Mind Your Language

My post the other day seems to have incurred a heated response. The initial story both amused and irritated me in equal measure, hence my comments. However, what seems to have caused ructions is my comments about Welsh being a dead language. I’ll pick up on something Guy said.

The parking company are simply breaking the law.
Welsh is not ‘imposed’ or ‘dead’. I’ve been here 40 years and West Wales natives mostly speak Welsh as their first language, although I’m sure you know that.
I hope your comments were tongue-in-cheek LR

Well, yes and no. Firstly there is an inherent contradiction, one I’ll return to later. If these people were breaking the law, then there is an imposition – it’s what the law does. As for Welsh being dead, while there was a degree of tongue-in-cheek, there was also an element of reality here.

Language evolves or it dies. Sometimes it’s a bit of both as it becomes absorbed into a newer language and the new one retains a flavour of the one it absorbed. English is a mongrel language that has within it elements of the earlier languages, but also, Latin, Greek, Norse, German, French and some Eastern European influences. It’s why it is such a successful and living language,  helped not a little by the colonial efforts of our ancestors. It is a tongue that has adapted and endured. Indeed, the English we speak today is likely to be unrecognisable in a thousand years. After all, following the great vowel shift of the middle ages, it is likely that Shakespeare would have had difficulty following Chaucer, and we no longer speak the English that he used. Indeed, we find the English of Dickens and Trollope archaic today.

The original languages of these islands have failed to do this. If you travel to the Isle of Man, there sits on the southern tip, the village of Cregneash. Once it was a thriving fishing village. Today it is a museum. One of the reminders of this place is just how insular communities were prior to the arrival of the industrial revolution. The villagers of Cregneash lived their whole lives in a narrowly defined geographic area. Douglas was the big city and Laxey was positively foreign and all this in a small island some thirty miles in length. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, young people were moving away to look for work, leaving the older generations behind and as they died off, so did the Manx language.

I lived in North Wales – known at the time as Viet Taff country due to the penchant of some locals for burning down holiday homes. Much the same was going on then as had happened in Cregneash. With no work prospects for the younger generation, they moved away, leaving the older generation behind. At that time, Welsh was a minority sport confined to the north west of the principality. Those in the south hardly spoke it at all. That it has survived is not due to its enduring nature, rather it is due to people making an effort to keep it alive – even if it is somewhat limited in usefulness. Sure, the old man in Machynlleth can bully the local bakery into speaking Welsh to him, but should he need to speak to a call centre in England or India, he won’t get too far. If someone came to me to learn to ride a motorcycle and expected me to speak Welsh, we won’t get very far either, yet English will serve perfectly well across a significant proportion of the globe. If you need to communicate effectively then you need a suitable tool with which to do it. A localised language such as Welsh is limited in this respect – unless you have no plans to move outside of that geographic location or are bilingual.

All of which brings me to France as I have lived there, too. The French have been desperately trying to keep their language pure. Hence the affectation le Courriel instead of email. There are a couple of problems here – one is that the Académie Française is desperately trying to keep out English influences on the French language, which is pretty rich considering that they heavily influenced ours, so we are merely returning the favour. The other is that they are pissing in the wind. French will evolve or die, just as any language evolves or dies and the Académie Française can sit on the shores of Biscay, demanding that the Atlantic retreat for eternity for all the good it will do.

However, remaining in France, we are seeing the same tendencies with revitalising archaic languages as we are here. Where I lived with the late Mrs L, the Languedoc (the language of the Docs) the local archaic language was Occitan. Gradually we would see signage appearing in French and Occitan. Did anyone actually speak it? Well, yes, actually. Our next door neighbour spoke a bastardised version of Occitan and French. Mrs L and I had learned to speak French with a southern accent and could communicate with the locals except Bernard. When we mentioned this to other villagers, they told us that neither could they so not to worry. So, in a village of fifty souls, this language was a waste of time, because they spoke modern French, just as across the British Isles, we speak modern English and if you wish to be understood wherever you travel across these isles, well, English will get the job done and Welsh won’t.

An erstwhile colleague of mine is Welsh and has lived in Wales all of his life. Now in his early fifties, he has decided that he would like to learn Welsh. On balance, this is no bad thing as learning a language is useful brain exercise. Personally, I’d try another modern European language such as Italian, Spanish or Portuguese as these are more useful. However, he wants to do this and is doing no one any harm, so why not? I have no problem with this, just as I have no problem with anyone doing what they want to do. However, that isn’t what is going on here, is it? The activists who want to keep alive a language that left to its own devices would have faded away along with Manx, aren’t content to merely talk among themselves.

There are two types of activist in my experience. There are those who suddenly find themselves thrown into it somewhat reluctantly due to an attack on their way of life, such as those of us who joined No2ID back in the early 2000s or the Motorcycle Action Group that tries to hold back the tidal wave of anti motorist legislation and there are the arseholes. The latter are those who are not content to just do as they please and let others do likewise. No, the arseholes want to force others to their will. See, for example groups such as PETA or Extinction Rebellion. Cymdeithas yr Iaith is one of these groups. Not content to speak Welsh themselves, they want to force others to do so who would not otherwise choose to do so, which was what the original story was about and why I was so derisive of them. They want the weight of the law used to force organisations to use Welsh. After all, if everyone wanted to use it, then no law would be necessary. The whole point of the parking protest was to use force.

My philosophy of life is a simple one. I’ll do as I please and you do as you please so long as no harm is done, you do not attempt to force others to comply and you don’t demand that they pay for it. The very existence of the Welsh Language Act and the plethora of money being spent on keeping Welsh from dying violates the latter two. The existence of the Welsh Language Act is as egregious as the legislation used to suppress it in previous centuries. A language will survive or die due to people using it or not and that is how it should be.

So, is Welsh a dead language? I did say it was on life support during the earlier discussion. Perhaps undead might be a better description, because without the artificial life support, it would certainly go the way of Manx, if not gone already. See also, Gaelic and Occitan.

One final point here. I don’t tend to get offended, but I do get irritated sometimes. My observations here and on the previous discussion do not make me a shoo-in for any other organisation. An overlap of opinion on one small issue does not mean agreement on other topics.