The Changing Status of the Welsh Language

THE CHANGING STATUS OF THE WELSH LANGUAGE KEY STAGE 4 In 1536, Henry VIII’s Act of Union required that anyone in public office in Wales should be able to speak English. Gradually the gentry and other powerful people came to see Welsh as being less important than English though it continued to be a language of culture, religion and the home. In 1846 a Welsh-speaking M.P. asserted in the House of Commons that the Welsh language was holding back the people of Wales. The English language, he claimed, was “the only road to knowledge... the road to improvement and civilization”. He demanded that the government help the Welsh to learn English. The government authorised three English barristers to inspect the state of education in Wales, especially how English was taught to working people and their children. None of these inspectors understood Welsh nor had much experience of education and they knew little about Welsh culture. The three volumes of their report came to be known as Y Llyfrau Gleision ( The Blue Books) because of the colour of their covers. The report was very negative about how education in Wales was organised but it blamed the language itself: “The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of its people.” The inspectors were also all Anglican Christians. Nonconformist Christianity, of which they disapproved, was strong in Wales and these Anglicans reported that it was a bad influence on the Welsh, making them morally inferior, especially Welsh women. The Welsh were both ashamed and outraged. A popular play, Brad Y Llyfrau Gleision (The Treachery of the Blue Books) caught the angry mood and gave a name to the affair. The Welsh campaigned for better education, and especially for state-run secondary schools. They wanted to be in the forefront of the ‘modern’ Victorian age. In 1889 the Welsh Intermediate Education Act set up these secondary schools but, crucially, all teaching was to be done in English. This requirement undermined the Welsh language. Other factors put pressure on the language. As the coal industry grew in the late nineteenth century large numbers of workers who could speak only English moved into the coal-mining areas. By the time of the 1911 census, 40% of people living in the coalfields did not speak Welsh. In addition, a huge proportion of young Welsh-speaking men were killed in the First World War. Also, many Welsh-speaking families encouraged their children to speak English to improve their chances of getting jobs. Concern grew among some Welsh-speakers that if nothing was done to support the Welsh language these pressures would mean people would stop using it. One response was to establish Welsh-medium schools where all the education would be done through the Welsh language. The first Welsh-medium primary school to be set up by a local authority was in Llanelli in 1947 and the first Welsh-medium secondary school began in Flintshire in 1956. !"#$%&'"#%()$*+,-"./01"" " " 02." In the 1950s and 1960s significant numbers of English-speakers from outside Wales moved to rural Welsh-speaking areas but few of these incomers learned Welsh and so the language of many communities changed. Many Welsh-speakers felt that their way of life was under threat and that the government in England did not care. This resentment came to a head over the proposal to flood the Tryweryn Valley near Bala to provide a reservoir of water to be used by the English city of Liverpool. The Welsh-speaking community of Capel Celyn would be submerged but there was nothing anyone in Wales could do to stop the plan. Welsh politicians of all parties were united in their opposition but the Tryweryn Bill was passed by parliament at Westminster in 1957. The valley was flooded and the reservoir opened in 1965. However, the Tryweryn affair prompted the politician, Saunders Lewis to make an influential radio broadcast called Tynged Yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language) in 1962. In this he claimed persuasively that, if firm action were not taken, Welsh would be dead by the end of the twentieth century. One response was the formation of Cymdeithas Yr Iaith (The Welsh Language Society). The society campaigned for the public status of the Welsh language. It wanted local and central government to conduct business through Welsh as well as English. It demanded that public services such as the Post Office, driving licences, birth certificates and road signs, for example, should be provided in Welsh. These efforts prepared the ground for The Welsh Language act of 1967 which recognised that Welsh had the same legal status as English, “that anything done in Welsh in Wales should have the same legal force as it would in English”. Television and radio were major cultural forces so Cymdeithas Yr Iaith, during the 1970s, campaigned for a Welsh-language television service for Wales. The Conservative Party supported this aim in its manifesto for the 1979 general election but when the party won, it tried to go back on the undertaking. Gwynfor Evans, honorary president of Plaid Cymru , the Party of Wales, threatened to fast to death if the promise was not kept. The government backed down and a Welsh-language television service, Sianel Pedwar Cymru S4C was launched in 1982. The Conservative government brought in the Welsh Language Act of 1993 which gave Welsh further legal status. Particularly from the 1970s Welsh-medium education thrived, especially in cities and in industrial south Wales. Although immigration from England continued, these incomers showed a greater willingess to learn Welsh. However the results of the 2011 census showed a drop in the percentage of Welsh-speakers in the population, from 21% in 2001 to 19%. Wales has become a country used to having two languages and to respecting both of them. !"#$%&'"#%()$*+,-"./01"" " " .2.".

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