Welsh language: The city, the country and the colony

There is a tendency of minority languages of surviving in the countryside and, even there, they usually end up being reached by a majority language, becoming gradually less used by younger generations until it almost disappears. These relationships, beyond being perceptible even by someone that is not a specialist in the issue, were studied with a scientific view (e.g. Hetcher’s model of cultural division of labour). But the Welsh language, the Cymraeg, tries to defy both tendencies.

In the article The streets of Bethesda (2004, alternative link), the linguist Paul Manning tells how the Welsh nationalist organizations of the 19^th Century debated among themselves wether the Cymraeg was a language hostile to the industrial environment or not. The rural leaders argued that the industrial centers were too bonded to England’s capital and would develop using English language exclusively. The Welsh capitalists sustained that, since more and more workers were leaving the fields to work in factories and slater and coal extraction, the cities would be the only possible future to Cymraeg. Even if those Industry men were not talking the truth, the Welsh seen as “standard” passed to be the one spoken by the miners and workers of slate processing factories, not the rural worker’s. It continued a “non-metropolitan” language though. Only more recently this pattern has started to change.

The Welsh language in Cardiff: a quiet revolution (Aitchison & Carter, 1987 alternative link) describes an increasing use of Cymraeg in the Welsh capital city, a heavily Anglicized area of the nation. Among other happenings that favoured this raise, he points out the founding of the Welsh Folk Museum, the inauguration of more Welsh speaking TV channels and the equality between English and Welsh in courts (a measure that attracted many Cymraeg speakers to act as interpreters and translators). These actions favored the developing of a class of Welsh speaking liberal professionals and white-collar salary men that found themselves privileged by speaking Cymraeg and that wanted to keep this advantage to their children. Because of that, there are several nursery schools (pre-primary schools) in Cardiff which educate children in Cymraeg. (About social division and Welsh language, see also The craft of reference (Manning, 2004).

The growth of the use of Cymraeg in the Metropolis and in a high mobility class defies the regional taboo. The paper Affiliation, Engagement, Language Use and Vitality (Nikolas et alii, 2005 alternative link) shows that the age taboo is also being defied. He exposes how the determinant age group to the growth of Welsh language use is around 16 years old, that would be the time when the adolescents are looking for an identity. This commitment with “Welshness” is crucial to the development of Cymraeg as an everyday language? The authors are not sure:

“But it is also unclear precisely where people locate the social value of Welsh, for example as a ‘language for life’ or as a more symbolic and iconic code.” (Nikolas et alii, op. cit., p. 6)

Cymraeg usage. Source: Welsh Language Board

Now that we already showed the current Welsh language status in its native land, we want to add some info of its usage elsewhere: the Welsh settlements in Chubut, Argentina. According to Maria Teresa Agozzino in Transplanted Traditions: An Assessment of Welsh Lore and Language in Argentina (2006) there are yet an average number of Welsh speakers (that speak the Cymraeg with an intonation pattern markedly influenced by Spanish), but the preserving of Welsh costumes is decaying and the acculturation improving.  

At least in one city though – the small town of Gaiman – the Welsh traditions persist and are improving, because they have become a profitable commodity. In the article TheWar of the Tea Houses (2009), the researcher Geraldine Lublin explains how Welsh traditions – language included – have being preserved in Gaiman to attract tourists. Actually these traditions are quite hybridized, being very specific of the Welsh descendants’ elite and apart of the traditions of Wales. The “War of the Tea” of the article’s title refers to propaganda and legal disputes between the tea houses owned by this elite and the ones owned by other European descendants and Argentines.

Welsh tea house at Gaiman, Argentina (source here)

EXTRA MATERIAL

- Text by J. R. R. Tolkien about Welsh and English languages.