Eu Hiaith a Gadwant

The focus of this blog is a topic that I have been avoiding for several months as I felt it was necessary to allow myself time to cool off as it is a subject that is quite close to my heart.

 

I currently study at a University in Wales, a University which boasts a proud bilingual heritage and views equality as being of key importance.  It is also important to point out at this juncture that the University has a Welsh-English bilingual policy, so that both languages are respected equally.

 

 It was due to this, and also due to the importance of the Welsh language to my own personal identity, that I was appalled at claims made by a lecturer (of Science) that the Welsh language was a hindrance to learning, pointless and should be abandoned since, as a language, it was dead.

 

Now were I living in a cartoon world at the point that information was given unto me, my face would have turned red, steam would have screamed out of my nostrils and my head would have eventually exploded.  The actual claims made by the lecturer were wide-sweeping, and so I will attempt to lay them out, as I understand them, in order to comprehensively critique and reply to them as well as I can.

 

Her claims, as I understand them, are thus:

 

1. The Welsh language is dead.
2. The Welsh language is pointless.
3. Students who learned science through the medium of Welsh have trouble adapting to it in English at University level.
4. Speakers of Welsh have trouble spelling in English.

 

I will now debunk these as far as I am able to.

 

Claim One: The Welsh Language is Dead.

 

My problem with this assertion is that the classification ‘dead’ is a vague one, that is ill-defined.  When does a language become dead?  Is a language dead when there is no-one left who can understand it?  Is it when the native speakers of that language all die out?

 

One definition I found was that a dead language is “A language, such as Latin, that is no longer learned as a native language by a speech community". (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dead+language).  Even this is unable to successfully tested, as it would be impossible to discover whether or not a language was learned as a native language.  The same website defines ‘native language’ as “the language that a person has spoken from earliest childhood” (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/native+language).  As I grew up bilingually learning both Welsh and English simultaneously, I would find it impossible to choose one or the other as a standalone ‘native language’.  I could define both languages in other ways, for instance I would select Welsh as the language of the geographical, social and historical context that I reside in, and yet I use English far more than I would use Welsh, mainly due to English’s status as an international lingua franca.  As Britain becomes increasingly more multicultural it is far safer to use English as the individuals I interact with on a daily basis range from Welsh to English, Chinese to Nigerian, Polish to Somali.  Should I use Welsh as a conversation starter in order to stubbornly stress a moribund point?  No, far more sensible to use English.  Does this make Welsh a dead language?  I would argue no, especially in terms of a dictionary definition.  It is estimated that there are 750,000+ speakers of Welsh (though this is from Wikipedia, and as such may not be hugely reliable), I think you would have to be slightly stubborn to insist that that number of speakers constitutes a language that is ‘dead’.  Notably, Welsh is one of a few small languages whose number of speakers grows every generation, usually when something is characterised by growth I tend not to describe it as ‘dead’, but I suppose I am not given to bouts of ethnic and cultural prejudice.

 

Claim Two: The Welsh Language is Pointless.

 

I will start this discussion by defining the term ‘pointless’.  In the same dictionary I used earlier it is defined as:

 

1. Lacking meaning; senseless.

2. Ineffectual: pointless attempts to rescue the victims of the raging fire.

(http://www.thefreedictionary.com/pointless)

 

If you place these into the claim it becomes 1) The Welsh Language lacks meaning or 2) The Welsh Language is ineffectual.  All of these claims all work on the assumption that any given language is being used to achieve a goal, or that there is some underlying reasoning behind its use.

 

I feel that the assumptions upon which these value judgements are based do not apply in my own understanding of language.  Also I believe that if I were to look for meaning and effectiveness in the continued use of the Welsh language I could certainly find it.

 

In my personal experience of discussions on this topic, it is this perceived lack of ‘reason’ that troubles many people in regards to the Welsh language, especially individuals from a monolingual English background (the language not necessarily the country).  I believe that this is because any ‘foreign’ language that is taught in English-medium schools is taught with an eye for justification.  What I mean by this is that if monolingual English-speakers are taught French/German/Spanish (or whichever language) in schools, they are told that it would be profitable to have the skill of this new language (esp. in a financial/business sense).  Thus monolingual-English speakers relate bilingualism with practical aims and goals, which in my case is certainly not true.  My grasp of the Welsh language is a part of my cultural heritage, it is also a part of my identity, it is integral to who I am.  In this way I would argue that there is no need for a practical/financial ‘reason’ or ‘meaning’ for a language.  Even should this practical/financial line be pursued, it is incorrect, as I very recently got a job in no small part due to my ability to speak Welsh.

 

Generally the ‘point’ of a language is communication, and as long as there are people out there who can and do speak Welsh, it has a communicative ‘point’.  If it is insisted that this is not enough of a ‘point’ then I offer you this:

 

Mae unrhyw berson sy’n agor ei geg i twlu cachu ar yr iaith Gymraeg heb rheswm yn wirionyn, a dylai meddwl pa mor hurt yw ei eiriau cyn adael iddynt carlamu o’i geg.

