Survival of the Welsh Language: Part VI

In the southern valleys, an Anglo-Welsh character came into being; one that came to dominate the political, social and literary life of Wales, and it was here also that a new and particular kind of Welshness was forged, symbolized by the cloth-capped, heavy drinking, strike-prone, English-speaking, rugby fanatic of the Valleys..To such a character, and to a certain extent, to the majority of the three large urban areas of Cardiff, Swansea and Newport, the people of the West and North, the Bible-toting, chapel-going, teetotal, parsimonious, and above all Welsh-speaking were totally alien beings who might have come from another planet. The repercussions are felt strongly today as only one in five of the inhabitants of Wales use Welsh as a language of everyday affairs. In other areas, the Welsh language had been in decline for over 100 years. In Flintshire, so near to the large urban areas of Merseyside and Cheshire there had long been deliberate attempts to stamp out the Welsh language: a traveller to the area as early as 1799 described the situation:

If therefore, in the colloquial intercourse of the scholars, one of them be detected in speaking a Welsh word, he is immediately degraded with the 'Welsh lump,' a large piece of lead fastened to a string, and suspended round the neck of the offender. The mark of ignominy has had the desired effect: all the children of Flintshire speak English very well

Such drastic measures had their desired effect. By 1804 John Evans wrote that "North Wales is becoming English." In the same year, Benjamin Heath Malkin wrote :

The language of Radnorshire is almost universally English. In learning to converse with their Saxon neighbours, they have forgotten the use of their vernacular tongue

Other areas did not suffer the loss of the language. Lord Tennyson, who in a letter to a friend in 1839 thought "it [is] remarkable how fluently little boys and girls can speak Welsh." Tennyson's romantic views of the Welsh language, however, were not shared by the Government in London, nor by everyone in Wales. In a letter to The Cambrian in September 1840, one writer blamed the Welsh language for the country's moral turpitude:

I cherish the hope that I may yet see the day when Wales, no longer the seat of barbarity and heathenism, will herself take a fit position (from which she has so long been excluded) in moral literature and science. It may be asked how was Wales set aside from that past, which is the glory and pride of every other nation? The answer is simple -- she is bound with fetters as yet indissoluble which she seems to hug with increasing tenacity -- namely her language --The Welshman is a fool, his language is his folly -- he prefers others to enjoy his goods, he prefers he prefers being laughed at as a puppet in Druidic processions and Bardic Eisteddfodau

The writer wished to see the disappearance of Welsh, "without which act, we can never hope to be recognized otherwise than as simple, good-natured, honest barbarians." The letter, astonishingly enough, was written just at the time that Lady Charlotte Guest was making known to the world some of the glories of Welsh literature through her translations of the medieval tales known as the Mabinogion.. Mrs. Guest (Lady Llanover), advised the mothers of Wales,". . .speak Welsh to your children . . .it is from you, and not from their fathers, that they will learn to love God in their own language." Others were not so sympathetic.

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