Language revival revisited

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Some extracts from the Welsh language blog I referred to above for the benefit of the di-Gymraeg (because I think these issues are not confined to Wales) :
"There are a number of Welsh speakers who find fault with the English incomer who has lived in Wales for ten years and still doesn't understand a word of Welsh. But really much more of the blame falls on us as Welsh speakers than on the incomer. This is because we do our best to hide the language from learners and so give them no reason to need to learn it. Far too often we change to English just "because it's easier" ... or simply because we can't be bothered to speak more slowly or repeat the occasional word."

"Will who has Welsh as his first language walks into a shop. The shopkeeper has English as his L1 but also speaks good Welsh. And we're in an area with many incomers and it's a time of year when there are many visitors around. So the shopkeeper asks in English, "Hello, how can I help?"
Will agrees with the idea of "starting every conversation in Welsh", but since the conversation has already been started in English, he replies in English, which is then the language of the rest of the conversation [even though both parties can speak perfectly good Welsh]"

"To avoid the 'embarrassment' of starting a conversation in Welsh with someone who doesn't understand that language, we tend to begin in English if we think the other person is not a Welsh speaker. But by doing so we are influencing the other person's choice of which language to use. This is a vicious circle which will have to be broken"

--------------------

There's more in the same vein, but I think this gives an idea of where the writer is going. I find it interesting to see this coming from a native speaker in a Welsh-speaking community, an 'insider'.

These issues are certainly not limited to Cymru; the same thing can be said of Quebec, where I lived most of my life, and is part of my whole irritating experience in Japan (the latter with some racialist undertones).

[sirdanilot]

What I also find funny is that the situation of Irish (official language, orthography, lots of literature, more speakers) is worse than the situation of my native dialect of Dutch (not recognized as a language, no fixed orthography, almost no literature at all, only about 100.000? speakers). Children here in the villages still learn my dialect (Zeeuws) and it's normal in the villages to speak it. It has only been lost in the larger towns.
Even I, coming from parents not originally speakers of Zeeuws, have learned the dialect through friends who spoke it. I know a lady who is virtually monolingual in Zeeuws. Although there is hardly any written material due to lack of an orthography, people are starting little websites, make music in Zeeuws and there are all sorts of Zeeuws facebook groups and stuff like that to keep the language alive.

Why can a bunch of farmers and fishermen on some remote south-western Dutch islands do better than the Irish?

[linguoboy]

Why can a bunch of farmers and fishermen on some remote south-western Dutch islands do better than the Irish?

I'm not sure how many different ways I can say "because their histories are different" until I find the one that you will actually comprehend. You are the master of the false equivalence, after all.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Why can a bunch of farmers and fishermen on some remote south-western Dutch islands do better than the Irish?

1. Irish has been made official to promote the local Celtic language; in the big cities, English had already replaced Irish, and it was quite widespread; the Gaeltacht are the places where, after independence, where Irish was still the vernacular language.
2. Irish is no dialect of English; both have distinct litterature and the language are separated by millenia of distinct linguistic history. Maintaining two distinct languages is not easy. (Though not impossible, Luxembourg comes to mind here, with the French-German tandem)
3. More importantly, a language catches on by being common, to the exclusion of others. English permeates Irish society so much that even the Irish speaker come to rely on it; and it serves as the language of integration for immigrants. Irish was doomed as soon as they put English to serve the purpose it does today. Sad, sure, but with the upcoming retreat of the UK from the EU, Ireland might actually gain a lot from being the only English speaking country still a member, if it happens.
4. Isolated places tend to keep any language; the very fact all Celtic languages remain spoken in the British Isles is entirely due to the fact a lot stayed isolated as farmers. This applies to French, Gaelic and Native languages (so much that the strongest native languages are spoken in Northern Quebec, where the Natives were disturbed only in the late 60s) in Canada as well. Isolation is kind of an important factor.

