biscuit wrote:
For me a welsh speaker is either someone with it as a first language or has learnt it and is considered fluent by other L1 welsh speakers. I don't consider myself a welsh speaker although I can get by.

So when i have been speaking of welsh language speakers I have known,i am talking about fluent ones. They are in every area of Wales I have visited or lived albeit to a different extent. The stats you provided accurately reflect my own experience of the percentages, including those people I know who are from the valleys

Of course I am repeating myself now, you obviously have made your mind up that a couple of trips to Barry island, the only place south of Cardiff, and nowhere near the valleys, makes you more of an expert than people who have lived there and worked there and have provided evidence to the contrary of everything you say.

I think you are in so much denial that if all 1000 welsh medium students of Ysgol Gyfun Cymer- a school in the centre of the Rhondda Valley - set up an eisteddfod on your lawn, you would convince yourself they were ghosts!

I would agree with your definition which is the one I use. But in that map and data everybody who even understands it but cant speak it is included. I have been able to find data that approaches yours and mine definition.

Using such a loose definition would make the Dutch almost all English speakers as almost all Dutchmen understand English in some form. Speaking it is something else.

Welsh as been taught in Welsh schools since 1967 so you expect a much higher number of people understanding the language or not?

Scot Dutchy wrote:

Sai'm wrote:Yeah, and Dutch-speakers can barely talk to German-speakers. Because they're different languages, duh.

No comaparison. Dutch and German are modern living languages with different roots. They are Germanic just as Irish and welsh are Gaelic. Old Dutch is closer to Old Engilsh. Irish and Scot's Gaelic are the same language but their developement has differed.

Welsh isn't Gaelic. Welsh is Brythonic, a distinct branch of the Celtic languages. Gaelic is a language family including Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Irish and Scottish Gaelic are only barely mutually intelligible AFAIK, just like German and Dutch.

Have you actually read anything about these two languages? Why are you bothering to pontify on a subject you clearly know nothing about?

Wasting money on stable bilingualism (which is a good thing and makes it easier to learn foreign languages) when a majority of the population has a favourable opinion of the language? That's a "waste" to you?

It is a big waste. No counting for taste though. It is just pure misguided nationalism.

You didn't respond to what I said. Majority favourable opinion, stable bilingualism? Are you going to address what I said?

There are plenty of second-language Irish speakers. "Irish is not spoken in any town", even including only native-speakers you're totally ignoring migrants from rural areas who've moved to towns or cities.

Every Irish kid is taught Irish and has to pass the subject on the leaving cert otherwise the cert is not valid. No wonder there are so many second language Irish speakers.

Have you read any of my posts in this thread? Have you not heard of Irish immersion schools?

I think many Breton language activists would dispute that they're "French in Brittany" (i.e., they'd say they're "Bretons"). Bretons are struggling to keep the language alive because of the hostile attitude of the French state towards minority languages (in this regard, the UK is light years ahead).

I would not say UK is light years ahead. The French once again proven to be more on the ball. Minority languages are a pain in the arse. They are just snobs. I once went to an Occitanes folk festival. A few people were trying to revive it but nobody knows how it was spoken. Fucking nutters

I don't even know how to respond to this. What century did you get your opinion on minority languages from, Scot Dutchy?

Nobody knows how it was spoken? There are still hundreds of thousands of native speakers, and millions of people with passive knowledge.

More on the ball, really? So the French are more "on the ball" than most of Europe?

BTW do you live in Wales?



Thought not. A more backward place that you will ever find.

Scot Dutchy wrote:

biscuit wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:

BTW do you live in Wales?



Thought not. A more backward place that you will ever find.

AHA now it is clear why you erroneously think no one speaks Welsh in the valleys....with an attitude like that you probably only heard them use Anglo-Saxon expletives

The people told me themselves they did not want to learn as they thought a stupid language and not worth the effort.

You know what I've heard called a "stupid language not worth the effort"?

I'll give you a hint: the flag that represents it is in your profile.

Scot Dutchy wrote:Not even 1% of the Irish is Irish their first language. So the other 99% are forced to learn it. Very democratic!

Obviously the other 99% don't have the political will to change this, since even though they may not speak Irish well Irish still constitutes a part of their identity.

Once again, who are YOU to tell other people that THEIR identity is WRONG?

Scot Dutchy wrote:THese days I think it is five since Maroccan is included.

