Ball Martin, M?ller Nicole. The Celtic Languages

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646 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

to Welsh experience, the Gaelic- medium experience has been shown to be highly success-

ful in terms of educational attainment levels, including both spoken and written English at

levels comparable to or better than English- medium educational levels in Scotland.

The media and the Gaelic arts likewise have crucial roles to play in language main-

tenance and regeneration, and they have been well supported by appropriate research

initiatives which demonstrate their importance (Sproull and Ashcroft 1993; Sproull and

Chalmers 1998; Chalmers and Danson 2004). From a local fèis or arts festival in Barra,

twenty- ﬁ ve years ago, a national cultural and educational movement, Fèisean nan Gàid-

heal, has developed. So have local Gaelic arts clubs, such as Ceòl is Craic in Glasgow.

These are important moves in developing a Gaelic cultural infrastructure nationally. The

future of a Gaelic- speaking community lies very much in creating new forms of network

and structure based around community social centres, Gaelic schools, and new forms of

communication media, the Gaelic arts, and new electronic technology. These are likely

to be a feature of the Gaelic environment for the majority of Gaelic speakers outwith the

‘heartlands’, and they will be just as appropriate and necessary within them. Local initia-

tives in such urban centres as Inverness, Glasgow and Edinburgh have begun to undertake

research on the social and cultural needs of local Gaelic speakers, and have based local

language planning upon it. In Edinburgh, for example, local survey research among Gaelic

speakers undertaken by Wilson McLeod (2005) has drawn attention to the possibilities

offered by new forms of urban Gaelic networks and communities, as has a similar study in

Inverness (Pedersen Consulting/Hecla Consulting 2004). A recent study on Gaelic learn-

ers (MacCaluim 2007) has emphasized their importance nationally for reversing language

shift. There is at last an ofﬁ cial infrastructure which needs to stay abreast of all this, and to

lead it effectively, in order to enable the new Gaelic networks of the future to develop. The

language and its speakers today face the challenge of whether the remaining strongholds

can for much longer continue as traditional everyday Gaelic speech communities. If not,

the new Gaelic statutory and cultural infrastructure might need urgently to prioritize a new

Gaelic community based upon today’s social realities and developing technology.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Support for the various studies reported is gratefully acknowledged from the Social Sci-

ence Research Council (Senior Research Fellowship 1972–4, and small project grant HR

4039/1 1976–8), Economic and Social Research Council (major project grant G00232328

1986–8, and assistance from Data Archive), Hatﬁ eld Polytechnic research funds and

secondment, Highland Regional Council for data and ofﬁ ce facilities, Highlands and

Islands Development Board for library facilities, and General Register Ofﬁ ce (Scotland)

Census Branch, EU Euromosaic Project (Bangor), Western Isles Language Plan Project

(Stornoway), and Comhairle nan Eilean (Stornoway) for supply of data.

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650 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

CHAPTER 14

THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC

CONTEXT OF WELSH

Robert Owen Jones and Colin H. Williams

It is a minor miracle that Welsh has survived to this day. The 2001 census ﬁ gure

records that 20.8 per cent of the population can speak Welsh, giving a total of 582,000

self- reported speakers. Many thousands more can understand Welsh. Beyond Wales, espe-

cially within the rest of the UK there are a large number of Welsh speakers who, despite

their current residence, contribute to the vitality of Welsh in so many ways. Undergirding

these speakers, far more formal attention, resources, investment and government backing

is being expended on promoting and spreading the language than ever before. The Wales

Assembly Government policy is to create a bilingual society and to secure a ﬂ ourishing

future for the use of Welsh in as many spheres of social and public life as is possible. The

challenge is great and there are limited grounds for hope that current efforts to revitalize

Welsh will yet succeed.

However, throughout ﬁ fteen centuries of its existence the Welsh language has been

under siege and for most of the period whenever bilingual and linguistically- mixed com-

munities have come into being, linguistic erosion has occurred with a resultant rejection

of Welsh as the primary language.

