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The Dragon Roars: the Emergence of Civil Disobedience in Welsh Language Politics

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The Dragon Roars: the Emergence of Civil Disobedience in Welsh Language Politics THE DRAGON ROARS The Dragon Roars: The emergence of civil disobedience in Welsh language politics The purpose of my paper is to briefly throw some light on the recent history of the Welsh language and its struggle to survive into the 21st century. Of the six Celtic languages that have survived until modern times, it is probably Welsh that today enjoys the strongest position of them all. At this time, over half a million people in Wales still speak Welsh, and with the advent of the Welsh National Assembly in 1999 it was declared one of Wales’s two official languages. Welsh-medium education is freely available throughout the country, it has its own radio and television service, and you can even buy a Welsh-language version of the famous BigMac in Wales—namely the Mac Mawr. What greater proof of the language's vitality could there possibly be? However, behind the current comparatively healthy position of Welsh lies a tale of immense endeavour, perseverance, courage, sacrifice and sheer guts. Because less than fifty years ago, you'd easily have been excused for thinking that Welsh wouldn't survive to see the third millennium. So during my paper I'd like to examine the miraculous recovery the Welsh language has witnessed during the last half century, and the key part played in that recovery by civil disobedience. Until comparatively recently Welsh was the first and only language of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Wales. At the beginning of the 19th Copyright © 2000 Dylan Phillips 1 THE DRAGON ROARS century, more than three-quarters of the population spoke Welsh as their first language, and even at the beginning of the 20th century, nearly a million people—half the population—still spoke Welsh as their mother- tongue. However, soon after enumerations recording the number of Welsh- speakers began with the decennial population census of 1891, it was realised that the language was quickly losing ground. By 1921 the percentage of Welsh-speakers had fallen to 37%. By 1951 it had fallen to just 29%. Half way through the 20th century, therefore, it was realised that Welsh was losing its native speakers at a rate of one every 90 minutes.1 In actual fact, it was little wonder that Welsh was losing ground so quickly by the first half of the last century. After all, Welsh had absolutely no official status whatsoever since the Union of Wales with England in 1536, when it had been completely ostracised from the political, administrative and legislative life of Wales. Four centuries later and Welsh was still very much conspicuous by its absence wherever you went in Wales. English was the exclusive language of the law courts, the civic authorities and government. English had been the sole language of education in Wales since 1870 when a state educational system was created throughout Britain. Even by the beginning of the 1970s, parents by-and-large were forced to accept that English would be the only realistic medium of instruction for their children. Fast-moving developments in the field of radio and television also underlined the language's total inferiority. In 1970 the BBC broadcast more hours of Arabic than it did in Welsh. But it wasn't just a problem of lack of status. Several economic and social factors also threatened its future, such as the decline of the traditional economies that sustained Welsh-speaking communities, the out-migration of Welsh-speakers looking for work, and the in-migration of English-speakers looking to escape the drab industrial conurbations of the English Midlands. All these things, coupled with Welsh-speakers’ low self-esteem and total lack of confidence in the utility and the value of their mother-tongue, were seriously endangering its 1 For a statistical examination of the position of the Welsh language, see John Aitchison and Harold Carter, Language, Economy and Society: The Chaning Fortunes of the Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century (Cardiff, 2000). Copyright © 2000 Dylan Phillips 2 THE DRAGON ROARS future.2 By midway through the 20th century the future of the language looked bleak. When the results of the latest decennial census were released in 1961, it seemed as if the Act of Union's objective of completely eradicating Welsh was about to be realised. It showed in stomach- churning detail that the total number of Welsh-speakers had now fallen as low as 650,000—or 26% of the population—a loss of over a quarter of a million speakers in just 60 years. Supporters of the language were forcefully shaken by these stark statistics, and many despaired for its future. It was clear that the Welsh language was in crisis and that the 1961 census had sounded the final warning. It wasn’t as if anybody hadn’t ever tried to avert this impending disaster. Numerous societies and associations had been formed during the first half of the 20th century to campaign on the language's behalf. But their efforts to a great degree were being impeded by the way in which they campaigned. In reality, they were much too polite and well- mannered for their own good. Because they didn’t want to rock the boat too much, to upset anybody, or raise their collective voice in protest, they were effectively sidelined and ignored by the establishment. So despite all their hard efforts and their tireless work, the inferior position of Welsh remained unchecked. Consequently more and more supporters of the language were becoming increasingly frustrated with its continuing decline in fortunes, and many called for bolder measures by government to preserve the language. Some even began to argue that the time had come to abandon the campaigning tactics of earlier movements and to adopt a radical new approach—by unconstitutional means if necessary. The main advocate of this argument was Saunders Lewis, the celebrated author and literary critic and President of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party from 1926 to 1939. He became convinced by 1962 that the battle for the future of the language was more important than the campaign for self-government. Lewis had lost patience with 2 For the most recent and detailed study of the plight of the Welsh language during the last century, see Geraint H. Jenkins and Mari A. Williams (eds.), “Let's do our Best for the Ancient Tongue”: The Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century (Cardiff, 2000). Copyright © 2000 Dylan Phillips 3 THE DRAGON ROARS Plaid Cymru’s strategy of election campaigning and the abysmal failure of the early language movements. Therefore, in a radio broadcast on Tuesday night, 13 February 1962, he called for a national campaign of civil disobedience in support of Welsh. The aim of his lecture entitled Tynged yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language) was to awaken the Welsh people to the crisis facing their language, for he believed that if the present trend were to continue Welsh would cease to exist as a living language by the beginning of the 21st century. He therefore called on his supporters to abandon their electoral campaigning and to organise a direct action campaign to “make it impossible to conduct local authority or central government business without the Welsh language.”3 Spurred on by their frustration, and inspired—or perhaps shocked—by Saunders Lewis's lecture, many now believed that civil disobedience would be the only effective means of securing official status for Welsh. They felt that the authorities were completely oblivious to the critical condition of the language and that there was justifiable cause to try and gain their attention in a dramatic way. The early 60s were also, of course, a period of worldwide unrest and turmoil. In many countries minorities and peoples were expressing their disillusionment with the constitutional political process. California, sure enough, was at the very hub of this movement as student protests in support of the freedom of expression swept all over the globe from the American West Coast as far as Warsaw and Moscow in the east. There were protests in Paris against the policy of the French government in its Algerian colony; massive peace marches in London against the atomic bomb; strikes and riots in South Africa against the injustices of apartheid; and civil disobedience campaigns to achieve equal rights for black people throughout the United States. The 60s were an exhilarating period throughout the world, and supporters of the Welsh language hoped that by emulating the methods of their international cousins back in Wales they would be able to elevate the status of their mother tongue. 3 Saunders Lewis, Tynged yr Iaith (London, [1962]). For the English translation, see Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘The Fate of the Language (1962)’ in Alun R. Jones and Gwyn Thomas (eds.), Presenting Saunders Lewis (Cardiff, 1973), pp. 127–1. Copyright © 2000 Dylan Phillips 4 THE DRAGON ROARS To this end a small hard-core of supporters centred around Aberystwyth decided in August 1962 to establish a new pressure group dedicated to non-violent civil disobedience to campaign for the language’s future. Their first meeting, as fitting a group of Celtic academics and students, was held two months later in a pub. There they elected the first two officers of the new group, drafted notices and pamphlets to give it publicity, deliberated over the details of their first campaign, and decided on a name—one that would incessantly plague the authorities throughout the next forty years, namely Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, or the Welsh Language Society.4 Funnily enough, the first campaign was actually started by accident five months before Cymdeithas had even been formed.
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