How is welsh different from english

It is by now a peripatetic festival of the Welsh culture on an unique scale, held in the week of the first Monday of each August and alternating between sites in the North and the South.

Cymru Fydd Young Wales was founded in London in , on the model of Young Ireland, with later unsuccessful suggestions that it should become a national meaning Welsh political party. It won its first seat in the Westminster parliament in , and at the time of writing represents four seats in the north and west of Wales, which is the area where the language is strongest.

It has some presence in local government elsewhere in Wales, but most parliamentary constituencies in Wales are represented by the British Labour Party. Since the government of Wales had been mediated by an institution called the Welsh Office, created by the first, rather brief and even more insecure Wilson Labour Government. The Welsh Office Swyddfa Gymreig is a department of state in the government of the United Kingdom, represented in the Cabinet by a single minister who has within his department responsibility for several areas of government in Wales which in England are administered by other departments of state.

Although early Secretaries of State were members of parliament for constituencies in Wales, successive Conservative governments in the s were unable to find such members for this office. One of the consequences of those arrangements is that much of the government of Wales to a much greater extent than in England is carried out by unelected bodies appointed by the Secretary of State, and not therefore answerable to any Welsh electors.

Following a skin-of-the-teeth endorsment of its proposals in a Referendum in September , the Labour government established an elected National Assembly for Wales which under the Government of Wales Act assumed in July most of the powers of oversight of the Welsh Office, and has secondary legislative powers.

The office of the Secretary of State continues to be the mechanism for carrying primary legislation relevant to Wales through parliament in Westmister, which retains those powers of primary legislation. The political party distanced itself deliberately from the Society both because the language is not central to the Party's campaign, and because of the Society's policy of non-violent civil disobedience. The Society campaigns using non-violent means of civil disobedience for changes in the status of Welsh and in state provision for such things as education.

It led the campaign for the first Welsh Language Act and is held to be responsible for many of the symbols which have made the existence of the Welsh language more a natural part of public life in the last half of the twentieth century. In the reign of Henry VI English, as opposed to Norman French, became a language in which it was possible to conduct business and to make legally binding contracts in England.

The corresponding provision for Welsh was the Welsh Language Act of which permitted the use of Welsh in courts, giving the right to trial in Welsh or interpretation where appropriate, made contracts drawn in the Welsh language equally enforceable with those drawn in English, and permitted various other interactions with Government such as company registration and television and driving licencing to be made in Welsh.

It was part of a tide of change in Welsh-speaking Wales which until the fifties had seen nothing strange in groups of Welsh speakers turning to using the English language amongst themselves for official purposes such as keeping minutes. A further act passed in made the ambiguous step of giving people in Wales the right to deal in Welsh with public bodies, but with the proviso that this was only enforceable where it was reasonable, a condition which it did not define.

Welsh is an Indo-European language, so is presumably descended like most but not all languages in modern Western Europe from something first spoken on the steppes of central Asia. Its immediate decent is from the Brythonic language or languages of Roman Britain. Conventionally one speaks of Early Welsh as being the development of that Brythonic precursor around the time when Britain fell to the Scandinavians, and Old Welsh as being the language of Wales between the ninth and eleventh centuries.

Cymraeg Canol , Mediaeval Welsh, covers the period from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Most extant manuscripts of the Mabinogi and such are from this period, although the stories are older.

The cywyddau of Dafydd ap Gwilym are examples of Early Modern Welsh, which covers the development over a period from about the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and a flowering of the arts of language through the medium of Welsh.

The publication of the Bible in Welsh in established a standard of language which governs the subsequent development of Late Modern Welsh, essentially unchanged as far as the present century. The language of the Bible did much to establish a standard nationwide language, admittedly one more nearly like the speech of the North and North-West. Despite the influence of publication and in the twentieth century of broadcasting, there remain substantial differences of dialect between parts of Wales.

The closest relatives of Welsh are the other p-Celtic languages, of which the other modern representatives are Cornish and Breton, which are also descendants of Brythonic.

Cumbrian, if it was indeed a distinct language, would also have been p-Celtic, and there was also a p-Celtic language indigenous to the continent, known as Gaulish, which is long extinct. The next nearest relatives are the family of q-Celtic languages, of which modern representatives are the Gaelic languages of Ireland, Man and Western and Highland Scotland. The distinction between the p- and q- languages reflects the modification of certain initial consonants which are harder in the q-family than the p-family.

For example, Irish crann and Welsh pren , meaning tree; Irish capall , horse, is related to Welsh ebol , foal. By and large, no. In fact even the p-Celtic languages are not really mutually intelligible. A Welsh speaker especially if he is familiar with some of the archaic vocabulary of his own language can expect to read but perhaps not fully understand Cornish, but has difficulty understanding spoken Cornish.

Breton is accessible to Welsh speakers who have French for its differently borrowed words and sounds, and again especially to those familiar with archaic Welsh. It is certainly much easier for a Welsh speaker to learn Breton than it would be for a French speaker to do so.

It is relatively easy for Welsh and Breton and Cornish speakers, even if they have none of the languages in common, to make themselves understood to each other with a bit of effort. The same is not really true in my experience with Welsh and Gaelic speakers but then I have known difficulty in understanding Irish speakers of Welsh.

There is some common vocabulary, although it is well disguised by different orthography and different pronunciation, and there seem to be sufficiently similar structures in the grammar that learning a Gaelic language should be easier for a Welsh speaker, or vice versa, than it might otherwise be.

The conventional answer to this question in the first half of the twentieth century would certainly be yes. The proportion of Welsh speakers in Wales has fallen consistently since there have been any sort of reliable statistics. Over the twentieth century the total number of speakers of Welsh has remained pretty much constant in the face of a sharp rise in the population.

