challenge, however, is to remove the “language of choice” or “preferred language” from our vocabularies, and certainly from our forms and systems, and adopt the best practice of recording languages spoken.

Until we do so, we are acting similarly to John G who reviewed the Welsh speaking pub on Google and who believes that people may choose a language to be difficult and to annoy. They do not.

Dr Huw Dylan Owen is a member of the Welsh Government’s More Than Just Words Advisory Board.