[marconatrix]

Having realised that the teaching of Welsh in English speaking schools (Welsh as L2) is rarely effective, the Welsh Government are thinking about moving towards making all state schools there Welsh medium. I.e. everything (almost) taught through Welsh. This has produced the expected backlash followed by the inevitable angry reaction. The 'cast' are quite familiar and predictable ...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cymrufyw/32734714

(Scroll down for the English)

[sirdanilot]

Maintaining two distinct languages is not difficult, it's in fact quite common throughout the world. Many Indian people maintain Hindi, English and a local language which is sometimes not even indo-european (and there are more Indians than there are europeans in the world). Large swaths of Africa are areas where multilingualism is more the norm than the exception, and the same goes for many places in south-east asia.

If Ireland simply had switched its school system to irish-medium language only (except for English classes) then the situation would've been a whole lot different.

Also I can't find the english version of the welsh article, and it's all gobbledygook to me, that welsh, though I did pick out the word 'iaith'.

[marconatrix]

This is more of less the same report in English :

http://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-w ... sh-9256221

Seems the guy has now been forced to apologise (see link)

Discussion (all the usual POV's) :

https://www.facebook.com/dailypostwales ... 0153087532

The real problem is that L2 teaching seems to be pretty rubbish in English speaking countries, why?

[Yng]

If Ireland simply had switched its school system to irish-medium language only (except for English classes) then the situation would've been a whole lot different.

don't you think that might have presented some logistical problems

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

The real problem is that L2 teaching seems to be pretty rubbish in English speaking countries, why?

This may be appropriate.

L2 learning is not rubbish only in English-speaking countries though.

[marconatrix]

The real problem is that L2 teaching seems to be pretty rubbish in English speaking countries, why?

This may be appropriate.

L2 learning is not rubbish only in English-speaking countries though.

Yet every Dutch person, Scandinavian, Finn, Latvian ... etc. that you meet, even teenagers, seem to have near perfect functional English, and often at least one other foreign language. Does e.g. teaching all Finns both Finnish and Swedish and English damage their education, rot their brains, lead to alcoholism (well maybe?) and insanity? Hardly. Wales and Ireland are similar western European societies, so what went wrong?

Another report, but look at the 'enlightened' comments down at the bottom of the page. Can you imagine anything like this in say Denmark or Estonia?

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales ... ep-9256782

[linguoboy]

Hardly. Wales and Ireland are similar western European societies, so what went wrong?

What do you mean? Without exception, every single Welsh or Irish person I've ever met has near perfect functional English.

(Somehow I get the feeling you may not have actually read the article Yiuel linked to.)

[Viktor77]

As has been discussed here ad nauseam, Ireland got started too late. By 1922 the language had already deteriorated even within the private domains ie. home, church, etc. outside the Gaeltaech especially. Also Irish suffers from a "few words suffice" syndrome, whereby people claim they are proficient in Irish Gaelic, when in fact what they can say amounts to little more than symbolic rhetoric, greetings, and simple communication. This mentality continues with, for example, corporations in Dublin taught employers dealing directly with tourists a sort of "tourist Irish" to provide some sort of ersatz authentic cultural experience. Figures from Walsh (2012) which you should read Sirlandilot, says 1.8% use it daily. Scottish Gaelic is suffering this fate as well, being removed mostly to the symbolic realm.

From the studies I've read about Welsh, its success is mostly thanks to government support, and even then you're not going to move to Cardiff or Port Talbot and learn Welsh. But Wales does have some unique things going for it, like the Welsh learner of the year award. But Welsh is suffering from a situation where Welsh is used among those who are Welsh, but once you introduce English into the situation the shift goes to English. So a group of youngsters who are all Welsh will likely speak Welsh amongst themselves, but add in an English friend, even if they are capable in Welsh, and Welsh begins to shift. This trend is noted for parents, too.

I can send you all sorts of articles. If you really want to understand the forces behind language revitalization you should listen to Salmoneous because it comes down to basically one question: Is there a motivation to speak the language? We can do everything we can think of to promote minority languages. Ireland can follow the European Charter for Minority and Regional Languages to a tee, but if the people see no reason to speak it, and if they have no one to speak it with or use it with, it will die. If you look at Livonian, after the fall of the USSR, Latvia did a lot to try to protect the language but it still died. On the other hand you have Basque which was suppressed by Franco for decades but always managed to survive, even if today there is a gap in speakers, and one made only wider by the Euskara Batua, but that's a story for another day.

