Speak Not

Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

James Griffiths

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786999665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A Globe & Mail Book of the Year
"A stimulating work on the politics of language." LA Review of Books As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'. In Speak Not, James Griffiths reports from the frontlines of the battle to preserve minority languages, from his native Wales, Hawaii and indigenous American nations, to southern China and Hong Kong. He explores the revival of the Welsh language as a blueprint for how to ensure new generations are not robbed of their linguistic heritage, outlines how loss of indigenous languages is the direct result of colonialism and globalisation and examines how technology is both hindering and aiding the fight to prevent linguistic extinction. Introducing readers to compelling characters and examining how indigenous communities are fighting for their languages, Griffiths ultimately explores how languages hang on, what happens when they don't, and how indigenous tongues can be preserved and brought back from the brink.

PART ONE

Welsh

Cymraeg

Language family

Indo-European

— Insular Celtic

— Brythonic

— Welsh

— Cornish

— Breton

— Goidelic

— Irish Gaelic

— Scottish Gaelic

— Manx

— Germanic

— English

Welsh is a Celtic language, descended from a common Brythonic tongue that was once spoken throughout Britain. It is closely related to Cornish and Breton, and more loosely to Irish and Scottish Gaelic, though Goidelic and Brythonic languages sound very distinct, and the two language families are not mutually intelligible. Welsh is only very distantly related to English, through a shared Indo-European root, though there are many English-borrowed words in Welsh (and some Welsh words in English), and both have been heavily influenced by Latin.

Speakers

Wales: ~800,000

Worldwide: ~850,000 (primarily in Wales, England and Y Wladfa, Argentina)

Writing system

Latin-based alphabet of 29 letters: a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff, g, ng, h, i, j, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y

Distinctive features

Welsh contains a number of phonemes that are rare in European languages and do not exist in English, often represented by double consonants, such as ll, ch, or ng (/ɬ/, /χ/, or /ŋ/). Welsh consonants also mutate depending on context. For example, gan, the word for ‘have’, can become gen, ganddo and gennych chi depending on the context. Cath, ‘cat’, shifts along with the possessive marker: fy nghath for ‘my cat’, ei gath, ‘his cat’, or ei chath, ‘her cat’. Welsh follows the verb–subject–object order, in contrast to the SVO of English, and nouns have both feminine and masculine forms.

Examples

I’m a Welsh person, I speak Welsh.

Rwy’n Gymro, dwi’n siarad Cymraeg.

Where is the toilet?

Lle mae’r toiled?

Which road goes to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch?

Pa ffordd sy’n mynd i Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch?

Chapter 1

Blue Books

Llandovery in October 1846 was cold and wet.¹ The tiny market town sits to the northwest of the Bannau Brycheiniog, the mountain range which separates it from the Welsh urban centres of Cardiff and Swansea. Near the centre was the Llandovery Union Workhouse, a low, grey limestone building topped with a slanted slate roof that made it even more squat in appearance. Unglazed windows in the shape of thin crosses did little to illuminate or ventilate the insides. The workhouse was a creation of the Poor Laws of 1834, which banned all other forms of relief for the destitute and made even the miserly Tudor-era welfare state they replaced seem generous.^2,3 Workhouses were designed to be miserable and punishing, a last resort for those unable to support themselves by any other means.⁴ By 1839, almost half the population of the workhouses across England and Wales were children, both orphans and foundlings, and the offspring of adult inmates. In Wales, some three hundred years after the country was officially annexed by England, the workhouses also served an assimilatory function for a population that remained stubbornly independent-minded. At the workhouse schools, Welsh children were taught, in English, reading, writing and arithmetic for three hours a day, in addition to instruction in the Anglican faith.

