The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page B

Almost 80 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 pockets 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 illegal. 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 1960s 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 television station. Welsh, according to The Economist, is now “the most subsidised minority language in the world.” Discussing the advent of S4C, 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 English people set alight. More than a hundred people were imprisoned 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 can converse, though they have lived apart for 1,500 years.) Its numbers are falling, but it is still spoken by half a million people.
    The position is somewhat less buoyant for the Gaelic of Ireland. There too the government has been a generous defender of the language, but with less visible success. Ireland is not even officially an English-speaking country. Yet 94 percent of her citizens speak only English and just 1 percent use Gaelic as their preferred language. Ireland is the only member of the Common Market that does not insist on having its own language used in community business, largely because it would be pointless. The dearth of Gaelic speakers does convey certain advantages to those who have mastery of the tongue. The Spectator magazine noted in 1986 how Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien would respond to an awkward question in the Dáil, or lower house of parliament, by emitting a mellifluous flurry of Gaelic, which most of the members of his audience could but admire if not even faintly understand.
    The Irish-speaking area of Ireland, called the Gaeltacht, has been inexorably shrinking for a long time. Even before the potato famine of 1845 drove hundreds of thousands of people from the land, only about a quarter of the population spoke Gaelic. Today Gaelic clings to a few scattered outposts, mostly along the rocky and underpopulated west coast. This has long been one of the most depressed, if fabulously scenic, areas of Europe. The government has tried to shore up the perennially faltering economy by bringing in tourists and industry, but this has put an inevitable strain on the local culture. In the 1970s the population of Donegal, the main Irish-speaking area, increased by a fifth, but the incomers were almost entirely English speakers who not only cannot speak Gaelic but have little desire to learn a language that is both difficult and so clearly doomed.
    All the evidence suggests that minority languages shrink or thrive at their own ineluctable rate. It seems not to matter greatly whether governments suppress them brutally or support them lavishly.