So the Welsh MP who refused to talk in English

[Beetroot]

On the BBC news?

WHY?

I'd have thought though that the Welsh Language Board would have preferred him to be subtitled rather than a voice over. Shouldn't the BBC know that?

feel like I've just said something loudly thats very boring and workly in a room of full of people having a laugh. Whoops! As you were.

LittleBella - Ron Davies was Clapham Common. Rhodri is his successor. And not a particular prat.

Cod is right about Welsh employing a lot of English words, but I think that's true for pretty much every language in the world, isn't it? Do any languages have entirely indigenous words for things like 'website'? In the fifteenth century, English was full of adopted French words (and it still retains a lot of them), but no one would argue that English stopped being a valid language.

As long as he is translated, I don't think its a big problem. I think it is slightly sad that Welsh people who through no fault of their own have lost their Welsh language also find that they have fewer job prospects in their own country. It is no easy task to learn to speak and write a language fluently in adulthood.

However, as mentioned previously, given the popularity of Welsh schools I don't think it can really be described as a dying language.

Policy wok, quite right about the French present in English.

And English has 'absorbed' masses of words from other Languages. pajamas being just one of the few . Bungalow. and where would middle England be without those eh?

Policywonk! sorry

Numbers are increasing, which sort of proves it's not dying.

They can borrow creatively as well though. My favourite is the one I was told for microwave. "Pob ty ping". The oven that goes Ping!

ty bach= Little house= toilet in Rhondda welsh

Speaking his mother tongue in his own country - the bastard, how dare he?

I think at least 20% of Welsh people speak Welsh (in answer to an earlier poster). An increasing number of non-Welsh speaking parents are deciding to send their children to Welsh medium schools. I speak Welsh to my children (they can understand and speak English - it's just not the language I speak to them in) and they hear me speaking in English to non-Welsh speakers a lot of the time. I speak Welsh on a daily basis to lots of people so it is certainly a langusge that is very much alive and being used. In the village where I grew up about 90% of the population spoke the language (the other 10% mainly people who had moved to the area) and the language in shops, pubs etc would have been Welsh. It is one of the languages of Britain and so why not use it in Parliament? Yes, he may or may not have been doing it to prove a point, but what is wrong with that. And I'm sure that there are enough Welsh speaking people working at the BBC to enable them to translate it pretty quickly.

MB, I heard similar tales about being beaten at school for speaking Welsh from my Grandad - that's why he only spoke English to his children. Very sad. This would have been in the 1920s.

My father does speak some Welsh, having plenty of friends from boyhood who had the language. And I think he had to take a compulsory Welsh course as part of his (PPE) degree at Swansea Uni - even my mother had to do it and she was a. English and b. studying zoology.

Fab that Welsh is growing ever stronger - I remember my Grandmother complaining about dual-language road signs on the grounds that 'no-one round here speaks Welsh'. Well, a lot of them do now, and that is A Good Thing.

If Welsh is his first language, absolutely fine that he should speak in welsh. However, no one can them complain that the bbc or whoever shoud use subtitles instead of voice over. Language up to him, translation service up to bbc.

Yes, lots of people were treated terribly in the past for using their first language in theoir own country - bretons, gaelic speaking scots and 'Scots' speaking scots, welsh - but that was far in teh past now and personally I don't think it has any relevance to today.

Lots of time and money has been/is being spent in Wales and Scotland to promote Welsh and Gaelic via the media and ring-fencing jobs. Languages are so fluid and ever-changing that I think it's madness to pump huge amounts of money into keeping them alive. Personally

I am English and live in Wales with my (Also English) DH.
We have picked up some Welsh words just from living here for the last 5 years and I can sometimes understand when my friends speak to each other. I have a lot of friends who are bilingual and speak Welsh to their children so it is far from a dead language, and there are plenty of people who would have understood him, I don't see any problem with it, He is Welsh, he was in Wales, so why shouldn't he speak Welsh?!

(Also if I said out loud what certain people have typed on here I would be lynched, and rightly too)

The advantage of subtitles over voiceover is that someone learning the language can compare the two. They also prefer to have Welsh and English side by side in marketing leaflets and things of that nature, for the sake of comparison. TBH as a monoglot I don't find that easy to scan on a bilingual page.

MB was referring to the "welsh not" the practice of putting a board around the neck of a school child who spoke Welsh. Sadly this is one of the main reasons Welsh declined so severely, so the language is still recovering. To say it's not relevant is ignoring the fact that its impact is still very real today.

I don't speak Welsh and probably will never learn but it would be madness not to have a Welsh media, and to acknowledge that in some jobs you do have to be bilingual to do them. As ever you have to judge on a case by case scenario and having worked in a bilingual, state sponsored, organisation for many years, there are very few examples I can point to which were wrong in an every day way.

"Also if I said out loud what certain people have typed on here I would be lynched, and rightly too"

Would you really advocate lynching for expressing a strong but possibly misguided point of view?

These sorts of discussions have got to be had and arguments won if the will and the funding are going to continue.

Ah, I doubt she meant it literally. If we're going to discuss something, we shouldn't pick apart every single word I guess.

ah come on pointy, what's wrong with a good hard lynching of a friday eve

'pob ty ping' - ROFL. My microwave is getting rechristened I think.

The \BBC's job is not to help people trying to learn Welsh via its news broadcasts.

I know what mb is referring to, I know what happened in Scotland. I feel it is certainly good for people to realise this is what used to happen. I don;t think it has any relevance whatsoever as to how the Welsh language is promotoed (or not) today.

We cannot carry on making legislation today due to the Highland clearances, the suppression of gaelic one hundred years ago, the prejudice against the catholic church in Scotland one hundred years ago etc or due to any other injust practice which no longer happens. imo

a good hard lynching of mcevoy... maybe

Fourpusone are you by any chance living on Anglesey?

You don't think it has any effect. It is, however, one of the reasons that the Welsh language declined. THe way in which this was done is one of the reasons why people feel strongly about maintaining the Welsh language.

Its effect still resonates

har

maybe later. dds still up but dh out.

I know the effects still resonate. I just think that highly charged emotionalism does not have a part in justifying why a language should be kept alive at a political/legal level.

One mans emotionalism is anothers family history I suppose.