AIBU to allow my children to speak my language?

[tyngedyriaith]

Have name changed to something fitting for this, I post once in a while

Just as a background...

I was brought up speaking Welsh and English at home with my grandparents having absolutely atrocious English and not learning it until their 20s.

I married a boarding school boy with a background very different from my own. He doesn't speak Welsh although clearly the family name has Welsh roots.

In my workplace we speak 100% Welsh and so naturally I still speak that more. I speak both to my children and English when husband is around. We live in an English speaking area although our small village being about 50:50 and so church is bilingual.

The children go to a welsh language school too.

DMIL.....

She resents that they speak Welsh and often comes out with comments like "oh only backward, uneducated poor people spoke Welsh when I was a child"
"It really does hold you back" - no it doesnt we have two medics at uni thanks...
Etc... it's not 1940 ffs

She always tries to prove that it's a waste of time, claims they don't speak it outside of school, frowns when she realises they speak it with their welsh speaking friends.

They pay for us all to go on a big family holiday and if they hear us speaking welsh we were once told to speak english when they are around. Ok fair enough if they are part of the conversation etc.
She makes comments when I'm around like " I find it very rude that you speak welsh around us"

BUT !!! Their cousins are bilingual Spanish and speak Spanish with their father (spanish) at the dinner table and she would NEVER dare say anything about that. I just feel like our language isn't viewed as real.

AIBU to tell them to stick up for themselves and be proud of having two first languages?!

God I want to smack that woman out sometimes...... as lovely as she is other times.....

My Welsh is much better than my English - spoken and written. I live in a tiwn with 70% Welsh speakers and at least half of them have better spoken Welsh than English.

OP I would point out how MIL is treating BIL and his language compared to how she treats the Welsh language.

Bet the teachers love the teacher parent meetings at gaelscoileanna. Far less cheeky back chat from the parents!

Being bilingual opens up a differnt area in your brain . People that can speak more than one language are more clever than those that don't. Fact.

Tell her your child is more intelligent than her.

I have friends who think in Welsh entirely, and we're not from an older generation (22).

I think half and half. If I do something wrong/stub my toe I swear in Welsh

Speaking Welsh has been the edge in getting me at least two jobs, it's been hugely valuable.

YANBU to speak your language with your children.

I love the idea that speaking Welsh "holds us back". I've been bilingual from 3 onwards, in addition to fluent Welsh and English I speak Spanish, French and I'm learning Polish. DD is being raised bilingual; as part of raising her bilingually we've also done Makaton with her so she can sign in addition to two languages. I don't think we're the ones being held back

so is it the gaelscoil or is it the parents' expectations?

Well, it's the gaelscoil, isn't it? Unless you're bilingual and raising them the same from birth? Of course, as a parent you choose to send your dc to a gaelscoil so I suppose it's both!

I think you're being a little shortsighted. Firstly, there are ample opportunities for Irish speakers in a plethora of careers. Secondly, as I said, and as PP have said, being bilingual in any language encourages and helps with becoming multilingual.

And that's not even taking heritage and culture into the equation.

In all honesty I think speaking a language in front of people who don't speak that language is rude sorry. Not that she is polite herself. But it is poor manners

I disagree and I say that as someone who only speaks English and who has a MIL who speaks to her children (My DH and his siblings) in her own first language despite the fact she speaks excellent English. She is a lovely woman and I know she wouldn't speak about me behind her back ordeliberately try and exclude me. There are definitely times where it's polite to speak a common language if there is one but I don't think you should have to all the time. IYSWIM

Why is it sad that thy have to have a 'posh accent' with MIL but another at home??
Or do you mean they speak English with a different accent depending on where they are?

Interesting to see the number of people who chime in with "but it would be so much more useful if they were taught another language instead". Funny how I never get told that about my Swedish-speaking children.

If you speak any other small language than a Celtic one, you get praised and told what a wonderful opportunity you are giving your children.

Likewise, "it has traditionally been used to exclude people in Wales". Again, nobody seems worried by the fact that the Swedes sit around Sweden speaking Swedish to the detriment of any non-Swedish speaking people around, or (perhaps a better analogy) that the German-speaking Swiss speak German which presumably excludes the French-speaking Swiss. Nobody makes the assumption that the other 10 000 or so languages in the world are spoken merely with the intention of pissing off the English. That is reserved for the speakers of a Celtic language for reasons which are obscure to me.

Madmags, I hear you but there is a certain kind of parent who sends their child to a gaelscoil and it's a parent who values education and encourages and supports their child and has an eye on third level achievement, so is it the gaelscoil or is it the parents' expectations?