In the sixth century Welsh was

spoken, not only in the

area currently known as Wales, but also in the West Midlands of England, and through

present- day Lancashire and Yorkshire into the lowlands of Scotland. Indeed the earliest

Welsh poetry originated in southern Scotland and is ascribed to poets living in that area

(the Old North) in the sixth century. When the Anglo- Saxons gained a victory at the battle

of Chester in 615 they effectively drove a wedge between the Welsh speakers of Wales

and their compatriots in the north. The loss of political independence accompanied by

a lower social and economic status ultimately resulted in an erosion of Welsh outside

the borders of Wales. Enforced bilingualism for utilitarian reasons and the absence of an

institutional framework to bolster the language eventually resulted in a language shift.

The Welsh language became conﬁ ned largely within the borders of Wales.

For the ﬁ rst millennium of its history Welsh in Wales was not only safe but ﬂ ourishing.

It was the natural linguistic medium of all sections of society – peasants, farmers, land-

owners, craftsmen, clergy, lawyers, administrators and the gentry. Furthermore a distinct

cultural and literary tradition developed which was initially supported by the princes and

later on by the gentry. The poet and storyteller (cyfarwydd; pl. cyfarwyddiaid) were pro-

fessionals and their training was both thorough and arduous.

Welsh was both the medium

of everyday speech for discussing the weather, farming, hunting or interpersonal relation-

ships, and also a medium that had developed appropriate registers for all aspects of life:

high status situations as well as lowly, less formal, situations. Welsh became an effective

literary language and the poets developed distinctive but complicated metrics which later

THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXT OF WELSH 651

evolved into strict metre poetry. The poets were language specialists and this in turn gave

the language prestige and helped develop a fairly uniform literary variety which gave rise

to a standard spoken literary variety since initially this was an oral/aural culture rather

than a written culture.

The medieval Welsh tales illustrate the mastery and professionalism of the storytell-

ers.

They had to have at their disposal a stock of adjectives, synonyms and phrases so

that they could interpret and recount the story effectively. They also had to be aware of the

linguistic competence of their audience. This in turn had the effect of promoting a public

Welsh was also the language of administration and of the legal profession. In Saunders

Lewis’s opinion, ‘The Welsh laws represent one of the high points of European civiliza-

tion during the Middle Ages’ (1932: 32). Lloyd and Owen (1986: xix) state that the Welsh

laws, like the mythological tales and the poetry, were composed in Welsh and therefore

the language had developed the vocabulary and terminology to deal with complicated

legal minutiae. The language of Hywel’s Laws is clear, detailed and totally unambiguous.

It is somewhat surprising, however, that a legal code ever developed in Welsh, especially

as early as the tenth century. That alone is evidence of the socio- political strength and lin-

guistic adequacies of the language at the beginning of the Middle Welsh period. Across

Europe local vernaculars had not achieved such a status. Latin remained supreme in the

legal domain and other associated domains. Yet in Wales the vernacular had sufﬁ cient

status and dynamic application to compete with and supersede Latin in the legal domain.

The same is partly true in the religious register because during the Middle Welsh period

a substantial body of religious material appeared in Welsh, such as parts of scripture and

Welsh translations of the lives of saints (see T. Jones 1940; Roberts 1961). Latin, how-

ever, remained the ofﬁ cial language of the religious register, yet all works which were

deemed important were translated into Welsh, which demonstrates that the sociologi-

cal conditions at the time promoted an expansion in the use of Welsh. Latin, the lingua

franca of the ecclesiastical and academic world in Europe, did not have a higher or more

prestigious status than the vernacular in Wales. Dating from the same period there are

manuscripts showing that Welsh could be used for such highly technical domains as med-

ical surgery, herbal medicine and personal hygiene (Diverres 1913). There were, in Wales

during the Middle Ages, professional doctors who had received the kind of training in

orthodox practical medicine that was available in some of the great medical centres of

Europe such as Bologna and Salerno (Lloyd and Owen 1986: xxiv). These men practised

their craft and preserved knowledge of it in writing in the vernacular Welsh. The language

had professional status and had been adopted in the very domains where Latin had tradi-

tionally dominated.

One can truly call the Middle Welsh period the ‘Golden Age’: not only was excellent

literature produced, but the domains of the language were considerably extended in spite

of the fact that Wales lost its political independence in 1282 as a result of the Edwardian

conquest. English colonial control transformed the formal, political and legal status of the

country, but it did not change drastically the social order and the resultant stability helped

to sustain and promote the language in spite of the fact that it lacked political status.

