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There was a concerted effort by the English authorities to extirpate the Welsh language in the latter nineteenth century, and the language as a living concern became more or less limited to the North of Wales with occasional pockets elsewhere, such as in some South Wales valleys. There's evidence of this even today in some of the mutilation of South Wales place-names: not all of the Anglicised names have been converted back to the Welsh. More recently there have been moves to revive the Welsh language, and to make it a necessity in some public-sector jobs even in areas where Welsh is barely spoken. Because this has often been to the benefit of middle-class English incomers who have learnt Welsh rather than Welsh people who don't know it, it has led to resentment. What I have noticed over the three decades I have had holidays in North Wales is the rise, especially over the last few years, of the use of English in everyday conversation of children and teenagers in the Welsh-speaking heartlands. Twenty or even 10 years back, when I walked through the towns, everyone would be speaking Welsh. Over the last few years, I've noticed that youngsters, when speaking amongst themselves, continually switch from Welsh to English and back again, or speak more in English than Welsh (I think that all Welsh people speak English these days). This, I was told, is a growing trend in the Welsh-speaking areas, and goes against the official trend of trying to revive the language. There are differences between the question of Welsh in Wales and Ukrainian in Ukraine, chiefly in that there is effectively no commonality between Welsh, a Celtic language, and English, whereas there is a fair bit of commonality between Russian and Ukrainian. In the parts of Ukraine where both languages are spoken, a new language has appeared, Syrzhik, drawing upon both. It is disproved of by both Russian and Ukrainian nationalists, as one might expect. This I think would be impossible in Wales because of the almost total lack of commonality between English and Welsh. I mentioned my observations to an English resident in North Wales who has learnt Welsh, and he felt that the easy availability of English-language media (internet, telly) is encouraging youngsters to converse increasingly in English, and that Welsh might die out within a generation or two should this trend continue, which he felt was likely to be the case. Paul F _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
