14 karma · joined August 24, 2023
My point exactly. The onwards march of that awful mongrel language English, trampling all of our original Celtic languages, continues to this day!
You can say it's a good thing that an ancient language and corresponding culture is being saved (although I would also argue that draining Welsh speakers from their familial localities by proving strong financial incentives to move to Cardiff is ultimately doing huge damage to the cultural heartlands of Wales), but I can't agree with this statement. Census data shows that Welsh language usage has decreased slightly over the past 10 years, and Welsh-language schools (funded at extra cost to taxpayers as a parallel school system) do not perform as well academically as mainstream schools. Sure, everyone here has done a Welsh GCSE, but it's largely considered a joke and kids boast about how little they learned.
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/welsh-medium-school-pupils-...
There's a helpful map here:
https://datamap.gov.wales/maps/welsh-language-statistics/
Zooming in on Cardiff shows exactly what I described - Welsh is more common (although still rare) in affluent suburbs, and the central part of town along with the poorer suburban housing developments have the lowest level of Welsh.
Outside Cardiff, the effect is essentially reversed - rural areas with a (very) long farming heritage are among the few places where Welsh continues to be used as a daily language.
I think this scenario is quite easily explained due to the amount of funding given to the Welsh language and the corresponding jobs created centreing on Cardiff, as well as the requirement for members of the Welsh Government to speak Welsh.
Edit:
>because killed by English internal colonialism/centralism so to say
If we trace the origins of the languages currently spoken in the UK, it's much more correct to say that all of the original languages were pushed out by foreign influence from the continent.