At least, that was the theory. When Ralph Lingen visited Llandovery on 19 October 1846, he found a group of sixteen children of various ages sitting around a table in the bare, whitewashed stone room which served as the workhouse’s school, writing on slates as they took turns reading monotonously from an English-language Bible. All the children looked ‘stolid and lifeless’ and one girl fell from her bench asleep as Lingen was talking to the schoolmaster, who then berated her harshly.⁵ Few of the children were able to answer the master’s questions, and he too had little grasp on the subjects he was supposed to be teaching. The textbooks he had to use were all in English, despite most of the children not understanding that language, and the master was unable to explain the principles of arithmetic beyond reading rote what was written in the book, leaving all none the wiser.⁶

The workhouse school was a paradise however, compared to another house of learning Lingen visited in Llandovery. The son of a rich Hertfordshire family and fellow of Oxford’s Balliol College, who would go on to be elevated to the peerage, Lingen had never imagined, let alone experienced, such squalor.⁷ The stench which emanated as he opened the door to the small building serving as a village school made him recoil. It was torrid, damp and nauseating, reminding Lingen of the engine room of a steamship on which several passengers have already succumbed to seasickness. The room inside was dark and low, packed to bursting with around fifty children who sat sprawled across benches and tables.⁸

Even that was not to be the worst Lingen found in his inspection of schools across Carmarthenshire, an impoverished farming county which covered much of southwest Wales. At least the Llandovery schools had a proper roof. Children in one village were taught inside a hut covered with thatch that did little to protect them from the frequent rain; pupils were instead given large quantities of straw to build makeshift shelters for themselves as they went about their lessons.⁹ At another school, ‘held in a ruinous hovel of the most squalid and miserable character’, Lingen found the floor to be of bare earth and full of deep holes. Children were required to kneel as they wrote their lessons, and one table was constructed out of an old door. In the middle of the floor a heap of loose coal and rubbish gave off little heat and a lot of smoke which choked Lingen but didn’t seem to bother the dozens of pupils packed inside, or their schoolmaster.¹⁰

Lingen had been despatched to Camarthenshire and its neighbouring counties to inquire into the state of the region’s education, and he was not impressed. October was not a pleasant month to be traipsing around some of the poorest parts of south Wales, and in a report he filed later, Lingen’s frustration and growing consternation at the conditions he found was palpable. He was particularly disgusted to find that, in his survey of almost seven hundred schools across the region, more than half were ‘utterly unprovided with privies’, children instead encouraged to use nearby fields or a hole in the ground dug for that purpose.¹¹ Read today, Lingen’s report elucidates viscerally the crippling poverty of the regions he inspected and the resulting paucity of either good schools or capable teachers. It is surprising therefore that he and his two fellow commissioners – who inspected schools in North Wales and southeast Wales respectively – concluded the problem inherent in the country’s education system was not poverty, or low standards, or a lack of teacher training, but the Welsh language.

‘Education is in a greatly more neglected state in Wales than any other part of the United Kingdom,’ William Williams intoned as he stood before the clerk’s table in the centre of the House of Commons. ‘The people of that country labour under a peculiar difficulty from the existence of an ancient language.’¹²

Williams was born in 1788 on a farm near the tiny village of Llanpumsaint, in Carmarthenshire.¹³ After a brief education in the local parish school, he apprenticed as a shopkeeper in Carmarthen town before finding success as a cotton and linen wholesaler. He was first elected to parliament in 1835, and went on to become one of the House of Commons’ leading radicals, advocating for extending the franchise and the separation of church and state. Williams was fifty-eight when he addressed fellow lawmakers in March 1846 on the topic of education in Wales, his round face framed by black mutton chops which stretched to his high upturned collar and bowtie.¹⁴ Despite, or maybe because of, his coming from one of the most Welsh-speaking regions of Wales, Williams was clear in his belief that the country’s native tongue was an inherent drawback to its future progress.

‘The gentry and educated class universally speak English, as well as generally the inhabitants of towns; while the farmers, labourers and other inhabitants of the rural and mining districts speak the Welsh language,’ he said. ‘This being the language of the poorer classes, important works in literature have not for ages been produced in it; neither have scarcely been translated into it from other languages any works on literature, the arts, and sciences.’¹⁵

Because of this, ‘although equally industrious with their English neighbours, the Welsh are much behind them in intelligence, in the enjoyment of the comforts of life, and the means of improving their condition’.

While he waxed lyrical about a desire to improve educational standards, Williams’s concern, and that of other lawmakers, was largely motivated by growing unrest in parts of Wales. In the 1830s, worker-led uprisings had briefly seized the towns of Merthyr Tydfil and Newport, demanding better conditions and greater political representation, while throughout 1842, the so-called Rebecca Riots had targeted symbols of English wealth and economic oppression in agricultural regions of Wales, particularly workhouses and toll gates.

