Supporters of Britain’s Celtic linguistic heritage will be feeling optimistic glee this week, with the excellent news that Welsh learning is booming. While a Welsh revival leads the way, there are hopeful signs elsewhere, too; the ‘I have some Gaelic’ crowd has doubled over the last ten years.
If the gains seem modest, it’s worth remembering how far we’ve come. I was rummaging in the British Newspaper Archive this week, hunting some material on serialised Welsh lessons in old newspapers. “Folk lessons” in Gaeilge abound in the early 20th Century, and the length of some series suggests that newspaper learning went down quite well with the readership.
The 19th-century trail for Welsh, though, is a lot patchier than for Irish. What you do find, on the other hand, is plenty of column inches spent on disparaging the language. Editorials don’t hold back, either. They talk of utter uselessness, disguising the offence with that thin veil of Victorian ‘progress’.
Welsh Barb
One letter writer, choosing to remain anonymous (aware, perhaps, of the cruel barb of their remarks) weighed in on the provision of Welsh-speaking bishops to Wales in a letter to the Chester Chronicle in 1847. The letter states:
“I would hazard an opinion as to the necessity of the Welsh Bishops knowing the language of the country. … I believe 9 out of every 10 of enlightened and thinking Welshmen would agree with me that the Welsh language is an evil and a positive disadvantage. …the lower orders are striving throughout the Principality to learn English – and why? The most ignorant servant who can speak broken English and can write, writes a letter to his friend or his sweetheart in English generally – this I know to be a fact.
The mechanic who can speak English, read and write, gets to the top of his business, while his less accomplished countryman, though equally ingenious as a workman is glad to be employed under him. … I should be extremely rejoiced to see some of my excellent countrymen promoted to the bench; but so long as a small nook of a small island is isolated by its language they are much less likely to do so than if the Welsh language was reckoned among the dead.”An Observer
Chester Chronicle, Friday 26th March 1847
Lands with a thud, that, doesn’t it?
But if we collect our objective thoughts (deep breaths!) there is so much going on in this short passage. It’s the reduction of language to job opportunity, a way for the “lower orders” to improve their lot. It’s the ranking of languages as more primitive and more civilised (that linking of English with reading and writing). Even more bafflingly, the letter sets language use up as an either/or choice. The author doesn’t admit the idea of bilingual speakers as even a remote possibility.
And remarkably, it’s come to be viewed that way by those, like our letter writer, who count themselves as members of those communities. It’s the outcome of a homogenising, colonial Victorian project that steamrolled out difference in the name of Britannia. Regional difference is simply burden; there is no Wales – just the Principality, and the economic gains to chase within it. We see the very same attitudes towards regional dialects of English.
Sign of the Times?
A lot of our reaction to this, of course, is a product of changing times. Victorian society engaged almost obsessively in social improvement and optimisation; improving woeful working and living conditions could force this kind of all or nothing mentality that left no room for nuance.
Thankfully, this kind of binary thinking about community languages sounds, rightly, very old-fashioned. The Observer got their wish for over a century, but views like that have a lot less currency nowadays. That said, a glance at the comments section of any National article on Scottish Gaelic shows that the work in speaking up for Britain’s Celtic languages is never quite done.
It’s a reminder that languages never die because they are useless. They die because speakers are convinced they are. With a bit of work, that trick is getting harder and harder to pull off.