We Are 42% - Gaeilge Anois!

In yesterday’s Guardian newspaper the journalist and political activist Ellie Mae O’Hagan argues that the Welsh language should be part of the school curriculum not just in Wales but in other parts of the island of Britain too. Since “England and Wales” are essentially treated as one constitutional and legal entity under British law it is perfectly valid to question why the second most-spoken and officially recognised language in the co-joined region, Welsh, is not also taught as a subject in English schools.







Typically the Comments beneath the article are full of Greater England derision for a “useless” and “dead” language that “no one” speaks. As pointed out on ASF before the Anglophone supremacism so often displayed in Ireland has its natural home (and origins) in Britain and more specifically in England. There is no language but the English language, there is no culture but English-derived culture. Given that the Welsh and Scottish (Gaelic) languages all have official status in Britain the argument that they should take their place alongside the de facto and vernacular language of the state, English, is overwhelming. Teaching British schoolchildren some knowledge of all the national languages that share the island of Britain, English, Welsh and Scottish (and Cornish too) is a threat to no one except the most intolerant expansionists of Greater England. Of which there are too many.

Meanwhile here in Ireland our national language continues to be denigrated and ridiculed by a state and political establishment that deliberately failed to revive it as the speech of the majority and now wishes to kill it as the speech of the minority. The broadcaster and radio producer Cuan Ó Seireadáin points out the farcical and dishonest nature of recent government actions for the Irish Central.













5 comments on “Equal In Any Language

  1. I have to agree with the first point made above. If the BritNats really were just that, rather than EngNats, then they would recognise what Tolkien called “The Senior Language of Britain”. The Welsh have been fighting a long drawn out rearguard action against the English, first politically, later culturally and linguistically. The official boundary of Wales is really arbitrary, it doesn’t make much geographical sense or linguistic sense either. It wanders about like a drunken sailor for much of its course. In a sense Welsh is as much part of ‘England’s’ heritage as Scots Gaelic is in lowland Scotland. In most places they predate English (less true for Gaelic) and just as Glasgow has many Gaels, so cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol have always had a great many Welsh people.

    • All true. With Welsh officially recognised (in Wales) via the Welsh Language Act of 1993 I would suggest at the very least some elements of Welsh language classes in English schools. There is no need to establish an elaborate curriculum of Welsh language education or strive for fluency and bilingualism. Simple lessons introducing English pupils to Welsh and allowing them to develop some familiarity with it would be enough.

    And what is that “establishment”? Martians? Or just ordinary Irish people?

    Private sector just ignores the language COMPLETELY.

    Nothing in my workplace is in Irish – absolutely nothing.

    What do you expect from people like my coworkers?

    All your logic sounds like – “It rains because the streets are wet”.

    Government does not give a shit about Irish because people don’t care about it not the other way around.

  3. The comments to the Guradian article are of course as expected, except perhaps that there are so many of them, although you only need to read a sample here and there, the ‘discussion’ never goes anywhere. And of course the response simply confirms the astounding levels of ignorance and sometimes outright hatred the English have for Welsh. Now Welsh is not anywhere near extinct. Over half a million people claim to speak it in Wales (those elsewhere in the UK aren’t counted), and there are books, magazines, websites, local newspapers etc. etc. In other words it appears to be a perfectly ordinary modern European language, if a small one.

    One reason why the English aren’t “good at languages” is because they live isolated on an island, yet they share that very island with the Welsh and have done so ever since they (the English) arrived some 1,600 years ago. So there’s this excellent linguistic resource sitting right next to them that the ignore, seemingly wilfully ignore. Or if they do notice it they make silly jokes about it and can’t seem to accept it as a ‘real’ language. There must be a research project there for someone, just trying to figure out how and why these attitudes came about.

    And then of course these attitudes get transferred to the Welsh themselves. In a country where the language is ‘normalised’ as they say, you see it everywhere, not just on official signs but in shops and private businesses and so on, you get a bit of that in Wales but it’s still limited and patchy. The problem with the official bilingual policy is that it leaves nowhere that is all Welsh. And giving English parity in the remaining heartlands (Y Fro Gymraeg) probably does more damage than spreading a thin layer of official token Welsh over long-anglicised regions. I don’t know the solution, but apparently in Belgium for example bilinguialism means in the Flemmish half everything is in Flemmish (yes, even advertisments and ‘for-sale’ signs), and the French bit is all French, with just a narrow zone and the capital where the two overlap. I think the same is probably true for Switzerland too.

    Ireland is in a worse state linguistically than Wales, despite being further from England and having had almost a century of independence. Jānis, you seem somehow disappointed by the Irish, can’t say I blame you. Yet from a British/Irish perspective it seems like a miracle that any of the languages and cultures in the Baltic region have survived at all. You only have to look at the history, both ancient and recent. Yet there you are, three small nations each with its own thriving language. Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth (despite everyone and everything) as the Welsh would say. Some time ago I was looking into the fall of the USSR, and came across a video of the resistance in Rīga, and they had this banner reading, “Par jūsu un mūsu Brīvibu!” (for your freedom and ours). Now the ‘your’ obviously referred to the Russian troops, but when I first saw it I took it more generally or perhaps more personally, and thought as Celts, this other collection of small nations and cultures in the opposite corner of Europe, where is our freedom?

      Despite the fact that we have been living next to Estonians and Lithuanians for centuries.
      Very few of us actually speak those languages.

      We always learn the largest foreign language that’s currently around and communicate in that instead.
      At first it was German, then Russian and now it’s English.

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