I’m Welsh, and a fluent speaker since childhood. My mother’s first language was Welsh, and she didn’t really learn to speak English until later childhood.
I think the ‘revival’ a lot of bollocks. The language is dying-- the question shouldn’t even be, should we save the language, but: could we even if we wanted to?
It is easy to point to the number of welsh speakers climbing to 20% from 19% or whatever, but the more important facts are being missed:
[ul]
[li]many of those 20% of people who ‘speak’ Welsh are not particularly fluent. they would struggle to read a Welsh newspaper, for example.[/li][li]to my mind, the more important statistic is this: the proportion of local government areas where more than 60% of the population speaks Welsh has been in steep decline, and continues to fall[/li][/ul]
For the latter reason in particular, Welsh is dying as a living language.
Just to contribute an anecdote: I’m under 30, and my village was always known as a Welsh-speaking village when I was a kid. People would speak in welsh first in shops etc. Not anymore–lots of English immigrants, and people from the anglophone south-east. All the bilingual tax forms and signs in the world won’t change that.
When people don’t speak in Welsh first, that is pretty fatal to the language: you often end up with two people who’d feel more comfortable in Welsh, but who are speaking english because they don’t know the other’s preference. It is quite rude to open a conversation in Welsh if you don’t know that the other person is a fluent speaker.
Oh and I don’t have a source on this, but people above who write that the language is more common in the North are wrong, at least in one respect–the county with the most Welsh speakers is Carmarthenshire, in the south.
This is true, but it’s probably the only time in history an extinct language has been revived to become the primary language of a people.
And you can’t really compare Hebrew in Israel with the Celtic languages in Britain, France and Ireland. During the struggle to establish Israel, learning Hebrew was very much an act of patriotism, an integral part of sabra identity, and invested with the knowlege that the nation’s existence was threated and by no means certain.
This is not to say that there are not patriotic and passionate Celts who want to protect their languages; I just doubt that there are as many who feel that speaking a Celtic language is as integral to their identity as Celts.
More to the point, Jews were coming from all over the world and converging on Israel in that time, it was necessary to find a language that all could use. Whereas in the Celtic world English or French are pretty much universally known by native speakers of the Celtic languages.
Irish, and I have no interest whatsoever in any revival of the irish language. It holds no romance for me, and just from a practical point of view it should be left to die.
I regret to inform you that though Ireland is not part of Great Britain, the nationality of those people in Northern Ireland who consider the territory part of the UK is, in fact, “British”.
I’m not surprised Yankees like Mississippienne get confused.
True, and yet another reason why one cannot validly compare Hebrew-language revival in Israel with the survival of Celtic languages.
I confess that, as a Scottish-American who is very interested in Scottish culture, I would love to be able to understand more than Slainte! and Ceud mille failte. In fact, I once tried to teach myself Gaelic - unsucessfully. And I love Scots, too. But I can’t but believe that the best case scenario for both of these languages, as well as Manx, Cornish, Breton, Irish and all the rest is as second languages. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t do well - they would just be like Navajo, which is in no danger of dying out, even though most Navajos speak English as well.
And the fact is, learning another language to any respectable level of fluency is really hard. ‘Mainstream’ Western European languages are relatively easy – but how many people who can ‘speak French’ or ‘speak Spanish’ can watch a colloquial French or Spanish movie, perhaps one set in an immigrant community, without subtitles?
Multiply that by a billion for more exotic languages like the (to English speakers) Celtic languages.
Getting to a point where you can pass for a native speaker is ridiculously hard, and the vast majority of people have neither the intelligence nor the perseverance to do it.
My mother is a native Welsh speaker. She married an Englishman. I’m totally fluent but prefer English, by far. I will probably marry an American. My kids will know a few phrases, if that.
Constantly. There’s a series of ads for a chain of English Language schools in Spain which harps on this: they show people in every day situations and, for any instance where there is both an “old Spanish word” and a “neologism or borrowed term from English,” they pick the second one (“sponsor” over “mecenas”, for example). The punch line is “you know more English than you think you know, come let us teach you the rest.”
