<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote"> Forwarded From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Fierman, William</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:wfierman@indiana.edu">wfierman@indiana.edu</a>></span><br>Date: Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 3:02 PM<br>
Subject: fyi (today's NYT)<br> <br><br><br>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:24.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The Welsh Strive to Keep Their Language<u></u><u></u></span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">By
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/katrin_bennhold/index.html" title="More Articles by KATRIN BENNHOLD" target="_blank">
<span style="color:blue">KATRIN BENNHOLD</span></a>AUG. 26, 2014 <u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">CARDIFF, Wales — There was a time when Irish and Scottish immigrants in the United States were jealous of their
Welsh cousins, who had not just their patron saint and their resentment of the English to bind them together — but also their very own language.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">A lively Welsh-language press once thrived in the United States. In the 1860s, a daily newspaper, three monthly
journals and a range of books were published in Welsh there, said Jerry Hunter, a professor at Bangor University.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">As one Welsh-American told an Irish-American at the time: “On
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/st_patricks_day/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier" title="More articles about St. Patrick's Day." target="_blank">
<span style="color:blue">St. Patrick’s Day</span></a>, you go to the pub and speak the language of the enemy. On St. David’s Day, we go to the chapel and speak Welsh.”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">But as the Welsh language withered from one generation to the next, much of Welsh-American identity withered
with it. If today it is mainly the Irish and Scottish diasporas that endure in the United States, it is not just because they were always more numerous.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">“Once the Welsh lost their language, they lost their main identifier and assimilated,” Mr. Hunter said.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Photo
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><img src="cid:image001.jpg@01CFC13E.B6632E00" alt="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/08/27/world/europe/27iht-letter27-welsh-language/27iht-letter27-welsh-language-master315.jpg" border="0" height="206" width="315"></span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">A road sign in English and Welsh in Cardiff, Wales. Credit Matt Cardy/Getty Images
<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">That helps to explain why Welsh nationalists have fought so hard to protect their language at home: Welshness,
more than any other national identity in <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/unitedkingdom/index.html?inline=nyt-geo" title="More news and information about United Kingdom." target="_blank">
<span style="color:blue">Britain</span></a>, relies on its linguistic and cultural legacy.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Conquered by England in the 13th century, the Welsh were deprived of their civic identity long ago. But their
plucky little language held out. The oldest tongue in the British Isles, it survived for centuries against all odds, surrounded by one of the most powerful languages, English. Cymraeg, as the Welsh call their language, “is intrinsic to the fascination, beauty
and self-esteem of this nation,” wrote the Welsh journalist and author Jan Morris.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Wales has bards and druids (indeed, it has archdruids), and in addition to wildly popular national cultural
competitions like the Eisteddfod and the Urdd, one of Europe’s largest youth festivals, most villages have their own versions of both. Culturally, Mr. Hunter said, Wales punches well above its weight: “Where else have you got thousands of people crowding into
a pavilion watching the results of a poetry contest?”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Welsh went into rapid decline in Victorian times, when schoolmasters bent on Anglicizing the Welsh beat the
language out of the country, often literally. The 1891 census showed the language spoken by a minority for the first time. A century later, the number of Welsh speakers had shrunk to 508,000 out of about three million.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">“They stole our language,” said Neil Hudson, a retired engineer in the former coal-mining valleys outside Cardiff.
“I’m 70 years old. My grandparents on both sides spoke Welsh, and I don’t.”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">But his grandchildren might. One in five people in Wales speaks Welsh, and one in four children attends a Welsh-language
school.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">It has been an uphill battle. The long border that once made Wales vulnerable to English conquest also exposes
it to English immigration: A full quarter of the population is non-native (compared with about 10 percent in Scotland). Militant language activists used to burn down English vacation homes.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">These days all signs and several public services are bilingual. There is a dedicated Welsh-language television
network. Welsh vocabulary, a garble of Celtic consonants to the uninitiated, is expanding. Jon Gower, a television producer, cites “Ffôn ar y lôn,” literally “phone on the road,” for cellphone, or “carlo” as slang for cocaine (inspired by the American slang
word “charlie”). But there is still work to do, he laments: “You can’t talk dirty in Welsh.”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">A more serious issue is that the 2011 census showed a decline in the share of Welsh speakers to 19 percent from
21 percent a decade earlier. The improved official status of the language has failed to solve one problem, said Geraint Talfan Davies, chairman of the Welsh National Opera: The growing percentage of Welsh speakers in southeastern Wales matters less to the
language than its decline in the northern and western heartlands, where it has been the language of a good majority.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">As Scotland debates independence and all of Britain mulls the meaning of national identity, Wales faces an old
but no less existential question, Mr. Talfan Davies said. “We have done all the easy things for the language,” he said. “The question is, what’s next?”<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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</div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>
University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br>
<a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------
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