Welsh Language

Welsh ( or ) is a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively in Wales, by some in England, and in Y Wladfa (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina). Historically, it has also been known in English as "British", "Cambrian", "Cambric" and "Cymric".

The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 gave the Welsh language official status in Wales. Both the Welsh and English languages are ''de jure'' official languages of the Welsh Parliament, the Senedd.

According to the 2021 census, the Welsh-speaking population of Wales aged three or older was 17.8% (538,300 people) and nearly three quarters of the population in Wales said they had no Welsh language skills. Other estimates suggest that 29.7% (899,500) of people aged three or older in Wales could speak Welsh in June 2022. Almost half of all Welsh speakers consider themselves fluent Welsh speakers and 21 per cent are able to speak a fair amount of Welsh. The Welsh government plans to increase the number of Welsh language speakers to one million by 2050. Since 1980, the number of children attending Welsh-medium schools has increased, and the number going to Welsh bilingual and dual-medium schools has decreased. Welsh is a vibrant Celtic language in terms of active speakers, and is the only Celtic language not considered endangered by UNESCO.

History

The language of the Welsh developed from the language of Britons. The emergence of Welsh was not instantaneous and clearly identifiable. Instead, the shift occurred over a long period of time, with some historians claiming that it had happened by as late as the 9th century, with a watershed moment being that proposed by linguist Kenneth H. Jackson, the Battle of Dyrham, a military battle between the West Saxons and the Britons in 577 AD, which split the South Western British from direct overland contact with the Welsh.

Four periods are identified in the history of Welsh, with rather indistinct boundaries: Primitive Welsh, Old Welsh, Middle Welsh, and Modern Welsh. The period immediately following the language's emergence is sometimes referred to as Primitive Welsh, followed by the Old Welsh period – which is generally considered to stretch from the beginning of the 9th century to sometime during the 12th century. The Middle Welsh period is considered to have lasted from then until the 14th century, when the Modern Welsh period began, which in turn is divided into Early and Late Modern Welsh.

The word ''Welsh'' is a descendant, via Old English , of the Proto-Germanic word ''*Walhaz'', which was derived from the name of the Celtic people known to the Romans as Volcae and which came to refer to speakers of Celtic languages, and then indiscriminately to the people of the Western Roman Empire. In Old English the term went through semantic narrowing, coming to refer to either Britons in particular or, in some contexts, slaves. The plural form evolved into the name for their territory, Wales. Davies, John (1994) ' A History of Wales''. Penguin: p.71; . The modern names for various Romance-speaking people in Continental Europe (e.g. Walloons, Valaisans, Vlachs/Wallachians, and , the Polish name for Italians) have a similar etymology. The Welsh term for the language, , descends from the Brythonic word ''combrogi'', meaning "compatriots" or "fellow countrymen".

Origins

Welsh evolved from Common Brittonic, the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Celtic Britons. Classified as Insular Celtic, the British language probably arrived in Britain during the Bronze Age or Iron Age and was probably spoken throughout the island south of the Firth of Forth.Koch, pp. 291–292. During the Early Middle Ages the British language began to fragment due to increased dialect differentiation, thus evolving into Welsh and the other Brittonic languages. It is not clear when Welsh became distinct.

Linguist Kenneth H. Jackson has suggested that the evolution in syllabic structure and sound pattern was complete by around AD 550, and labelled the period between then and about AD 800 "Primitive Welsh".Koch, p. 1757. This Primitive Welsh may have been spoken in both Wales and the Hen Ogledd ("Old North") – the Brittonic-speaking areas of what are now northern England and southern Scotland – and therefore may have been the ancestor of Cumbric as well as Welsh. Jackson, however, believed that the two varieties were already distinct by that time. The earliest Welsh poetry – that attributed to the or "Early Poets" – is generally considered to date to the Primitive Welsh period. However, much of this poetry was supposedly composed in the Hen Ogledd, raising further questions about the dating of the material and language in which it was originally composed. This discretion stems from the fact that Cumbric was widely believed to have been the language used in Hen Ogledd. An 8th-century inscription in Tywyn shows the language already dropping inflections in the declension of nouns.