Walsh, J. (2012). Language policy and language governance: A case-study of Irish language legislation. Lang Policy Language Policy, 323-341.

[marconatrix]

Hardly. Wales and Ireland are similar western European societies, so what went wrong?

What do you mean? Without exception, every single Welsh or Irish person I've ever met has near perfect functional English.

(Somehow I get the feeling you may not have actually read the article Yiuel linked to.)

The Zompist article? Several times, in fact I often recommend it.

Sorry if I was unclear. My question was : Why does the old idea still flourish in Wales/Ireland ... that knowledge of the local language will damage a child's ability to learn and use English.

Knowledge of English for obvious reasons is valued in many countries, but where else is it seen as an alternative rather than an addition to the local language? The original article expressed the opinion that teaching kids Welsh, and especially teaching them mostly through the medium of Welsh would make it more difficult for them to function in English, get into university (except locally) etc. And quite a few of the comments agreed. I'd like to get an international perspective on this. The "colonial mentality"? But the Irish have it too after 100 years almost of independence.

[sirdanilot]

People don't seem to know the positive effects of bilingualism. This is also why dialect declined (but did not get eradicated) in the Netherlands; knowledge of dialect is deemed to harm a child's knowledge of standard Dutch.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Knowledge of English for obvious reasons is valued in many countries, but where else is it seen as an alternative rather than an addition to the local language? The original article expressed the opinion that teaching kids Welsh, and especially teaching them mostly through the medium of Welsh would make it more difficult for them to function in English, get into university (except locally) etc. And quite a few of the comments agreed. I'd like to get an international perspective on this. The "colonial mentality"? But the Irish have it too after 100 years almost of independence.

Viktor points the biggest issue; that is, is there a motivation to speak the language?.

I have seen more than a few Japanese people curse the language barrier, so I don't think it is necessarily a "colonial" issue. The point is to make sure the language spoken by their kids opens as many door as possible, and for small, local languages, this is just not the case.

Yet every Dutch person, Scandinavian, Finn, Latvian ... etc. that you meet, even teenagers, seem to have near perfect functional English, and often at least one other foreign language.

This may well be the case for Europe but, outside of it, especially in the AU-NZ-US-CA, being bilingual is the exception rather than the rule; there are still 60% of Quebeckers that cannot converse in English (I have a few such friends and family members), and as a speaker of three national languages, I fall within the exception, not the rule, among these four countries.

Then again, here be sirdanilot, who, in another thread, sort of was puzzled by the lack of vocabulary his students in English class have demonstrated, so your picture of Europe, while probably true to some level, may not apply to all people. However, I must say that a certain banking reform in a certain country has given me food to think.

I remember seeing a map where English proficiency, while with a bias for other Germanic languages, seemed highly correlated with the country's population size. I would not be surprised if Europe's multilinguality is more a result of its mozaic, reducing most countries to small populations (with ridiculously small Luxembourg and Iceland), than any success in the educational system.

[sirdanilot]

I think it's better to look at the amount of speakers of the national language world-wide, than look at the size of the country. Portugal is small and insignificant but knowing portuguese still opens many doors, for example in Brazil.

[Nortaneous]

The real problem is that L2 teaching seems to be pretty rubbish in English speaking countries, why?

This may be appropriate.

L2 learning is not rubbish only in English-speaking countries though.

Yet every Dutch person, Scandinavian, Finn, Latvian ... etc. that you meet, even teenagers, seem to have near perfect functional English, and often at least one other foreign language.

Because they watch English television.

[sirdanilot]

Perhaps there should also be more investment in producing Welsh media (books, television, film dubs, subtitles, series dubs...) so that children can actually have Welsh immersion other than talking to grandpa.

[Yng]

There already is plenty of media in Welsh. Some of it even gets consumed. But the reality is that even if a child is fairly unprejudiced as to whether they want to watch English TV or Welsh TV, which many are, there's only one Welsh-language TV channel (and not really enough demand to even justify that). So there are always many more programmes they could watch in English than in Welsh.

