Welsh medium teaching

Anyway, to get back to the discussion, It’s worth remembering the key thing that happened - not that people started speaking English, but that people stopped speaking Welsh. It’s easy to see why people should want to add English to their skills as it has an obvious economic benefit. That’s why all of my work colleagues in Flanders and the Netherlands and Mexico speak English. But, note, none of them have stopped speaking Dutch or Spanish.

So why was the transition, the language shift as it’s termed, so complete? This didn’t happen in Italy where it’s normal to speak both Italian and Sardinian or Neapolitan or Sicilian etc. And it didn’t actually happen in Brittany until relatively recently - Breton was the kitchen language of the vast majority of homes in 1950 with a million speakers.

So what stopped people from passing on Welsh to their children?*

I’d guess that there has to be some kind of social pressure that says that as much as English helps people to move forward, equally Welsh is holding them back. I think @AnthonyCusack also mentioned the common idea that we don’t have room for more than one language, but I’m not convinced that that would have been at play at the time. People, I think, would have been familiar with the ‘clever’ people in the community like doctors and religious ministers who may have had some Latin and maybe French as well as English and Welsh. These were aspirational figures at the time and would, possibly, have demonstrated the usefulness of multi-lingualism.

Again, I must stress, all of this is guesswork. :wink:

*Actually, we could ask, because it still happens. I know of farming families in the Llanwrtyd area of Builth hundred and in the hills above Llanidloes where both parents are first language Welsh but who speak only English to their children.

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I went to France v Wales in, I think, 1971. On the boat were some Breton lads going home from UK. I asked them about speaking Breton and none did. They said their Grandfathers had spoken it! I never thought to ask them why they did not, but, well, they must have been born in about 1950, so what happened then to stop their parents passing it on?

I hope it didn’t come across that I was supporting the view of a single language. I, of course, do not agree with that. However, I don’t think Wales was the only European example. If we look at the industrial areas of Italy, the migrant communities stopped speaking Sardinian etc. The same is true in French cities, Occitan and Breton were both cultural identities in Paris in the 60s but the language wasn’t. That’s why I used New York as a comparator. It appears that economic migration has a lot to do with shifts.

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No, you didn’t.

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I have older relatives who also did elocution lessons as well. The words insecurity and snobbery seem to come to mind or maybe misdirected aspirationalism.

The latter, I think. Until the late 'sixties it was very much accepted that to ‘get on’ you were expected to look and sound the part, and that included a carefully acquired RP accent.

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There is something that I have never been able to quite understand about how children acquire languages. I cannot imagine any kid in Wales not being able to acquire English and I’ve just assumed that it is simply because it is everywhere, but I’m starting to wonder if that is a sufficient mechanism of transmission…

The problem I have is that if it is simply down to exposure then I should be a fluent first language Welsh speaker and I’m not - I only acquired a handful of very, very basic non useful commands and phrases - kids in English medium primary schools now know more Welsh than I did when I was 10. My grandparents would never speak a word to each other in English and would have to use Welsh to discuss anything meaningful - they were very uncomfortable English speakers, yet my mother has two younger siblings who don’t speak Welsh.

I guess what I was wondering is whether many parents may have assumed that kids would pick up Welsh passively anyway and focused all of their strengths on actively trying to instil English, becuase to them it might have seemed like a harder thing to learn.

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Ah! That’s a very interesting thought. Thanks for that!

I have always known my mother was a snob. You may say she was aspirational but her dreams involved finding a man able to keep her in the style to which she wished to become accustomed. She modelled her accent on the English film stars she heard or the queen (George VI’s wife) if she had a chance to hear her on ‘the wireless’ ,
My dad was lost to my grandfather’s agreement to marry the boss’s daughter so he had a directorship, new house, car and a woman to look after him, it and those of his children who came too! I think you may understand that I do not admire him. My poor dad could only see his Tadcu over a school gate and his Welsh just went. That was about early 1920s.

Yes, but even these days, language, dialect and accent can lead to discrimination. I have heard of a number of (even well known) people who have struggled to find employment just because of how the talk. Check this out for discrimination from viewers and employers. (sorry to mention the Mail :frowning: )

This makes sense, I have always wondered why my grandfather didn’t speak Welsh yet his younger brother did (who was probably more enthusiastic about the language, knowing their characters). Maybe at the time Welsh wasn’t seen as an ‘aspirational’ language. A pity I never asked about this when they were alive :O(

Blimey. So maybe my great grandparents chose to use English as the language of the home in the 1900s, so that their children (such as my grandfather) would be confident adaptable English speakers to get a well paid job, apart from my ‘rogue’ uncle who decided to use Welsh enough to become fluent. I come along and chose to spend time to re-gain the language the family had lost. If only my great grandparents had known that this would happen! That I would see the ability to speak Welsh as something to aspire to.

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It’s interesting that the British Empire took this view to so many languages and yet, the complete opposite to Québécois. Due to the risk of the 13 colonies becoming 14 in 1776 (with the addition of Quebec) they made sure they protected the language and the position of the Catholic Church. It was later, under more independent Canadian rule that it started to be undermined.

Wasn’t Louis of France and his wife Marie Antoinette an ally of England at the time? Was this Kings sticking together! Once the French Revolution got rid of the Monarchy, the Brits definitely no longer saw France as anything but an enemy!

But Quebec had been in British hands for almost two decades since the seven years war. The last time France and Britain had been at war. Allies maybe, friends definitely not. The French assisted the colonies in their war for independence against Britain, so again, not very friendly.

I know people in NE Wales who couldnt speak any English until about 7 or 8 years old haha

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18% of Welsh speaking families are not transmitting Cymraeg to their children according to a recent language attitudes survey. I find that depressing due to Welsh being spoken in Britain by far fewer than English…I mean 18% English families not passing on their native language is bad enough even for English in the long long run! :wink:

In my English medium class of 30 people in NE Wales…a good 4 children came from Welsh speaking homes…and they only knew a few sentences now in their 20s
And a good 10 more recall their grandparents speaking it (we had a class debate about languages - I was fascinated ofc! )

If its any added fact, they all had very anglicised names…more quintessentially English than even us lot who had moved in from England! (my grandparents spoke Welsh but moved to England due to lack of jobs)

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That bends my mind!

But it’s wonderful to hear that Welsh is still that alive.

I’m envious of those who speak Welsh completely without thinking, just naturally and fluently because they learned it when they were two.

Someplace else on the Forum I have mentioned how hard it was for little children going into the only school available when aged 5 and being faced with English only everything. The classic example was an alphabet chart with a picture of a chicken labelled ‘hen’. To the children, a chicken was iar or cyw iar and hen had a long ‘e’ and meant old!
I just wonder if those kids became determined to make sure their own children knew English before they went to school and wouldn’t have that sort of experience!
I have only just really thought about this and I can see how it might have been. I only know the original experience was very traumatic indeed for the friend who told me about it some 20 years later!

Hmmm. My daughter started school when no-one in the family had a single word of Welsh and the last thing you can say about the experience was that it was traumatic.

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