Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

to think that most welsh people should speak some welsh

408 replies

mumof2children · 01/10/2010 00:53

i am no way fluent in welsh by know very basic welsh.

but sould more welsh people speak some welsh

OP posts:
fedupofnamechanging · 02/10/2010 22:54

If you actively choose to not teach your child Welsh (if you are Welsh) then is that not colluding in it's demise? Sorry, probably being a bit thick,but not sure what you are asking me

lostinwales · 02/10/2010 22:59

was just about to post your name on another thread, as they want to know other MN'ers you like and you are the only one I actually know (well and like a lot obviously!) Definitely the only MN'er who has fed me delicious home made cake! Although I'm still waiting on someone to notice my clever post that people speak Welsh in Argentia, my DSil went there during he nursing degree and worked as a nurse speaking Welsh to her patients.

Susiewho · 02/10/2010 23:10

They only speak Welsh in one province in Argentina. That was always rolled out by our Welsh teacher at school: "You could speak Welsh in Argentina". Or perhaps we could learn a decent, useful language like Spanish and speak to them properly then!

lostinwales · 02/10/2010 23:15

Oh I know Susiewho, it just always made me smile! And thank you for not pointing out I spelt Argentina wrong. DSil would have been pants anywhere other than Patagonia as she is only fluent in Welsh, English and French.

Susiewho · 02/10/2010 23:16

Three languages is impressive! I struggle with one at the best of times!

mathanxiety · 02/10/2010 23:27

If there are huge economic pressures to speak Urdu yourself for work or to participate in civic life (vote, read newspapers, stay informed), and you teach your child Urdu as opposed to English then I don't see it as collusion, just accepting economic and political reality and making sure your children have a better chance in life than you did.

Lostinwales, I had heard of the Welsh in Patagonia as my granny was born in Argentina (Irish parents) and I have a passing knowledge of emigration there. Another interesting fact -- about 20% of the population of the state of Utah claims Welsh heritage, and the development of the Mormon Tabernacle choir is due to the many hundreds of early Welsh Mormons and the many Welsh conductors and organisers who left Wales for Utah in the 19th century. Welsh communities tended to emigrate en masse.

fedupofnamechanging · 03/10/2010 00:03

mathanxiety - it's not a question of learning one language intead of another. I would have ensured that my children could speak both languages.

mathanxiety · 03/10/2010 00:32

Why would you bother? What good would it possibly do your children to know English? There would be no future for it, and they would probably not value it; it would be an uphill struggle all the way.

fedupofnamechanging · 03/10/2010 09:41

I think I would bother because it would be my language. If people chose not to, well, that's just it, isn't it, their choice? No point putting all the blame on England.

My DHs mum is not from the UK and didn't ensure that my DH grew up to be fluent in her language. I think it is sad that he can't fully communicate with his mum in the language that comes naturally to her, that she thinks in iyswim. I tried to get her to teach it to my DCs, but she hasn't. My DCs have a whole side of their family that they can't speak to unless they speak English too.

domesticsluttery · 03/10/2010 11:08

"I wonder how you make a language spread, assuming a fair number of people speak some of it. Could someone at a workplace in Wales say "Let's try to speak Welsh every Friday" or something like that? Or have a sign in a pub saying "Please speak Welsh if you can"?"

I remember a few years ago there was a campaign, probably by the Welsh Language Board, to start every conversation in Welsh. I know I tend to automatically speak to people in English if I don't know whether they speak Welsh or not, then even if they do speak Welsh they don't realise that I do and we carry on speaking English. The campaign tried to get people to automatically start a conversation in Welsh, it is easy enough for a non Welsh speaker to Reply that they don't actually speak Welsh and then you can switch.

We had little badges to wear in work too to show that we spoke Welsh, that way people would automatically speak Welsh to you if they wanted to.

It isn't a problem where I work now as we only speak Welsh there anyway.

pointydog · 03/10/2010 11:23

Languages change, move on, mutate all the time. Human intervention is like chnaging the direction of a stream with your hands.

Wales is genuinely bi-lingual. The welsh language has never died out. So it seems only right that signs etc are produced in both languages.

However, pumping government money into various schemes to revive a language that only a very small minority speak (Scots gaelic), and which has never been spoken in vast areas of the land, seems a wate of time and money.

domesticsluttery · 03/10/2010 11:25

And Welsh mutates more than most (anyone who spent hours learning treigladau at school will know what I mean!)

mumof2children · 03/10/2010 11:47

wow what a thread.

i agree though i should of worded the thread better, nobody should be made to do anything.

OP posts:
Onetoomanycornettos · 03/10/2010 12:25

Karmabeliever, I just wanted to respond to the 'neglect' of your DH's mother in not passing on her own mother tongue. In an ideal world, this would happen, but it's very hard to pass on a language when only one person in the family speaks it and it's not a common language (such as my DH's language). We've done the nursery rhymes and so on, but it takes a massive time commitment, and real dedication to have truly bilingual children, especially if the second language is a very minority language and not spoken in the home by the family.