The key, key difference between Wales and e.g. the Netherlands is that the Netherlands is not part of the UK. It is a country where Dutch has never been displaced as the language of everyday life. Mass English-speaking is a relatively recent development, and English is a language everybody wants to learn - but they're still living in the Netherlands, where everybody speaks Dutch, where political life is conducted through Dutch, where the courts speak Dutch, where everybody you'll ever need to interact with will probably speak Dutch. Dutch is kind of a necessity to be a Dutch person, whilst English has massive prestige and instrumental value. Welsh is neither practically useful nor necessary, and there's not really any way to change that - it's not the default language of the community as Dutch is pretty much everywhere in the Netherlands, except in a few small communities (which are where the language is being preserved, by the way), and it doesn't really have any instrumental value, despite their desperate attempts in school to tell you that IT'LL GET YOU PLACES IN WALES (which perhaps having a Welsh second-language GCSE certificate will, but as we've discussed that hardly means you speak Welsh).

by the way, does anyone have any references to anyone official actually suggesting making all schools Welsh-medium? All I've found is people reacting to it with the normal anti-Cymraeg bollocks

[sirdanilot]

There already is plenty of media in Welsh. Some of it even gets consumed. But the reality is that even if a child is fairly unprejudiced as to whether they want to watch English TV or Welsh TV, which many are, there's only one Welsh-language TV channel (and not really enough demand to even justify that). So there are always many more programmes they could watch in English than in Welsh.

There is also more media in English than there is in Dutch that interests me, still I speak Dutch and also watch Dutch media. Honestly I often forget whether I am listening to Dutch or English.

As for my dialect of Dutch (Zeeuws), there is absolutely no media in it at all. Yet, my dialect is still doing better than Irish (though probably not better than Welsh). If you count the related variations in Belgium as the same dialect (West-Flemish), it probably has more speakers than there are Welsh speakers in the world. Yet there is no orthography, no media, nothing at all.

The key, key difference between Wales and e.g. the Netherlands is that the Netherlands is not part of the UK. It is a country where Dutch has never been displaced as the language of everyday life. Mass English-speaking is a relatively recent development, and English is a language everybody wants to learn - but they're still living in the Netherlands, where everybody speaks Dutch, where political life is conducted through Dutch, where the courts speak Dutch, where everybody you'll ever need to interact with will probably speak Dutch. Dutch is kind of a necessity to be a Dutch person, whilst English has massive prestige and instrumental value. Welsh is neither practically useful nor necessary, and there's not really any way to change that - it's not the default language of the community as Dutch is pretty much everywhere in the Netherlands, except in a few small communities (which are where the language is being preserved, by the way), and it doesn't really have any instrumental value, despite their desperate attempts in school to tell you that IT'LL GET YOU PLACES IN WALES (which perhaps having a Welsh second-language GCSE certificate will, but as we've discussed that hardly means you speak Welsh).

Sure that goes for standard Dutch. Nobody is arguing that standard Dutch is endangered. I was talking about the dialects (Zeeuws in my case) which are still going strong despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing in terms of orthography, media or literature in the dialect. Even the regional TV station does everything in standard Dutch, only sporadically having a tiny thing on the dialect (this is word X and it has etymology Y).

As for Dutch vs. Irish, the sitaution is the same in terms of being a sovereign nation but still Irish is very endangered ! Haha

[linguoboy]

Yet every Dutch person, Scandinavian, Finn, Latvian ... etc. that you meet, even teenagers, seem to have near perfect functional English, and often at least one other foreign language.

Because they watch English television.

Clearly there's more to it than that.

Key: "Dark blue is dubbing for children only, otherwise subtitling. Purple is dubbing in all cases except non-children's films. Red is all dubbing. "

Are you blown away by the English competence of people from the Balkans? Or the Portuguese? Moreover, what proves the causation isn't the other way around?

[Yng]

There is also more media in English than there is in Dutch that interests me, still I speak Dutch and also watch Dutch media. Honestly I often forget whether I am listening to Dutch or English.

you're misunderstanding. Let's imagine that you are a totally 100% bilingual native speaker of two languages. You have a hundred channels available with programmes of all different kinds in one language and one (1) programme with a small selection of often quite cheaply-produced programmes in your other language. Which do you think you will watch?