There is perhaps less of an obvious consensus on the answer at the end of the century, although the long term prospects must be pretty bleak for any particular language with a small community of speakers, and particularly one like Welsh which both is devoid of great concentrations of speakers, and is surrounded by the particularly aggressive culture of the American and English speaking world.

Ah, now. There is a question to keep one awake at nights. It really rather depends what one means by speaking Welsh. The most consistently reliable statistics are those derived from the decennial United Kingdom National Census, which in Wales asks people whether they speak Welsh.

This reports a figure of a few hundred thousand in a population which is rapidly approaching three million but is widely held to underestimate the figure for several reasons. The principal reason is a reluctance of many people to admit to speaking Welsh, especially those who have an education in English and only informal knowledge of Welsh, and those especially in the South who speak dialects other than the esteemed North-Western dialect.

These are people who are afraid that if they admit to the Welsh they will start to receive incomprehensible formal documents from the Government in Welsh rather than in the English to which they are accustomed. There is also a lack of self-esteem inherent in not having a formal knowledge of the language, though the lack of Welsh education, which makes some people deny their Welsh because they are being asked an official question, one which they treat almost as if it were the threat of an examination.

Other reasons include the arbitrariness of the administrative border, which means that the question is asked in the largely English speaking town of Wrexham in Clwyd in North Wales, but not in the essentially Welsh market town of Oswestry nearby but just across the border in England. A conversely over-estimated figure is suggested by a survey conducted by S4C , the terrestrial television channel which broadcasts Welsh-language programmes in Wales, who were interested in as large a figure as possible in order to attract advertising revenue.

It is already being de-standardised and is losing ground to American English in the world of computing and business. The language is being fed by more and more linguistic tributaries and in the next years is likely to change beyond recognition. Future schoolchildren will look back at the language of today with the same lack of understanding as they currently look at the works of Chaucer.

Welsh meanwhile will meander forwards much as it has the past few hundred years, with no real pressure to change its course to adapt to the needs of others. Write a book in Welsh and a Welsh speaker will be able to pick it up and read it in years with no real difficulty.

This is unnatural. Researchers have found that bilinguals have significant cognitive advantages in terms of memory, perception, and attentional and inhibitory control. They have also found health benefits including faster stroke recovery and delayed onset of dementia.

The only conclusion is that the English language is a vast drawback to Britain and a manifold barrier to the progress of the people. OK, you may have realised by now that this is, of course, a parody of the arguments used regularly against the Welsh language. You can make silly arguments against any language.

But they are all worthwhile and should all be cherished. Perhaps we should just accept that and learn to love the richness and variety that comes with linguistic diversity. Editor: Enjoying Nation. Please help support investigative journalism in Wales by subscribing to Nation. All information provided to Nation. Cymru will be handled sensitively and within the boundaries of the Data Protection Act In the s and s, all political parties started to look for ways of recognising Welsh nationhood.

Thus, Cardiff was made a capital city, the red dragon was recognised as the official flag, the declining Welsh language was given legal status, and a government post was created to look after Wales. These initiatives came about through a combination of political pressures and protests from within Wales, and a willingness within government to recognise the plurality of the United Kingdom. By , this process had led to the creation of the National Assembly for Wales.

For the first time in its history, Wales had a democratic institution of national self-government. Yet, in the referendum that led to its creation, only a quarter of the electorate voted in favour, while half of people chose not to vote at all.

The reality was that, although a mundane sense of Welsh identity was very powerful, the political implications of this were narrow. This raises questions about the nature of Welsh identity in the past. From the medieval age onwards, there is clear evidence of a commitment to Wales amongst the literate classes, but how deep this went amongst the mass of people is a different matter.

Many people lived difficult lives and were probably consumed more by daily challenges than questions of nationality. However, the survival of Welsh identity was never down to the elite alone. There is evidence of a popular pride in the Welsh language, although this did not mean that people did not also want to speak English. History itself was also important to the survival of Wales because it provided tales of times when the Welsh were self-governing or rose up against their chains of servitude.

This overlaid internal divisions and offered the Welsh a sense of being more than just a region or culture. This history and patriotism were inscribed into the landscape through place- names, legends , and the emotions inspired by mountains, hills and even individual streets. A sense of what it meant to be Welsh was brought alive in sport, literature and fireside stories. The projects of the middle classes might have given voice to a sense of national identity, but their invented traditions worked because they gave form to something much wider, if more abstract.

But no matter how much people have cared about Wales, the political, cultural and economic framework within which modern Wales existed was British and dominated by England. After medieval colonialism faded, there was little direct oppression of the Welsh because they were Welsh.

Their language was looked down upon, patronised and condemned, but this never translated into policies designed to actually stop people speaking or feeling Welsh. Indeed, there were times in the 20th century when the British state, in supporting Welsh in public life and education, seemed more progressive in attitudes towards the language than many Welsh people. When Welsh was made a compulsory subject in schools at the end of the s, it was not because of a widespread public demand.

This should not be interpreted as external largesse. Since Wales was part of the British state, some of the officials and representatives of the latter were Welsh.

Moreover, there was pressure placed upon the state by a small but effective protest movement to recognise the Welsh language and Welsh identity. Yet Wales always remained on the periphery of the state. In the modern period, it may not have been oppressed but nor was it often at the centre of government thinking. As social democracy and regional policy went into retreat from the middle of the s, Wales became more vulnerable again to the vagaries of the free market.

Just as it had in the s and s, this led to fears for the very future of the Welsh nation.