I have numerous friends in mixed culture marriages who have started out with the best of intentions to teach their children their mother tongue (e.g. Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish), and successfully got them to speak a bit by the age of three, however, after that they have gone to English school, realised their mum spoke English too and unless the family has persisted and spent a lot of time and energy, the second language usually has ended up lost (i.e. the child understands a bit of it but can't actually converse themselves). I have seen it work well where English (which is highly dominant anyway) is the home language and the second language is something like Arabic, in the host culture, and one parents speaks it plus having extra Arabic classes every day. But I cannot emphasise the effort this takes to have fluent bilingual children, and to just say someone's mum didn't ensure they spoke the second language kind of implies they might not have bothered (which they might not, of course) but also risks undersestimating how hard it is to do this, and how often it fails, if my set of friends are anything to go by.

fedupofnamechanging · 03/10/2010 14:17

Onetoomanycornettos, in my DHs family his mum had a lot of siblings so my DH had uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents that he could not converse with entirely easily. He did grow up in England but had dual nationality until the age of 18, so the language is part of his heritage.

His dads family was very small by contrast, just his dad and paternal GPs. I do get the impression that because my FIL struggled with the language, he maybe put pressure on my MIL to focus on English.

I do think that she did her child a disservice, because although lots of his extended family spoke some English, my DHs GPs didn't and I would want my children to be able to fully converse with all their GPs.

Still, I accept that everyones situation is different and people make different choices.

edam · 03/10/2010 16:34

onetoomany's right, it takes a LOT of effort to ensure a child is bilingual if they are growing up in a country dominated by one language. We have two sets of Iranian friends - in one family the ds barely speaks any Farsi although his parents have tried to teach him. In the others the children are fluent - good enough to converse with Afghan visitors to our school - but that's because their father ONLY speaks Farsi to them, never English (unless there's another party to the conversation who can't speak Farsi).

Susiewho · 03/10/2010 17:01

karmabeliever, do you mean that he had dual nationality as Welsh and English? In what capacity is this? Passport is British. Where would you be officially dual nationality if you're half Welsh and half English?

fedupofnamechanging · 03/10/2010 17:42

Susiewho, my DH had dual British and Danish nationality until the age of 18. I think at that point he had to choose (Danish rules,I think). Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Ariesgirl · 03/10/2010 18:04

Re passports etc, I don't think there are many people in Wales who want an independent Wales, unlike the support there seems to be in Scotland. The Welsh were the original Britons and most Welsh have no problem in recognising themselves as Welsh and British. It's the same as in many countries in Europe - a Catalan can be Catalonian and Spanish, a Bavarian can be Bavarian and German and a Piedmontese can be Piedmontese and Italian. Many of these regions have their own languages too.

I was about to chip in with Welsh Patagonia. My sister was there a couple of years ago and spoke some admittedly fairly stilted Welsh with some of the locals. She said it was a very odd feeling.

According to Wiki,

"List of the languages of the British Isles
The British Isles has 12 native languages of which 2 have been revived in the last 100 years, Cornish & Manx. There are the celtic languages of Wales, Ireland & Scotland along with the Romance languages of the Channel Islands.
English
Scots
Ulster Scots
Irish Gaelic
Welsh
Scottish Gaelic
Cornish
Manx Gaelic
Jersey Legal French
Jèrriais
Guernésiais
Sercquiais"

English isn't actually the official language by law, just the main language. Live and let live :)

TheCoalitionNeedsYou · 03/10/2010 18:39

Actually according to Wiki the FIRST britons retreated back to southern europe at the start of the last ice age.

mathanxiety · 03/10/2010 18:53

The Fainne (ring) was and is used in Ireland to indicate Irish-friendliness. It's a little badge, a small gold ring, worn on a suit or whatever you put on in the morning.

Ariesgirl · 03/10/2010 19:07

If you're calling the first Britons the humans who lived on this island first, Coalition, then I won't argue with you. I was referring to the first people to identify themselves with the island of Britain as their home rather than Gaul, Rome etc i.e. the ones the Romans conquered. It was only the Saxons who started referring to Wales as Wealas, or place of foreigners. Same word root as Corn wall. And the Welsh referred to themselves as Brythons or Britons into the Middle Ages. That's all.

pointydog · 03/10/2010 19:10

What is ulster scots?

abr1de · 03/10/2010 19:24

The language spoken by people in Northern Ireland who originally came over from Scotland from the sixteenth century onwards.

TheCoalitionNeedsYou · 03/10/2010 19:24

You always need to specify a time period when you talk about the original inhabitants of anywhere. If you take a long enough point of view we are all just immigrants from the rift valley.

Swipe left for the next trending thread