When was welsh language banned

The first school was opened by parents in ; many others followed. But education is only part of the overarching campaign for recognition of language rights. The Welsh Language Society, founded in , aimed to save the language from the fate suffered by Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton and Cornish — Celtic languages that came close to extinction.

People campaigned to be able to testify in a court of law in their mother tongue; to have a council tax bill in it; to have Welsh place names on signs in Wales. My own village, Nefyn, bore a sign with Nevin on it until the s. None of this, apparently, matters; what matters is a minority of families, unwilling even to be named, who want to educate their children in English, and can do so nearby.

Did it occur to you to send a Welsh speaker to LLangennech? There are many thousands of us — in Wales, and here in London, like me and my bilingual children — longing to see our positive experience of Welsh-only teaching reflected and understood. The issues at Llangennech have their roots in the attempt by English governments to erase the Welsh language as a living tongue in its native Cymru, stretching further back than Henry VIII, whose antipathy towards the Welsh tongue was notorious.

But the real attack came in the Victorian period, when a government commission reported that the Welsh were lazy and indolent and that most of their troubles originated in their use of the Welsh language and their adherence to chapel religion. Eradication of the Welsh language and the assimilation of the Welsh people into England was seen as the cure.

My grandmother, like many of her generation, was the last fluent Welsh speaker in the family and endured humiliation and punishment at school for daring to speak the tongue of home and wider community.

As a result, my grandmother would not have her children learn or speak Welsh and they had nothing culturally to pass on to their children and her grandchildren.

My generation has been deprived of our cultural inheritance by government policy, indifference and neglect of this part of our so-called United Kingdom, one of the poorest and underdeveloped areas of Europe. Rev Tony Coslett Hinckley, Leicestershire.

I was taught Welsh in a bilingual school in Cardiff from the age of five How sad that English-speaking parents fear their children being taught in Welsh , 22 June.

I went on to get an O-level in the subject and an abiding love of the language. My parents were not Welsh-speakers so, sadly, I never became fluent. But that experience not only taught me the importance of the language but it gave me confidence to learn other languages. Welsh originates from the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Britons. Before the Roman invasion Celtic languages were spoken across Europe as far as Turkey.

Celtic language came to Britain around BC, with one version evolving into Brythonic which formed the basis of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. When the Anglo-Saxons colonised Britain, Brythonic speakers were split up into those in northern England speaking Cumbric, those in the south-west speaking an early version of Cornish, and those speaking primitive Welsh.

The Welsh spoken in the 12th to 14th centuries, or Middle Welsh, is what the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Mabinogion, its famous literary collection, are written in, and it is a Welsh which speakers today can more or less understand. This meant people had to speak English to get work and progress. The suppression of the language extended to education too.

It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects… It dissevers the people from intercourse which would greatly advance their civilisation, and bars the access of improving knowledge to their minds. The Industrial Revolution was another challenge to the language, with mass migration of English speakers into Wales diluting the language and making workplaces bilingual or English. With the legal status of Welsh still inferior to English, English gradually became the default language.

By the 20th century, the numbers of Welsh speakers had fallen so much it looked as though the language would die out. This in spite of 19th century practices in schools where Welsh children were required to wear a piece of wood inscribed with WN Welsh Not when they were overheard speaking Welsh during the school day. The WN sign would be hung around the neck and that child could pass it on to another child caught speaking Welsh.

At the end of the day, the last person wearing the symbol would be punished. Welsh children were told that English was considered the best language for instruction.

By the s the Welsh language was in demise, decreasing to , speakers by Jones, H. In the s the government replaced Welsh road signs with English substitutes. Protest broke out around the country with acts of civil disobedience by members of Plaid Cymru Welsh National Party who painted over the English signs with green paint. But by the government created a Welsh office that would place the Welsh language on par with English, and the Welsh signage was returned.