‘Take the Welsh language back to its working roots’
Academic Simon Brooks, who founded Welsh language communities group Cymuned, says Welsh risks losing its community base and being sustained by middleclass learners. Chief reporter Martin Shipton reports
SUPPORTERS of the Welsh language should beware of turning it into an “identity politics” issue and concentrate on bolstering its use in grassroots communities, according to one of its most prominent advocates.
About two decades ago Simon Brooks was one of the founders of the Welsh-language communities group Cymuned.
While not advocating the kind of law-breaking that had earlier seen second homes in Welsh-language heartlands set alight, the group warned of creeping Anglicisation and called for protective measures to be taken that would reverse such a trend.
Now an associate professor in the school of management at Swansea University, Dr Brooks remains concerned about the fate of the language, and has recently been especially worried by trends that show further declines in the community use of Scottish Gaelic and Irish.
In an article this week for the Irish Times, Conchúr Ó Giollagáin, Gaelic Research Professor at the University of the Highlands and Islands, stated: “We are now seeing more clearly how language politics in Ireland is evading the social reality of Irish.
“Current policy may superficially boast a sense of cultural renewal, but the language’s native-speaking community is in crisis. The decrease in the density of active Irish-speakers in the Gaeltacht [the Irish-speaking heartland in the west of Ireland] has undermined the ability of the community to regenerate itself.
“Irish can be generally characterised by three features: a dwindling and alienated native-speaking group; an official pretence of notionally supporting Irish while ignoring the decline of its community of speakers, as highlighted in the recently published annual report of the language commissioner; and a level of public indifference to the vague approach to language promotion which is dissociated from the social continuity of Irish.
“Arriving at this sorry state 10 years on from the adoption of the 20-year strategy for the Irish language can be partly explained by the preference in current approaches for the symbolic and institutional use of Irish. There is no expectation that policies would have any application in actual communities. The state may still encourage rhetorical flourishes about the cultural importance of Irish, but it has grown weary about its social dimension.”
Professor Ó Giollagáin has previously made similar points about Scottish Gaelic.
Dr Brooks said: “The position of Welsh is 100 times better than that of Irish or Scottish Gaelic. The language is not dying, it is not in terminal decline and we still have communities that are Welsh speaking. Most people in Gwynedd speak Welsh and so do 50% of the people in Carmarthenshire.
“But I believe we need to shift our focus from identity politics, where predominantly middle-class people take comfort in asserting their Welsh-language identity as they drink their cappuccinos, to the need to sustain working-class, Welshspeaking communities.
“It may be the case that 85% of the people in Blaenau Ffestiniog will fill in their census from next year saying they are Welsh-speakers, and that in the case of children it’s 100%. But just because people can speak Welsh doesn’t mean they actually do so.
“Young people are very much part of the digital age and mostly when they take to social media they do so in English.
“Equally, there is much discussion among adults on social media about the Welsh language – but very often it is through the medium of English.
“One of the major threats to the Welsh language is people moving away from Welsh-language communities. Socio-economic interventions need to be taken to give people an option not to leave. But there is also the danger that the communities themselves lose the opportunity to interact in Welsh.
“Gwynedd Council closed down all the youth clubs in the county as part of the austerity measures it took. That deprived large numbers of young people of the opportunity to use the language in a natural social context in their community.
“What we have to guard against is the language becoming no more than a symbolic right. For it to thrive, it has to be part of a living community.
“We’re fortunate that in Wales, unlike in Scotland and Ireland, we now have living Welsh-language communities in our capital, Cardiff. That’s great.
“But we also need to nurture the language in its remaining heartlands, where it’s the language of the working class.”