Welsh- medium culture was entrenched in the very fabric of the social order. The aristoc-

racy looked upon it as their privilege and duty to support the bards and the cyfarwyddiaid

and some went as far as to establish their own libraries of poetry, stories, traditions and

historical documents. The gentry were men of learning and although in time they had

considerable contact with Norman French, with other Europeans and of course with the

English, that did not erode their pride in their own ancestry, pedigree and indeed identity.

652 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

The gentry remained supportive of and loyal to their roots, their culture and their own lan-

guage. They were the social elite, but also the leaders, and their adherence to the language

made it possible for it to expand its spheres of application and realize its full potential

socially and linguistically. The language had a full complement of registers at this time.

A person could discuss all topics through the medium of Welsh. The language was robust

in both the spoken and the written modes. All relationships from the very personal to the

most formal and ofﬁ cial could be expressed in it. In general for the ﬁ rst nine centuries

or so of its existence, the Welsh language survived and ﬂ ourished and was successfully

adapted to new social situations as they arose. The next six centuries have seen periods of

recession in terms of functional use and numbers of speakers, yet there have also been sig-

niﬁ cant periods of revitalization, as is currently being experienced.

In 1891 Professor John Morris- Jones of the University College of North Wales wrote

about the Welsh language:

More people today speak it than ever in its history, it is more widely read in pro-

portion to its speakers than possibly any other language. One quarterly and one

bimonthly magazine are published in it, some ﬁ fteen monthlies as well as eighteen or

twenty weekly newspapers. It has at last been given recognition by the British Gov-

ernment. Acts of Parliament and other parliamentary papers are translated into it. The

government pays for teaching

as a special subject in primary schools. A century

ago it was prophesied that it would be extinct within a hundred years. No one today

would dare utter a similar prophecy.

(Morris- Jones 1891: 49)

John Morris- Jones was sincere in his sentiments, and yet over a century later, many

of those who are concerned with, and have a concern for the Welsh language, are still

haunted by similar pessimistic prophecies.

Within four years of Morris- Jones’s optimistic statement, Southall’s (1895) report on

the ofﬁ cial census survey reported that only 54 per cent

the population of Wales spoke

Welsh, as opposed to 71 per cent as estimated by Ravenstein (1879) for the early 1870s.

During the twentieth century the percentage of Welsh speakers fell to 20.8 per cent in

1971, to 19 per cent in 1981 and to 18.7 per cent in 1991. This apparently inexorable

decline measured a deﬁ nite language shift from Welsh to English. It would be futile, how-

ever, to try to understand recent trends and developments without viewing them within

a historical perspective. J. E. Southall made a salient point vis- à- vis the socio- historical

context of synchronic tendencies:

From 1871 to 1891 colloquial Welsh has remained nearly stationary. The reason for

this is that the Tudor Legislation and Hanoverian politics set currents into existence

which harassed the language, but which were not strong enough to prevent its bene-

ﬁ ting by the increase of population and the popular education of the meeting houses.

All the while however the nineteenth century was sharpening its knives and gradu-

ally gathering strength to dispute further advances.

(Southall 1895: 35)

The Acts of Union of England and Wales in 1536 and 1542 are frequently cited as the ﬁ rst

decisive milestones in the erosion of the Welsh language. This incorporation certainly

was important and its effects far- reaching, but it would be fairer to say that it accelerated

rather than initiated the encroachment of English on domains which had traditionally been

THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXT OF WELSH 653

Welsh medium. Professor Glanmor Williams (1988) argues that the Welsh language had

been in competition with Latin, French and English long before this date; that upper- class

Welshmen had started turning to English, and some were opting to send their children to

be educated in England at centres such as Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court.

Many of them had become ‘Saeson’ in public language before 1536; it had been the

price of advancement before and after the Acts of Union (G. Williams 1988: 49). The

Acts of Union merely formalized certain forces that had been quietly at work for some

years, and the immediate results were not as dramatic as was commonly believed. But

they were the ﬁ rst ofﬁ cial pronouncements to regard the Welsh language as being in ferior

to English.