As for my dialect of Dutch (Zeeuws), there is absolutely no media in it at all. Yet, my dialect is still doing better than Irish (though probably not better than Welsh). If you count the related variations in Belgium as the same dialect (West-Flemish), it probably has more speakers than there are Welsh speakers in the world. Yet there is no orthography, no media, nothing at all.

Sure that goes for standard Dutch. Nobody is arguing that standard Dutch is endangered. I was talking about the dialects (Zeeuws in my case) which are still going strong despite the fact that there is absolutely nothing in terms of orthography, media or literature in the dialect. Even the regional TV station does everything in standard Dutch, only sporadically having a tiny thing on the dialect (this is word X and it has etymology Y).

A dialect of Dutch is not equivalent to a separate language. You mentioned yourself a process of levelling towards the standard language, and a dialect of Dutch is still Dutch.

As for Dutch vs. Irish, the sitaution is the same in terms of being a sovereign nation but still Irish is very endangered ! Haha

except it isn't, because the reality is that English is the native and everyday language of the vast, vast majority of Ireland's population and of Irish institutions, television, etc, etc, etc, and has been since before independence.

[marconatrix]

Because they watch English television.

You may have a point there. Last year I found that a new season had started to appear online of a Swedish series I'd quite enjoyed. As it had been a while I did a weekend marathon watch of all the previous episodes to remind myself who all the characters were etc. I was following it all by reading the subtitles as I've never seriously tried to learn Swedish, but do know some *very* basic Norwegian. Anyway I was surprised to find that after the w/e intensive exposure I'd actually absorbed quite a lot of common expressions, was starting to hear many simple sentences as individual words etc. And I should point out I wasn't trying especially to learn the language, just enjoying the show. The important thing I think was that I was hearing/seeing language used in context, and it wasn't the sort of stilted set-up you get in learners' courses. Y'know Lesson 3, how to order a coffee ...

So yes I think that may be an very important part of the process. European kids don't *just* get the English in school, it also features in their 'real lives' as a medium for information and especially entertainment --- it's associated with enjoyment, not just another school subject you have to struggle through to get good grades.

I mean this is going back to prehistoric times before the internet, but when I did French at school the only French we ever saw was in our textbooks. We never saw a single 'real' French book or magazine, let alone a comic book! The teachers were all English, so we never heard French from the lips of a native, and so on. The whole language existed in a sort of bubble detached from real life.

[marconatrix]

There already is plenty of media in Welsh. Some of it even gets consumed.

*LOL!!*

by the way, does anyone have any references to anyone official actually suggesting making all schools Welsh-medium? All I've found is people reacting to it with the normal anti-Cymraeg bollocks

I don't have a reference to hand, but IIRC there was a report within the last year that more or less concluded that teaching Welsh as an L2 in English medium schools was pretty much a waste of time, and that the solution would be to move to all Welsh medium education. The Welsh government seems to agree, but it might well be a case of agreeing and then doing nothing much about it, the Irish approach.

[sirdanilot]

A dialect of Dutch is not equivalent to a separate language. You mentioned yourself a process of levelling towards the standard language, and a dialect of Dutch is still Dutch.

You have an old-fashioned conceptualizaton of what constitutes a language and what constitutes a dialect.

The Zeeuws dialect is for some speakers hardly intelligible with Standard Dutch, and the West Flemish dialect (closely related to Zeeuws) is virtually unintelligible with standard Dutch. The entire dialect continuum (ranging from the northern tip of France to the norhernmost island in Zeeland, the Netherlands, all along the Belgian coastal region too) could for all linguistic intents and purposes be regarded as a single language. However, due to political reasons it is not. The language is divided over three nations and there is quite a bit of internal variation (because of the island region of Zeeland, where every island has its own version of the dialect, and due to divergence of the versions in different countries). Historically, this entire language area was regarded as having 'de Zeeuwse taele' (the Zeeuws language).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Flemish

These dialects are clearly distinct from all dialects that lie to the east (East Flemish and Brabants), very clearly even. There is a very sharp isogloss between the island of Tholen (where Zeeuws is spoken) and the neighbouring Brabant town of Bergen op Zoom. These two lie only a couple of kilometeres apart, but Tholen used to be an island (it's now connected with bridges and dikes and so) with an isolated population speaking a Zeelandic dialect.