Janet Davies proposed that the origins of the Welsh language were much less definite; in ''The Welsh Language: A History'', she proposes that Welsh may have been around even earlier than 600 AD. This is evidenced by the dropping of final syllables from Brittonic: ''*bardos'' "poet" became ''bardd'', and ''*abona'' "river" became ''afon''. Though both Davies and Jackson cite minor changes in syllable structure and sounds as evidence for the creation of Old Welsh, Davies suggests it may be more appropriate to refer to this derivative language as rather than characterising it as a new language altogether.

Primitive Welsh

The argued dates for the period of "Primitive Welsh" are widely debated, with some historians' suggestions differing by hundreds of years.

Old Welsh

The next main period is Old Welsh (, 9th to 11th centuries); poetry from both Wales and Scotland has been preserved in this form of the language. As Germanic and Gaelic colonisation of Britain proceeded, the Brittonic speakers in Wales were split off from those in northern England, speaking Cumbric, and those in the southwest, speaking what would become Cornish, and so the languages diverged. Both the works of Aneirin (, c. 600) and the '' Book of Taliesin'' () were written during this era.

Middle Welsh

Middle Welsh () is the label attached to the Welsh of the 12th to 14th centuries, of which much more remains than for any earlier period. This is the language of nearly all surviving early manuscripts of the '' Mabinogion'', although the tales themselves are certainly much older. It is also the language of the existing Welsh law manuscripts. Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible to a modern-day Welsh speaker.

File:Map o ieithoedd Cymru (A map of the languages of Wales) - 1750.svg, 1750
File:Map o ieithoedd Cymru (A map of the languages of Wales) - 1800.svg, 1800
File:Map o ieithoedd Cymru (A map of the languages of Wales) - 1850.svg, 1850
File:Map o ieithoedd Cymru (A map of the languages of Wales) - 1900.svg, 1900

Modern Welsh

The Bible translations into Welsh helped maintain the use of Welsh in daily life. The New Testament was translated by William Salesbury in 1567, and the complete Bible by William Morgan in 1588. Modern Welsh is subdivided into Early Modern Welsh and Late Modern Welsh. Early Modern Welsh ran from the 15th century through to the end of the 16th century, and the Late Modern Welsh period roughly dates from the 16th century onwards. Contemporary Welsh differs greatly from the Welsh of the 16th century, but they are similar enough for a fluent Welsh speaker to have little trouble understanding it. During the Modern Welsh period there has been a decline in the popularity of the Welsh language: the number of Welsh speakers declined to the point at which there was concern that the language would become extinct. Welsh government processes and legislation have worked to increase the proliferation of the Welsh language, e.g. through education.

Geographic distribution

Wales

Welsh has been spoken continuously in Wales throughout history, but by 1911 it had become a minority language, spoken by 43.5 percent of the population. While this decline continued over the following decades, the language did not die out. By the start of the 21st century, numbers began to increase once more, at least partly as a result of the increase in Welsh-medium education.

The 2004 Welsh Language Use Survey showed that 21.7 percent of the population of Wales spoke Welsh, compared with 20.8 percent in the 2001 census, and 18.5 percent in the 1991 census. The 2011 census, however, showed a slight decline to 562,000, or 19 per cent of the population. The census also showed a "big drop" in the number of speakers in the Welsh-speaking heartlands, with the number dropping to under 50 percent in and Carmarthenshire for the first time. However, according to the Welsh Language Use Survey in 2019–20, 22 percent of people aged three and over were able to speak Welsh.

The Annual Population Survey (APS) by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated that as of June 2022, 899,500, or 29.7 percent of the population of Wales aged 3 and over, were able to speak the language. This could imply an increase in the prevalence of the Welsh language since the 2011 census. The APS estimates of Welsh language ability are historically higher than those produced by the census. In terms of usage, ONS also reported that 14.8% of people aged three or older in Wales reported that they spoke Welsh daily in June 2022, with 5.6% speaking it weekly and 7.6% less often. Approximately 1.7% reported that they never spoke Welsh despite being able to speak it, with the remaining 70.3% not being able to speak Welsh.

The National Survey for Wales, conducted by Welsh Government, has also tended to have a higher percentage of Welsh speakers than the census, with the most recent results for 2018–2019 suggesting that 22 percent of the population aged 3 and over were able to speak Welsh, with an additional 16 percent noting that they had some Welsh-speaking ability.

Historically, large numbers of Welsh people spoke only Welsh. Over the course of the 20th century this monolingual population all but disappeared, but a small percentage remained at the time of the 1981 census. Most Welsh-speaking people in Wales also speak English. However, many Welsh-speaking people are more comfortable expressing themselves in Welsh than in English. A speaker's choice of language can vary according to the subject domain and the social context, even within a single discourse (known in linguistics as code-switching).

