<div dir="ltr"><h1>The decline of the Welsh language</h1>
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Evan Harris
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<div align="justify"><strong>Welsh road signs.</strong></div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify">I
think it’s time that I took ‘Welsh (fluent)’ off my CV. Yesterday my
housemate asked me to say something in Welsh. I tried to say ‘I’m in my
flat, frying vegetables’ but couldn’t think of the word for vegetables,
or flat and the verb ‘to fry’ is adapted from the English ‘ffrio’. All
my education from age 3 to 16 was in Welsh – I scored top marks in Welsh
language and literature exams – but I can no longer speak it. </div><div align="justify"> </div><div class="" align="justify">The
Welsh language is steadily declining and yet, the amount of
Welsh-speaking schools are on the rise. Are the facts being ignored in
order to keep stoking the embers of nationalist myths?</div><div align="justify"> </div><div align="justify">Last
week, I learned my atrophied tongue is not alone; I am part of a trend.
A report published by the Welsh Assembly shows only 50% of Welsh
speakers aged 16-24 consider themselves fluent. Only a third use it
socially.</div><div align="justify"><br>Mainstream political support for
the language is now reflexive and uncritical. Welsh politicians and the
commentariat are alarmed at the failure to make Welsh a “living
language”. Their solutions to the problem are inspired, considered,
informed: speak it more, make it more relevant, use it more on Facebook
and Twitter. The Welsh Assembly announced the allocation of three
quarters of a million pounds to develop Welsh technology apps. </div><div align="justify"><br>Despite
significant funding and policy efforts, the language is in decline.
Between the 2001 and 2011 census, the proportion of Welsh language
speakers fell by 2%: 19% of the Welsh population now claims they can
speak Welsh. I stress ‘claims’; it is possible that these figures are
inflated. Welsh nationalist rhetoric creates aspiration to speak the
language; the population is told that it is part of their identity,
their heritage (“the very essence of who we are” - Heritage Minister
Alun Ffred Jones speaking in the EU Council of Ministers). This is
demonstrated in the WA report: participants’ reported desire to more
frequently speak Welsh is stoked by aspirations to stronger cultural,
historical and personal identity. </div><div align="justify"><br>If
identity is the populist vehicle for the Welsh language, at the wheel
is, in fact, ‘status’. Fevre, Denney and Borland identify a small
middle-class status group, the Welsh Class, as the promoter and
beneficiary of Welsh nationalism. This status group is
socio-economically advantaged and is concerned with the honour and
prestige of its language and culture. It is the community at the heart
of Welsh nationalism, and has succeeded in normalising the aspiration to
belong to an amorphous national community whilst remaining aloof as the
arbiter of its high culture. To justify the political and financial
investment needed to expand the language, to rhetorically extend it to
everyone in Wales and to facilitate its use in all public spheres, the
Welsh Class and policy makers promote myths about the instrumental
benefits of learning the language and inscribing its public use in
statute. Politically, this instrumental discourse has been successful,
as it has received significant funding and policy commitments. However,
the instrumental myths that legitimate funding and policy are based on
naïve or willful misinterpretation of research. Uncritical parents
internalise these myths; Welsh-medium education continues to expand, but
the language is still in decline. Last week’s Welsh Assembly report
demonstrates that Welsh education does not create Welsh speakers. If,
then, all this funding and policy doesn’t benefit the language or
culture, who does benefit? Sayers notes that Welsh language policy is a
social policy that does not improve people’s capabilities and does not
instrumentally benefit society – it benefits a small status group, it is
a conservative policy.<br><br>Here are the instrumental myths used to promote the language:</div><div align="justify"><br><strong>1. Welsh-medium schools perform better than English-medium schools.</strong><br>Gorard
and others have published refutations of this claim. This claim is
based on a comparison of raw data. When adjusted for factors such as
socio-economic background - the factor most likely to affect educational
achievement - Welsh medium schools perform no better than their
English-medium equivalents. More generally, the Welsh education system
performs poorly – below the EU average: Michael Davidson, of the OECD
and responsible for PISA – an international evaluation of 15 year olds’
maths, reading and science achievement – described education in Wales as
‘bleak’.</div><div align="justify"><br>A further point that is rarely
considered: the Welsh language survives because of coercion and
punishment in schools because there are few, if any, economic, cultural
or social incentives to speaking it – the WA report demonstrates that
funding and policy have failed to create these incentives. The carrots
are rotten so they resort to sticks. In my Welsh-medium school the most
likely reason for punishment was speaking English; that is, you are most
likely to be punished for speaking the language in which you best
express yourself. This is punished by verbal aggression, humiliation and
sanctions such as the loss of break time. There is a paranoid,
aggressive siege mentality to the promotion of the language in schools.