Williams demanded, successfully, that an inspection committee be formed for Welsh schools and despatched to all corners of the country. Thus it was that Ralph Lingen, along with two other commissioners, Jelinger Symons and Henry Vaughan Johnson, was sent walking from parish to parish in the winter of 1846. Lingen’s fellow commissioners were, like him, wealthy sons of the English landed gentry. Symons was the son of a vicar and educated at Corpus Christi, Cambridge,¹⁶ while Vaughan Johnson was a fellow of the same university’s Trinity College and would go on to marry the daughter of a baron.^17,18 None of the three spoke any Welsh, nor had much familiarity with the country, though they were accompanied by assistants ‘acquainted with the Welsh language’.¹⁹

The resultant Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales was ponderously subtitled ‘[an inquiry] into the State of Education in the Principality of Wales, and especially into the means afforded to the labouring Classes of acquiring a Knowledge of the English language’. In it, the commissioners’ findings were damning. Symons wrote in his most memorable passage that ‘the Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people’.²⁰

It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects. It is the language of the Cymri, and anterior to that of the ancient Britons. It dissevers the people from intercourse which would greatly advance their civilization, and bars the access of improving knowledge to their minds. As a proof of this, there is no Welsh literature worthy of the name.

While Lingen was less extravagant in his language, his assessment was no less critical.

Whether in the country, or among the furnaces, the Welsh element is never found at the top of the social scale, nor in its own body does it exhibit much variety of gradation. In the country, the farmers are very small holders, in intelligence and capital nowise distinguished from labourers. In the works, the Welsh workman never finds his way into the office. He never becomes either clerk or agent. He may become an overseer or sub-contractor, but this does not take him out of the labouring and put him into the administering class. Equally in his new as in his old home, his language keeps him under the hatches, being one in which he can neither acquire nor communicate the necessary information. It is a language of old-fashioned agriculture, of theology, and of simple rustic life, while all the world about him is English.²¹

The Welsh, the commissioners claimed, were filthy, uneducated, lazy, and prone to drunkenness and licentiousness. Despite the preponderance of churches, most did not properly observe the sabbath, and knowledge of the scriptures was poor, made worse by the fact the majority of religious institutions did not belong to the Church of England but were run by nonconformist sects such as the Methodists or Baptists. The commissioners were guided to these assessments by the testimony of local Anglican clergy, most of whom were English immigrants who also did not speak the local language, and were especially disdainful of their dissenting, Welsh-speaking neighbours.

‘The poor seem ignorant on most subjects, except how to cheat and speak evil of each other,’ Symons quoted the Reverend James Denning of St Mary’s Church in Brecon.

They appear not to have an idea of what the comforts of life are. There are at least 2,000 persons living in this town in a state of the greatest filth, and to all appearance they enjoy their filth and idleness, for they make no effort to get rid of it. From my experience of Ireland, I think there is a very great similarity between the lower orders of Welsh and Irish – both are dirty, indolent, bigoted, and contented.²²

All of these flaws, Symons and the other commissioners argued, could be traced back to the general lack of education in Wales, which was itself due to the evils of the Welsh language. Welsh hampered not only morals and learning, but even the effectiveness of the justice system, a point which harkened back to the original impetus for Williams’s testament in Parliament and the commissioners’ presence in Wales in the first place: worker unrest and the Rebecca Riots.

‘The mockery of an English trial of a Welsh criminal by a Welsh jury, addressed by counsel and judge in English, is too gross and shocking to need comment,’ Symons said. ‘It is nevertheless a mockery which must continue until the people are taught the English language; and that will not be done until there are efficient schools for the purpose.’²³

Efforts were underway to achieve this language replacement, and the commissioners found considerable support for advancing the teaching of English at the expense of Welsh even among Welsh-speaking people. In North Wales, Vaughan Johnson encountered ‘a custom which has been invented in the hope of promoting a knowledge of English’.²⁴

My attention was attracted to a piece of wood, suspended by a string round a boy’s neck, and on the wood were the words, “Welsh stick.” This, I was told, was a stigma for speaking Welsh. But, in fact, his onl...