It brings up the question of whether you should teach your child all the languages you know. For example, my dad was fluent in Gaeilge, although not a native speaker, but he rarely spoke it to us. I don’t resent that but I think it is a pity he didn’t speak to us as Gaeilge when we were kids. He had a love and an amateur academic interest in the language and its various dialects so I find it strange he never bothered.
My area (geographically) of interest is Cornwall. Twenty five years ago, you’d hard pushed to know that there was a Cornish language. As far as I knew, it was not a topic of interest to anyone in Cornwall. Very recently - as in the past five years - there does seem to be a slight resurgence of interest in it. People seem to be curious about it.
But I don’t understand why there is this concern about reviving or sustaining languages. It’s just a form of communication. As long as we understand each other, does the particular language matter? Surely the fewer, the better. I appreciate that there can be issues of national identity, but beyond that, why is it important? OK, it may be academically satisfying to have a complete picture of liguistic progress, to study the rise and fall of languages, but in day to day life, surely we’ll use what is closest to hand?
My daughter used to go to Cardiff university, and it was strange to see two languages running in parallel. Beyond the national identity issue, I don’t really see the point.
Nine to the sky, I truely don’t mean to sound snarky, but I would guess you don’t speak a second language at all. Language is a significantpart of cultural identity. I suspect (but have never visited our country) that the various English accents (eg dialects) as well as class speeych forms are a significant part of various culture. Some good old cockney boys only being able to speak the Queen’s English wouldn’t be cockney boys, now would they? Would they be the same without the rhyming Cockney slang? (forgive this septic if the analogy falls flat but I suspect it’s spot on).
I’m always in two minds about Scots Gaelic. I’m a born and bred Lowland Scot, and Gaelic was never really the language around these parts.
I think it is an important part of our heritage and culture. What people tend to miss about the importance of language is what the language tells us about culture. I have no cite for this, but a Gaelic speaker once explained to me that there is no real word in the language for “ownership”, which tells us a lot about the old Highland lifestyle. There must be loads of other examples in other languages.
However, at times it seems disproportionate the effort and money that goes into well-intentioned attempts to keep the language alive. The local council put up duplicate road signs on every street in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull so that they were in Gaelic as well as English. The local population reckoned this was a woeful waste. The local supermarket in Tobermory has very confusing signage - the signs showing where the goods are are in English on one side and Gaelic on the other. So at one end of the aisle all you can see are Gaelic.
The whole issue gets even more muddled when you introduce the Highland/Lowland split. Any attempts to bring in Gaelic signage here in Edinburgh are usually met with derision, because it never has been the language of the city. To complicate matters further, there is a school of thought that Lowland Scots is a true language in its own right, rather than a dialect of English. Even the Scottish Parliament has gone to the effort of translating its information leaflet into Lowland Scots. With, quite frankly, hilarious results. (Caution: 1.6Mb pdf file)
You’re right: I don’t speak a second language. (And thank you, but no snark seen.)
Are you saying that dialects, and language, influence character? I don’t think all cockneys are the same, despite a common dialect. If you’re saying that a person’s language and dialect influence how they are perceived, then maybe. Would I feel my cultural identity would be different if I spoke a different language? No. But if a dialect is associated with a class, or perceived level of intelligence, then that might affect the sort of person I am; but not otherwise.
I do think, though, that a language or dialect can act as a bond, a unifier, for those that speak it.
Languages contain within them traces of the mindset, morality, and history of a people. Speaking a language means thinking in that cultural mindset, even indirectly.
The classical, and somewhat silly example, is a bilingual french/english sign for the place people go to retrieve lost property. In english the sign reads “Lost objects”, while the same in french is “Found objects”. Leading to the ridiculous impression that the english are losing objects and the french finding them.
The norse word which is the basis for the english “window” means “Eye to the Wind”, a construction which could only arise in a culture where the most important bit of information that can be found outside is the wind direction and speed.
I’m sure dopers can think of better examples.
When a language disappears, that culture is, in practical terms, gone.
(Not a celt, but native speaker of a language with maybe 70.000 native speakers. Fortunately, my language is thriving. If the language was gone, we would all just be assimilated into the larger neighboring cultures, which we otherwise resemble.)