Whether you think that the language is under siege by a cultural
imperialist or not, you must wonder whether this is the best environment
for children to learn not only Welsh but other languages such as maths,
science and all the skills that provide students with a productive
future. Imagine the English equivalent: two children, for example first
generation British-Iraqis, in a London school punished for speaking
Arabic at break time. What does authoritarian language prohibition do to
a child’s perception of language, culture, education, authority? Does
it facilitate or inhibit the social use of the language? For some in my
school, speaking English was a defiant act, an assertion of an identity
independent of prescribed nationalism; for most it was just more
functional. <br><br><strong>2. Bilingualism makes children more intelligent. </strong><br>Yes,
it does, sort of. There is no academic consensus, but there is research
supporting the claim. However, there are two types of bilinguals:
simultaneous and sequential. Simultaneous bilinguals acquire two
languages from birth and speak both at home. They have native-level
language structures, and their control of both can give certain
cognitive benefits. However, only 7% of Welsh-language primary school
children are simultaneous bilinguals, a tiny minority.</div><div align="justify"><br>The
majority of Welsh-language students, half of whom lose fluency when
they leave school, are sequential bilinguals i.e. they acquire their
second language in a formal setting. There are no clear cognitive
benefits for sequential bilinguals i.e. there are no clear cognitive
benefits for the vast majority of Welsh-language students. Further,
bilingualism is shown to restrict vocabularies in both languages - this
can be overcome by better education; again, in Wales this is shown to be
sub-standard.<br><br><strong>3. Bilingualism makes easier the acquisition of other languages.</strong><br>There
is evidence suggesting that bilingualism increases metalinguistic
ability – the awareness of language structures and sounds – which better
facilitates further language acquisition. There is no consensus
however; this claim is contested. Further, in research where this claim
is made, education and native language proficiency are factors
controlling language acquisition. Again, Welsh students, on average,
perform worst in the UK. Further again, any metalinguistic ability is
squandered if there is no interest in, or sufficient provision for, the
acquisition of foreign languages. Welsh students are below the European
and UK average for language qualifications, and the number of Welsh
students studying a foreign language is in decline. <br><br><strong>4. Welsh bilingualism makes you more employable. </strong><br>Research
suggests the contrary. Compared to Anglophones, in Wales, Welsh
speakers better achieve educational and occupational attainment, but are
comparatively underpaid for those attainments. A suggested reason for
this is that bilingual workers are immobile their advantage exists only
in a small enclave and employers exploit this immobility. When there is a
shortage of bilingual jobs in the enclave, workers migrate and lose
their advantage. </div><div align="justify"><br>There is no evidence of
increased workplace productivity in bilinguals, but there is a small
premium for bilingual workers, which is accounted for by employers’
needs to comply with government policy. That is, there is a small
premium for a small proportion of the population because some public
sector jobs must comply with bilingual policy. Evidence of better
employability in the private sector is weak.</div><div align="justify"><br>These
negligible benefits for a minority of the population – a minority which
is likely to anyway be socio-economically advantaged – occur in the
context of the 2nd worst employment figures in the UK, the least
productive UK regional economy and a per capita GDP decline. This is
despite continued EU Objective One funding in South and West Wales,
funding designated to the areas of the EU most in need of development.
Wales has appointed the UK’s first ever poverty minister, as between a
third and a quarter of citizens live below the breadline and besides
London, Wales has the UK’s worst child poverty. In this context, Welsh
nationalism is the old man in his shed busy with a hobby only he can
appreciate whilst his family starves at the dinner table. Language
advocates are not responsible for Welsh poverty, but they do not help as
they persist with myths that the language has instrumental value to
learners. It doesn’t.<br><br>Williams, in 1989, the period leading up to the Welsh Language Act, wrote: <br>Thus
we are faced with a generation of bilingual school-leavers who have
been socialised into believing that their bilingualism is prized by
society, which on examination turns out to be a rather narrowly
constructed, middle-class public sector society, which rewards its own
purveyors of information and knowledge. There are clear class
implications in the development of an administrative bureaucracy, which
is both the principal agency for change and the principal net
beneficiary of change.</div><div align="justify"><br>We are now twenty
four years later; twenty four years of policy and investment in the
language. Plus ça change. Use of the language has increased and has
perhaps peaked, but benefits to those who have learnt the language have
not followed its growth. Rhetorically, the Welsh people have been
invited to join the Welsh Class, but few have achieved that social
movement. The economic benefits of bilingualism are limited, and limited
to this already advantaged group of people. So too the prestige of
speaking Welsh and the aspiration to speak it, is now widespread, but
few are fluent and even fewer use it in a way that the Welsh Class can.
Welsh language education does not, and perhaps will not, give students
access to the benefits the Welsh Class enjoys – what gives students
access to these benefits is class movement, something the Welsh
education system and economy facilitates for few.</div><div align="justify"><br>Let’s
be clear, for intrinsic reasons, I am not advocating the death of the
Welsh language. When a language dies a history and culture goes with it,
a unique human subjectivity is lost. But if nationalism adopts
instrumental rhetoric then it must be repudiated – the literature shows
that the language and culture is not instrumentally beneficial to
learners. What reasons remain for its policy support are status and
identity. But speaking Welsh does not, should not, connote a more
prestigious or authentic ‘Welsh identity’. The idea that a middle-class
bilingual from Gwynedd or Cardiff Bay is more authentically ‘Welsh’ than
a working-class anglophone from Merthyr is self-evidently repugnant.
Those who will claim this is not the Welsh nationalist rhetoric are
naïve, but this is the rhetoric used in schools, in political chambers,
is implicit in policy documents and is evident in people’s reported
desire to use the language so as to feel more ‘Welsh’. </div><br>The
preservation of the language and its minority culture may not be
mutually exclusive with an egalitarian, social politics, but currently
contributes very little or nothing to the lives of an economically and
educationally disadvantaged majority. Patriots like to think of Wales as
a nation of story and song; these are not attributes that create good
policy. The country is in a mire, the elites tell tales and point at
dragon shadows in the mud.<br><br><a href="http://www.morungexpress.com/Perspective/102442.html">http://www.morungexpress.com/Perspective/102442.html</a><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>**************************************<br>
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