Introduction
If you ask someone about language in Wales, the fact that it is a bilingual country inevitably comes up. On the surface, this is accurate, as both Welsh and English have official status and there are many Welsh–English bilingual speakers. In practice, the level of bilingualism varies between communities and there are differences in the way Welsh is acquired, with some learning at home and some through school.
A long history of campaigning for increased rights (Williams 2008: Chapter 8) has led to recent legislation which aims to ensure that Welsh is not treated any less favourably than English in Wales (Welsh Language Measure 2011). The Welsh Language Measure not only establishes Welsh as an official language in Wales, but also places responsibility on a number of official and non-official organisations to provide services in Welsh. The Measure and other legislation are seen as vital to not only guarantee parity between the languages, but also to ensure that Welsh remains a living language. As we will discuss below, the situation of contact between Welsh and English has been fraught at times and the increase of the English language in Wales has been the result of a number of societal changes. The twentieth century has seen English become the most widely spoken language in Wales because of language shift in some areas and widespread bilingualism among Welsh speakers.
The situation of Welsh and English in Wales makes it interesting for linguistics generally, and sociolinguistics especially, not least because it is distinctive compared to the rest of the UK. This volume aims to showcase some of the research recently conducted on Wales and to underline how valuable insight from the country is to understand broader sociolinguistic questions.
This chapter acts as an introduction to the volume as a whole, outlining the current linguistic situation of Wales and the history of Welsh and English in the country. We then provide an overview of earlier sociolinguistic research on Wales, before briefly introducing the chapters in the volume. The chapter will close with a discussion of what kinds of future research might be valuable to understand the language situation in Wales in the context of ongoing societal changes.
Languages Spoken in Wales Today
The most up-to-date source of information about language use in Wales is found in the 2011 National Census (Office for National Statistics 2012). There are two sets of questions which are relevant to our discussion: one question which asks respondents about their main language and a set which focuses on Welsh-language ability.
The first question, as it was phrased in Wales, asked whether the respondents’ main language was English or Welsh and, if it was neither, what language it was.1 This means that this question cannot tell us what the distribution of English and Welsh is, and it cannot help us gauge how many speakers consider Welsh their main language or how many might feel they use them equally. It can, however, give us a partial idea of what other languages are spoken in Wales, although it is likely some respondents who choose English or Welsh as their main language might have been fluent in other languages as well.
The second set of questions asked whether respondents could speak, read and/or write in Welsh. This grants us greater insight into Welsh and/or English-language use, although, as noted, it does not reveal how many consider Welsh their main language. The value should not be taken to come solely from those who had English or Welsh as their main language, as speakers who did not select English/Welsh as their main language may also have had some Welsh ability.
Taken together, these sets of questions can provide a broad idea of language use in Wales. Table 1.1 below, presents the raw numbers and the percentages for the relevant answers to these two sets of questions (taken from the census website).2
Table 1.1
Raw numbers and percentages for language-related questions on the National Census 2011 (Wales only)
Overall number of respondents | 2,955,841 | |
Q: What is your main language? | Number of respondents | % |
English or Welsh | 2,871,405 | 97 |
European languages (inc. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish) | 40,538 | 1.37 |
Arabic | 6800 | 0.23 |
West/Central Asian language | 3241 | 0.11 |
South Asian language (inc. Punjabi, Urdu and Bengali) | 15,665 | 0.53 |
East Asian (inc. Chinese) | 13,816 | 0.47 |
African languages | 3485 | 0.12 |
Other | 891 | 0.03 |
Q: Can you understand, speak, read or write Welsh? | Number of respondents | % |
Welsh ability | 562,016 | 19 |
The table makes it clear that English and Welsh are the main languages spoken in Wales and they represent the main languages of nearly all the population (ONS 2012). Languages with at least 5000 speakers in Wales are the following: Polish (17,001 speakers), Arabic (6800 speakers), Chinese (8103 speakers), and Bengali (including Sylheti and Chatgaya) (5207 speakers). Although most respondents in Wales have English or Welsh as their main language, the various other languages reflect migration patterns to the country (see Evans 2015; Markaki 2016).
Moving to Welsh use, Table 1.1 shows that 19% of the population use Welsh in some way (the census shows that around 15% can read and write it as well as speak it). While this represents around a fifth of the population, it highlights that many people in Wales may have little contact with Welsh. To understand the current situation of Welsh, it is important to show how it has come to be and what historical, political, and social changes have led to this situation.
History of Welsh and English Language Contact
Findings from the 1901 census indicate that 49.9% (n = 929,824) of the Welsh population were able to speak Welsh and that 15.1% (n = 280, 905) of these were monolinguals (Great Britain Historical GIS Project 2004). The current levels of Welsh use, discussed above, represent a substantial shift away from this. The twentieth century has seen the end of Welsh monolingualism and the contraction of the language to Western heartland areas (H.M. Jones 2012: 13).3 This is reflected in the geographical profile of the language today, as the areas with the highest proportion of Welsh speakers are in the Western counties: Gwynedd (65.4%), Isle of Anglesey (57.2%), Ceredigion (47.3%), and Carmarthenshire (43.9%, see StatsWales 2012).
Despite substantial changes to the sociolinguistic profile of Wales during the twentieth century, contact between Welsh and English and the history of language shift had started much earlier. The following sections chart this shift beginning with the early development of Welsh.
Old Welsh, a Celtic language, related to Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Cornish and Breton, developed from Brythonic during the sixth century. The Western advance of the Kingdom of Wessex during the late sixth century isolated the Brythonic-speaking Celts of Wales from those of South-West Britain, which led to the separate evolutions of Welsh and Cornish (Filppula et al. 2008: 8–9). In this period, Wales was largely monolingual and contact with the Anglo-Saxons was restricted to some areas near the English border (Beverley-Smith 1997: 16) and to a few isolated Flemish and Saxon communities in the South-West (Toorians 2000).
This early period is marked by a growing sense of Welsh identity and attempts to politically unify Wales (Davies 1990: 78). In 1282, however, with the defeat of the last native prince of Wales and the resulting ceding Wales to the English crown, Wales lost its independence. On the one hand, the effect of this on the language was not completely straightforward and to a certain extent the position of the language was strengthened rather than weakened (e.g. Welsh law continued to be practised and ‘the domains of the language were considerably extended,’, R.O. Jones (1993: 537)). On the other hand, contact between the English and Welsh gentry had already led to an increase in prestige for the English language and the beginning of a gradual top-down process of Anglicisation.
The process of Anglicisation intensified following the Acts of Union in 1536 and 1543. The English legal system replaced the Welsh one and sections of Welsh land were annexed to the English crown. English became the sole language of official business and those who held any position of authority in Wales were therefore required to be bilingual (Abalain 1989: 131). This would have been limiting for the majority of the Welsh population as they were not English speakers. Williams (2009: 204) underlines, however, that this should not be taken to mean that there was ‘forced bilingualism for the mass of the population’. Instead, the domains in which Welsh was spoken were increasingly restricted and it became increasingly seen as having a lower status to English (Williams 2009: 205).
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