Welsh speakers are largely concentrated in the north and west of Wales, principally , Conwy County Borough, Denbighshire, Anglesey, Carmarthenshire, north Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, parts of Glamorgan, and north-west and extreme south-west . However, first-language and other fluent speakers can be found throughout Wales.

Outside Wales

The rest of the UK

Welsh-speaking communities persisted well into the modern period across the border in England. Archenfield was still Welsh enough in the time of Elizabeth I for the Bishop of Hereford to be made responsible, together with the four Welsh bishops, for the translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Welsh. Welsh was still commonly spoken there in the first half of the 19th century, and churchwardens' notices were put up in both Welsh and English until about 1860. Alexander John Ellis in the 1880s identified a small part of Shropshire as still then speaking Welsh, with the "Celtic Border" passing from Llanymynech through Oswestry to Chirk.

The number of Welsh-speaking people in the rest of Britain has not yet been counted for statistical purposes. In 1993, the Welsh-language television channel S4C published the results of a survey into the numbers of people who spoke or understood Welsh, which estimated that there were around 133,000 Welsh-speaking people living in England, about 50,000 of them in the Greater London area. The Welsh Language Board, on the basis of an analysis of the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study, estimated there were 110,000 Welsh-speaking people in England, and another thousand in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In the 2011 census, 8,248 people in England gave Welsh in answer to the question "What is your main language?" The Office for National Statistics subsequently published a census glossary of terms to support the release of results from the census, including their definition of "main language" as referring to "first or preferred language" (though that wording was not in the census questionnaire itself). The wards in England with the most people giving Welsh as their main language were the Liverpool wards of Central and Greenbank; and Oswestry South in Shropshire. The wards of Oswestry South (1.15%), Oswestry East (0.86%) and St Oswald (0.71%) had the highest percentage of residents giving Welsh as their main language. The census also revealed that 3,528 wards in England, or 46% of the total number, contained at least one resident whose main language is Welsh. In terms of the regions of England, North West England (1,945), London (1,310) and the West Midlands (1,265) had the highest number of people noting Welsh as their main language. According to the 2021 census, 7,349 people in England recorded Welsh to be their "main language".

In the 2011 census, 1,189 people aged three and over in Scotland noted that Welsh was a language (other than English) that they used at home.

Argentina

It is believed that there are as many as 5,000 speakers of Patagonian Welsh.

Australia

In response to the question 'Does the person speak a language other than English at home?' in the 2016 Australian census, 1,688 people noted that they spoke Welsh.

Canada

In the 2011 Canadian census, 3,885 people reported Welsh as their first language. According to the 2021 Canadian census, 1,130 people noted that Welsh was their mother tongue.

New Zealand

The 2018 New Zealand census noted that 1,083 people in New Zealand spoke Welsh.

United States

The American Community Survey 2009–2013 noted that 2,235 people aged 5 years and over in the United States spoke Welsh at home. The highest number of those (255) lived in Florida.

Status

Although Welsh is a minority language, support for it grew during the second half of the 20th century, along with the rise of organisations such as the nationalist political party from 1925 and Welsh Language Society from 1962. Of the six living Celtic languages (including two revived), Welsh has the most number of native speakers who use the language on a daily basis, and it is the only Celtic language which is not considered to be endangered by UNESCO.

The Welsh Language Act 1993 and the Government of Wales Act 1998 provide that the Welsh and English languages be treated equally in the public sector, as far as is reasonable and practicable. Each public body is required to prepare for approval a Welsh Language Scheme, which indicates its commitment to the equality of treatment principle. This is sent out in draft form for public consultation for a three-month period, whereupon comments on it may be incorporated into a final version. It requires the final approval of the now defunct Welsh Language Board (). Thereafter, the public body is charged with implementing and fulfilling its obligations under the Welsh Language Scheme. The list of other public bodies which have to prepare Schemes could be added to by initially the Secretary of State for Wales, from 1993 to 1997, by way of statutory instrument. Subsequent to the forming of the National Assembly for Wales in 1997, the Government Minister responsible for the Welsh language can and has passed statutory instruments naming public bodies who have to prepare Schemes. Neither the 1993 Act nor secondary legislation made under it covers the private sector, although some organisations, notably banks and some railway companies, provide some of their information in Welsh.