Probably a combination of both. There are people who are interested in education and achievement and part of that is the ability to understand the massive benefits of a bilingual education and the massive handicap - culturally and educationally - that monolingualism can be.

I find it interesting that your challenge for Welsh speakers is to tranliterate a colloquial English expression. It's probably perfectly possible to express the sentiment without it being exactly the same as a common expression in a different language.

"If you start needed to use words like exponentially and extrapolate and exacerbate (just examples) do Welsh speakers have a translation, or do they use the welsh for increase at a greater rate, take from that, make worse etc etc etc"

So why would using Latin loan words make English a superior language? Ime most Germanic languages have a greater tendency than English to use native word roots when modernising their vocabulary: does that mean that German and Swedish are not "as good" as English?

I grew up in North Wales and I was very aware that children in previous generations that were welsh speakers had been berated ad belittled for speaking welsh, they were physically punished in schools for it and it was seen as "dirty" and "poor" to speak welsh. She has obviously carried this forward without realising things have changed, welsh is taught in all schools in wales, there are welsh speaking schools and it is an advantage in applying for posts with public services and I am sure for commercial organisations as they have to provide access to welsh language if they are based in Wales. She is being antiwelsh and you it should be stood up to especially if you have an example of another language in use within the family for which she has no problem with.

Potnoodlewilld0 - as much as I agree that bilingualism is generally very beneficial for most people I think you are exaggerating to say that people who speak more than one language are automatically clever than anyone who doesn't - your average person who starts learning french, or whatever, isn't suddenly going to develop previous unsuspected genius and become more intelligent than Stephen Hawking. Otherwise there would be a very obvious intelligence difference between the inhabitants of, say, Luxembourg or India compared to UK/US, which, as far as I'm aware, has never been suggested.

I didn't know people spoke Welsh still.

I've been horribly misinformed by Gavin and Stacey.

If you are bilingual you find it easier to learn another language.
If you speak only Welsh to your DC and never English (as a lot of parents do so the child becomes fluent) then they will speak Welsh when talking to you without even being aware that they're doing so.
Perhaps they're old enough to understand that it would be good manners to speak English whenever someone in the group doesn't understand Welsh, especially when their DGM is around!

As someone who is multilingual, the more languages you know, the easier it is to go on to learn new ones so no language, no matter how few places use is useless.

I'm trying to teach my son my native language which will probably be a lot less useful to him than Welsh in Wales!

Cross posted with llangennith. Great minds and all that.

Yanbu at all. My father's family are Welsh speakers, they moved to London in the 20's and although my mamgu and tadcu both spoke Welsh at home, so presumably it was my father's first language, I can only say nos tar and I feel I've lost out on part of my family culture and identity. I'll never live in Wales, but one day l'd love to learn some Welsh and I wish I could have spoken some with my father's family.

Can I also say one of the reasons it is important to preserve languages is that different thoughts and ideas are possible in different languages, we can translate a lot, but not everything from one language to another.

Another siaradwr cymraeg here. Just ignore, smile sweetly and carry on. Don't get drawn in: you won't change her mind. Just keep doing what you're doing, i.e. raising bilingual children. I liked AcrossThePond's suggestion in terms of keeping her included.

First language Welsh speaker here
Noswaith dda pawb o'm cyd Gymru
Yeh Welsh was purely invented to exclude English people
Excellent post from
Corygal

I'm English but my wife is a first language Welsh-speaker. We live in Wales and are raising our children to be bilingual. They attend a Welsh school. I'm glad to say my family are all very supportive of this.

Oh, and YANBU.

If you start needed to use words like exponentially and extrapolate and exacerbate (just examples) do Welsh speakers have a translation, or do they use the welsh for increase at a greater rate, take from that, make worse etc etc etc

What would be wrong if Welsh speakers used several words for a concept that had one word in English? Issues like that are very usual between languages; the times where there is no one-to-one word correspondence are what makes translating interesting! Is English an inferior language to German for famously having no word that means the same as Schadenfreude?

On the subject of German, German uses Germanified versions of exponentially and extrapolate, but the closest verb to exacerbate is verschlimmen which is basically "make worse", which is lovely because an intermediate level speaker could work out what it meant on his or her first encounter without a dictionary. Not so for the English 'exacerbate'!

Hiraeth
A beautiful welsh word
And there is no English equivalent.
So there

Welsh is also phonetic, and I imagine you don't spend the first two years of learning to read memorising things like the difference in pronunciation between heart and hear.