The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

the message Addresse en Breton interdite ("Address in Breton forbidden"). Hitler and Mus-solini even went so far as to persecute Esperanto speakers.
    XSuppression is still going on. In the Soviet Union in the 198os, Azerbaijanis and other linguistic minorities rioted, and sometimes lost their lives, for the right to have newspapers and schoolbooks in their own language. In Romania there exists a group of people called Szeklers who speak what is said to be the purest and most beautiful form of Hungarian. But for thirty years, until the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian government systematically erad-icated its culture, closing down schools, forcing the renowned Hungarian-language Bolyai University to merge with a lesser-known Romanian one, even bulldozing whole villages, all in the name of linguistic conformity.
    On the whole, however, governments these days take a more enlightened view to their minority languages. Nowhere perhaps has this reversal of attitudes been more pronounced than in Wales.
    Once practically banned, the Welsh language is now officially pro-tected by the government. It is a language of rich but daunting beauty. Try getting your tongue around this sentence, from a park-ing lot in Gwynedd, the most determinedly Welsh-speaking of Wales's eight counties: "A ydycg wedi talu a dodi eich tocyn yn y golwg?" It translates roughly as "Did you remember to pay?" and, yes, it is about as unpronounceable as it looks. In fact, more so because Welsh pronunciations rarely bear much relation to their spellings—at least when viewed from an English-speaking per-spective. The town of Dolgellau, for instance, is pronounced "doll-geth-lee," while Llandudno is "klan-did-no." And those are the easy ones. There are also scores of places that bring tears to the GLOBAL LANGUAGE
    eyes of outsiders: Llwchmynydd, Bwlchtocyn, Dwygyfylch, Cw-mystwyth, Pontrhydfendigaid, and Cnwch Cock Given such awesome phonics it is perhaps little wonder that Prince Charles had endless difficulties mastering the language be-fore his investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969. In this he is not alone. Almost 8o percent of all Welsh people do not speak Welsh.
    Although the country is officially bilingual and all public signs are in Welsh as well as English, the Welsh language is spoken hardly at all in the south, around the main industrial cities of Swansea, Cardiff, and Newport, and elsewhere it tends to exist only in pock-ets in the more remote inland areas.
    That it has survived at all is a tribute to the character of the Welsh people. Until well into this century Welsh was all but ille-gal. It was forbidden in schools, in the courts, and at many places of work. Children who forgot themselves and shouted it on the playground were often forced to undergo humiliating punishments.
    Now all that has changed. Since the 196os the British government has allowed Welsh to become an official language, has permitted its use in schools in predominantly Welsh-speaking areas, allowed people to give court evidence in Welsh, and set up a Welsh tele-vision station. Welsh, according to The Economist, is now "the most subsidised minority language in the world." Discussing the advent of 5 4C, the Welsh-language television station, it observed:
    "Never mind that it costs £ 43 million a year to broadcast to the 20
    percent of the population of Wales who speak Welsh, who in turn make up only 1 percent of the population of Britain."
    All of this was secured for the Welsh people only after a long campaign of vandalism, in which road signs were painted over, television masts torn down, and weekend cottages owned by En-glish people set alight. More than a hundred people were impris-oned during the campaign. Today, although still very much a minority tongue, Welsh is more robust than many other small European languages—certainly in much better health than the Breton language of France, its closest relation. (Breton and Welsh are so close that speakers from the two regions