On 7 December 2010, the Welsh Assembly unanimously approved a set of measures to develop the use of the Welsh language within Wales. On 9 February 2011 this measure, the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011, was passed and received Royal Assent, thus making the Welsh language an officially recognised language within Wales. The measure:
* confirms the official status of the Welsh language
* creates a new system of placing duties on bodies to provide services through the medium of Welsh
* creates a Welsh Language Commissioner with strong enforcement powers to protect the rights of Welsh-speaking people to access services through the medium of Welsh
* establishes a Welsh Language Tribunal
* gives individuals and bodies the right to appeal decisions made in relation to the provision of services through the medium of Welsh
* creates a Welsh Language Partnership Council to advise Government on its strategy in relation to the Welsh language
* allows for an official investigation by the Welsh Language Commissioner of instances where there is an attempt to interfere with the freedom of Welsh-speaking people to use the language with one another

The measure requires public bodies and some private companies to provide services in Welsh. The Welsh government's Minister for Heritage at the time, Alun Ffred Jones, said, "The Welsh language is a source of great pride for the people of Wales, whether they speak it or not, and I am delighted that this measure has now become law. I am very proud to have steered legislation through the Assembly which confirms the official status of the Welsh language; which creates a strong advocate for Welsh speakers and will improve the quality and quantity of services available through the medium of Welsh. I believe that everyone who wants to access services in the Welsh language should be able to do so, and that is what this government has worked towards. This legislation is an important and historic step forward for the language, its speakers and for the nation." The measure was not welcomed warmly by all supporters: Bethan Williams, chairman of the Welsh Language Society, gave a mixed response to the move, saying, "Through this measure we have won official status for the language and that has been warmly welcomed. But there was a core principle missing in the law passed by the Assembly before Christmas. It doesn't give language rights to the people of Wales in every aspect of their lives. Despite that, an amendment to that effect was supported by 18 Assembly Members from three different parties, and that was a significant step forward."

On 5 October 2011, Meri Huws, Chair of the Welsh Language Board, was appointed the new Welsh Language Commissioner. She released a statement that she was "delighted" to have been appointed to the "hugely important role", adding, "I look forward to working with the Welsh Government and organisations in Wales in developing the new system of standards. I will look to build on the good work that has been done by the Welsh Language Board and others to strengthen the Welsh language and ensure that it continues to thrive." First Minister Carwyn Jones said that Huws would act as a champion for the Welsh language, though some had concerns over her appointment: Plaid Cymru spokeswoman Bethan Jenkins said, "I have concerns about the transition from Meri Huws's role from the Welsh Language Board to the language commissioner, and I will be asking the Welsh government how this will be successfully managed. We must be sure that there is no conflict of interest, and that the Welsh Language Commissioner can demonstrate how she will offer the required fresh approach to this new role." Huws started her role as the Welsh Language Commissioner on 1 April 2012.

Local councils and the Senedd use Welsh, issuing Welsh versions of their literature, to varying degrees.

Road signs in Wales are in Welsh and English. Prior to 2016, the choice of which language to display first was the responsibility of the local council. Since then, as part of the Welsh Language alesMeasure 2011, all new signs have Welsh displayed first. There have been incidents of one of the languages being vandalised, which may be considered a hate crime.

Since 2000, the teaching of Welsh has been compulsory in all schools in Wales up to age 16; this has had an effect in stabilising and reversing the decline in the language.

Text on UK coins tends to be in English and Latin. However, a Welsh-language edge inscription was used on pound coins dated 1985, 1990 and 1995, which circulated in all parts of the UK prior to their 2017 withdrawal. The wording is , (), and derives from the national anthem of Wales, . UK banknotes are in English only.

Some shops employ bilingual signage. Welsh sometimes appears on product packaging or instructions.

The UK government has ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in respect of Welsh.

The language has greatly increased its prominence since the creation of the television channel S4C in November 1982, which until digital switchover in 2010 broadcast 70 per cent of Channel 4's programming along with a majority of Welsh language shows during peak viewing hours. The all-Welsh-language digital station S4C Digidol is available throughout Europe on satellite and online throughout the UK. Since the digital switchover was completed in South Wales on 31 March 2010, S4C Digidol became the main broadcasting channel and fully in Welsh. The main evening television news provided by the BBC
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