Also be it enacted by the authority aforesaid that all justices, Commissioners, sher-

iffs, coroners, escheators, stewards and their Lieutenants, and all other ofﬁ cers and

ministers of the law, shall proclaim and keep the sessions, courts . . . in the English

tongue, and all oaths of ofﬁ cers, juries and inquests and all other afﬁ davits . . . to be

given and done in the English tongue; and also that from henceforth no person or per-

sons that use the Welsh speech or language shall have or enjoy any manner of ofﬁ ce

or fees within this realm of England, Wales or other the King’s Dominion upon pain

of forfeiting the same ofﬁ ces or fees, unless he or they use and exercise the English

speech or language.

(W. Rees 1937: 95–6)

The psychological effects of such a pronouncement had far- reaching repercussions. The

Welsh were granted equality with the English under the law, and new socio- economic

opportunities were open to them, but it meant accepting the supremacy of the English

language and ascribing to Welsh a low socio- economic status. In all political, adminis-

trative, legal and public circles, English was the only language allowed. Welsh certainly

had registers appropriate to such situations but they could no longer be used. This was

not forced bilingualism for the mass of the population, but rather a statute that had

direct and adverse effect upon that section of society which had previously produced

the administrators, the legal advisors, the educators and indeed the societal leaders. The

very section of society that had upheld Welsh literacy and culture now became intent

upon making its young men literate in English. Anhysbys [Anonymous] (1585: 53) com-

ments: ‘the gentry and others neglect and treat the Welsh language with contempt; most

of the gentry can’t read or write in Welsh, a fact which should shame them. This causes

the English to believe and indeed to pronounce that the language is ugly, weak, lifeless

and worthless.’ They were sent to England to be educated and very often returned as

strangers to the roots that had nurtured them. The gentry was gradually anglicized, which

meant that social differences in Wales then became closely correlated with linguistic

differences. The Welsh cultural framework that had been the mainstay of the language

collapsed. Public- status domains which had been Welsh medium were therefore weak-

ened and eroded. For the educated, all status registers were in English, and Welsh

became largely associated with low status situations such as hearth and home, farming

or addressing tenants and illiterate persons. Since education was English medium, liter-

acy became associated with the English language. Gradually the registers of the Welsh

language were being eroded and replaced by registers in an increasingly hegemonic

language. For the ﬁ rst time in its history the Welsh language was deteriorating, and its

potential register spectrum was shrinking. As early as 1547 William Salesbury warned

that such tendencies could have catastrophic results unless stemmed: ‘And take this as

654 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

a warning from me. If you do not save, build and perfect your language within the time

span of the present generation, it will be too late. And if a language does not have learn-

ing, knowledge and wisdom in it, it is like the screeching of birds and the roar of animals

and beasts.’

Within twenty- ﬁ ve years of the introduction of the Acts of Union, Gwilym Hiraethog

in an introduction to his collection of proverbs records this sad state of affairs:

O God how unkind and so unnatural are so many Welshmen, particularly those who

go outside the borders of their natural land of birth and their country . . . And all

those who stay for a while away from home come to hate and to forget the lan-

guage of their land of birth and their own mother tongue. One notices this when

they speak Welsh clumsily in a corrupt accent and so indistinctly, although they

have not learnt properly any other language, nor can they speak clearly their own

native language, but instead use a corrupt, inarticulate pronunciation following a

foreign language.

(T. H. Parry- WilIiams (ed.) 1953: 60)

Gruffydd Robert, living in exile in Milan, made similar comments in 1567 in the intro-

duction to his Grammar ‘Dospartth Byrr Ar y Rhan Gyntaf i Ramadeg Cymraeg’ (Robert

1567: i):

Seeing myself for some years being regarded as worthless in the land of Wales and

with nothing substantial written in me which would add to the knowledge of my dear

people: I decided that it would be a good thing for me to travel through the lands of

Europe to ﬁ nd out whether anyone of the languages there was in such a contemptu-

ous state as I am and being considered to be useless to those who speak it, which is

my lot.