 

Though that is a childish ‘reason’ for the Welsh language, it is merely satirising the equally childish and ignorant nature of the original claim.

 

Claim Three: Students who learned science through the medium of Welsh have trouble adapting to it in English at University level.

 

This is an interesting claim, as I have the least hands-on knowledge of this occurrence I am less certain of my rebuttal.  Though I am studying English Language at University, a number of my close, Welsh-speaking, friends are studying Science, and seem to be having little trouble succeeding.  No more trouble than monolinguals at any rate.

 

Though I no longer study the subject, I had studied it, through the medium of Welsh, until A-Level.  I studied triple science at GCSE level, and though they weren’t my strongest subjects did okay in them.  It interests me that this claim notes that studying science through Welsh hampers their understanding of the subject in English.  For the most part, scientific terminology in Welsh are largely borrowed from English, and English itself borrows heavily from other languages in terms of scientific terminology.  Here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the huge changes that Welsh has imposed on science terminology.

 

English – Welsh

 

Biology – Bioleg

Physics – Ffiseg

Chemistry – Cemeg

Electronics - Electroneg

Alkali – Alcali

Acid – Asid

Atom – Atom

Atmosphere – Atmosffer

Battery – Bateri

Celsius – Celsiws

Capillary – Capilari

Decibel – Desibel

Electrolysis – Electrolysis

Energy – Egni

Mass – Mas

Molecule – Moliciwl

Momentum – Momentwm

Osmosis – Osmosis

Oxygen - Ocsigen

At this point I think I’ll stop as I feel I’ve expressed my point satisfactorily.  Of course this similarity isn’t universal, and there are some terms that aren’t so obviously linked.  Some examples of these are:

 

Buoyancy – Brigwth

Current - Llif

Bunsen Burner – Llosgydd Bunsen

Freezing Point – Pwynt Rhewi

Friction – Ffrithiant.

 

The difference between these terms is that they also exist outside of science, and so these terms are certainly in the minority, and as the science gets more complicated, the terminology get ever more similar.

 

At this point I must also note that there are students of all nationalities studying science at University, and I can’t help but note that no first language interference is suggested with any other nationalities.  Would the claim that a student's bilingualism is affecting their ability to study science be taken quite so passively if the first language of that student was Arabic?  Or French?  Or any other language at all?

 

“People who speak Arabic as their first language can’t do science in English.”  This claim wouldn’t be accepted quietly in the current social climate, especially with the amount of research there is to back up that claim, namely none at all.

 

The claim that a knowledge of Welsh interferes with ability to study science through English is one I refuse to accept, and only watertight evidence to suggest otherwise would convince me to reappraise my conclusion.

 

Claim Four:  Speakers of Welsh have trouble spelling in English.

 

When this was told to me I laughed until my head hurt.  The utter preposterousness of this claim gave me a migraine.  I offer you this anecdote.

 

A small child in a Welsh-medium school receives an English spelling test every week, on Friday.  At the beginning of the week the entire class are provided with a list of words they will be tested on, and sometimes a few wild cards are added, just for that little bit of extra excitement and jeopardy.  Week after week that child receives full marks in the spelling test (as he also does in a parallel Welsh test) because he is a fucking amazing spelling machine.

 

THAT CHILD WAS ME!

 

I challenge any hapless curmudgeon foolish enough to claim that my ability to speak Welsh affects spelling in English to a spelling competition.  I will spell you all over the walls, your rotting illiterate entrails will hang from the rafters of my linguistic cathedral, and you will bow down in obeisance to my superior spelling might.  The supernatural war-hammer of my spelling glory will splatter your idiocy all up on my altar.  My unholy spelling lightning-bolt-of-Zeus will incinerate your absurd preconceptions of the nature of spelling accuracy.

 

I think the general level of spelling accuracy in English, which in my experience is fairly poor, has reasons that lie outside of bilingualism, and the fact that many English-speaking monolinguals can’t spell for shit certainly backs up this claim.  It isn’t bi- or multilingualism that is to blame for poor spelling, I would suggest that it is the prevalence of ‘electronic language’, in particular txtspk.  Ba mebbz I dno wa I is tlkin bwt laik lol.

 

I suppose my conclusion, such as there is one, is thus:

 

Welsh isn’t ‘dead’, language doesn’t have to have a ‘point’, speaking Welsh doesn’t make you crap at science and speaking Welsh doesn’t inform how good you are at spelling in English.

 

It seems to me that there is an underlying dislike of the Welsh language, and perhaps the Welsh culture, in the individual who made these claims.  Perhaps when the individual was a child, the Welsh language invaded the farm where she lived and slaughtered her parents, and then perhaps the Welsh language held the individual captive and eventually sold her into academic slavery, and this resulted in the dislike that she feels for the Welsh language.

 

Whatever the reason, there certainly is a level of prejudice against the Welsh language that is fuelling her desire to pointlessly besmirch the language in the ignorant way she did.  What I really can’t understand is this:

 

If you dislike the Welsh language so much, why would you come to work in a University that has a very strong policy of bilingualism?

 

If you don’t like Welsh, why work in Wales?