Negative attitudes to Welsh were obviously prevalent. Commercial, educational, profes-

sional success and prosperity became equated with the English language. The low status

of the Welsh language branded it with the mark of inferiority. This register- conditioned

bilingualism was, of course, by deﬁ nition unstable because of the negative attitudes

towards Welsh which eventually resulted in a language shift among the aristocracy. Gruff-

ydd Robert comments (1567: xii):

I wish that I would be as natural a choice to the Welsh gentleman as his mother

tongue is to any other man. Sometimes my heart feels pity when I see many who

were born and nurtured to speak me but are now unmindful of me, rejecting me and

ﬂ irting with a foreign language before even knowing her properly. You will ﬁ nd

some, as soon as they see the river Severn, or the spires of Shrewsbury and they hear

an Englishman once say ‘good morrow’ they start to forget their Welsh and start pro-

nouncing it with an affected accent; their Welsh becomes anglicised and their English

(God knows) is far too Welsh.

The literary tradition had changed radically by the end of the sixteenth century and the

most proliﬁ c output were songs written to English melodies. In terms of artistry they were

inferior material, but they were songs in Welsh which appealed to the grass roots. They

were invariably composed in dialect and this undermined the idea of a standard form.

Everything about the Welsh language was becoming undigniﬁ ed and it would seem that

THE SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXT OF WELSH 655

the fate of the language was sealed unless a new cultural framework could give it status

and social prestige and preserve it as a literary and written medium.

Two movements helped to avert linguistic extinction, namely, the Reformation and

the Renaissance. The Reformation had not made great headway in Wales. The mass of

the population did not really appreciate its true import, but there were remnants of the old

gentry stock who had received a certain amount of traditional Welsh education as well

as the new and who were convinced that Reformed theology was the answer to the spir-

itual needs of the people of Wales. Clerics such as William Salesbury, William Morgan

and Richard Davies were adamant that the Gospel should be presented to the people in

their own language. It was the distinguished humanist and Christian William Salesbury

who pleaded passionately with his fellow- countrymen to secure a Welsh translation of

the Bible: ‘Unless you wish to be worse than animals . . . insist on getting learning in your

language . . . And unless you wish to abandon utterly the faith of Christ . . . insist on get-

ting the Holy Scripture in your language’ (Salesbury 1547: II).

Internal pressure and external geo- strategic considerations, namely the fear of

Catholic- inspired invasion from Spain and France via Ireland, prompted Parliament in

1563 to order the Welsh bishops to secure Welsh translations of the Bible and of the Book

of Common Prayer and to place copies in every parish church by 1 March 1567. The time

scale was unrealistic but translations of the Book of Common Prayer and of the New

Testament appeared in that year. It was not until 1588 that William Morgan’s complete

translation of the Bible was published. He drew upon the linguistic usages of the bards

of the previous three centuries and therefore his work contained a standardized literary

variety of Welsh in terms of vocabulary, idiom and syntax. It proved to be an excel-

lent translation and the revised version, published in 1620, is a literary masterpiece that

remained unchanged until the publication of a new translation in 1988. The inﬂ uence that

the Bible has had on the sociolinguistics of Welsh is impossible to measure. Before 1800

about 31 different editions had been printed. Between 1800 and 1900 about 370 differ-

ent editions were printed (some in the USA). Each edition consisted of several thousand

copies.

The main importance and contribution of the Bible to Welsh literature is that it served

as a standard variety of the language. In a land that did not possess a university, or any

other cultural establishment that could give guidance on linguistic and literary matters,

the Bible translation was taken as an example of the standard variety. This then helped

avert the situation where one would have a collection of different if not incomprehensi-

ble dialects. The linguistic forms of the Bible therefore gained prestige as being ‘correct

and standard Welsh’. Thomas Parry (1944: 153) notes: ‘The Bible appeared at the ideal

point in time when it was most needed. It fortunately came while the old digniﬁ ed stand-

ard language was still alive and at a time when there were around several clerics who had

mastered it.’ In time the Bible became a linguistic measuring stick as well as a source of

spiritual guidance. A parallel development was the printing of a large number of books in

Welsh, mostly in the ﬁ eld of religion but also encompassing such varied ﬁ elds as vocabu-

lary, grammar, linguistics, botanical science and archaeology.

Suddenly at this dark hour in the cultural history of our country we see Welsh emerg-

ing as a modern literary language with a new conﬁ dence, capable of development

as a medium of instruction and study in a multitude of directions. This is due to the

energies of Biblical evangelism. And we have a cultural framework appearing that

was able to undo much of the harm perpetuated by the Act of Union.

(B. Jones 1974: 68)