It's called Moroccan Arabic or Darija, although I doubt any documents are printed in it since it's hardly ever written. If they're translating to any form of Arabic, it's going to by literary Arabic. Though I doubt they're printing much in Arabic, probably just offering some services to immigrant communities.

the pigeon wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:

Sai'm wrote:Yeah, and Dutch-speakers can barely talk to German-speakers. Because they're different languages, duh.

No comaparison. Dutch and German are modern living languages with different roots. They are Germanic just as Irish and welsh are Gaelic. Old Dutch is closer to Old Engilsh. Irish and Scot's Gaelic are the same language but their developement has differed.

Wasting money on stable bilingualism (which is a good thing and makes it easier to learn foreign languages) when a majority of the population has a favourable opinion of the language? That's a "waste" to you?

It is a big waste. No counting for taste though. It is just pure misguided nationalism.

There are plenty of second-language Irish speakers. "Irish is not spoken in any town", even including only native-speakers you're totally ignoring migrants from rural areas who've moved to towns or cities.

Every Irish kid is taught Irish and has to pass the subject on the leaving cert otherwise the cert is not valid. No wonder there are so many second language Irish speakers. When they move into towns they have to speak English as no on would aknowledge them. They may learn it but nobody except in small pockets speak it. Its only claim to fame is that it is the language of GAA.

I think many Breton language activists would dispute that they're "French in Brittany" (i.e., they'd say they're "Bretons"). Bretons are struggling to keep the language alive because of the hostile attitude of the French state towards minority languages (in this regard, the UK is light years ahead).

I would not say UK is light years ahead. The French once again proven to be more on the ball. Minority languages are a pain in the arse. They are just snobs. I once went to an Occitanes folk festival. A few people were trying to revive it but nobody knows how it was spoken. Fucking nutters

BTW do you live in Wales?



Thought not. A more backward place that you will ever find.

We had this discussion a few years ago. You're fully entitled to your opinion on the lack of value of certain languages; however your philological knowledge is showing you up, as it did before.

Let's review-

1. Dutch and Modern High German do share a common ancestor.

2. Welsh is Brythonic, not Gaelic.

3. Although they formed a dialect continuum in the past (just as German and Dutch do today, through their respective dialects), Irish and Scottish Gaelic constitute distinct languages, particularly in their written form. They are as "modern" as German and Dutch, though not nearly so vital these days.

4. Belfast has a growing contigent of native Irish speakers. So does Derry. Both places are towns.

5. Old English is most closely related to Old Frisian, rather than Old Dutch.

6. Roughly a million people speak Occitan. About the same number again understand it.

As I said above: you are entitled to your opinions as they stand, even the xenophobic ones, and I have no desire to attempt to change your mind. My only concern here is that others may accept your supporting claims at face value, when they are clearly incorrect from a philological standpoint.

Thanks for that. You have much more patience than me.

Scot Dutchy wrote:

Jumbo wrote:I don't underestimate the Taffia. I live round the corner from Pontcanna in Cardiff which is inhabited by swathes of BBC media types. A couple of the pubs can be packed with them speaking Welsh but more than a few are either English or from other areas and are more passionate about the language than many locals. Getting employment in the media or local government would be virtually impossible without some grasp of the language. Conversely at my work (Im a software engineer) we looked at creating a Welsh language version of our software. We found we only had 2 clients who were mainly Welsh speakers. One in Swansea and one in Camarthen. The other issue was no one in our office could speak the language either!

THats about the same in Dublin. You have Irish speaking pubs but they are inhabited by civil servents and media types.To get a job as a civil servant you must be fluent in Irish. I suppose Wales is the same now. THank goodness the Scot's have kept their head. There would be not many in parliament if that was the case.

All this going on about who speaks these languages rests upon the misconception that if people are taught it they must be able to speak it which really could not be farther from the truth. My wife has had 13 years of Irish but is no speaker. She can just read some of it. In all her professional career as district nurce and midwife she was never rquired to use Irish once.

IMMERSION SCHOOLS.

The Scots haven't "kept their head". The reason they're not as keen about their local languages is because #1 there's two of them, so the Scots-speaking areas don't care much for Gaelic and vice versa and #2 Gaelic is much less healthy than Welsh or Irish, while Lowland Scots is often seen by Scots as a dialect of English.

Scot Dutchy wrote:

biscuit wrote:
For me a welsh speaker is either someone with it as a first language or has learnt it and is considered fluent by other L1 welsh speakers. I don't consider myself a welsh speaker although I can get by.

So when i have been speaking of welsh language speakers I have known,i am talking about fluent ones. They are in every area of Wales I have visited or lived albeit to a different extent. The stats you provided accurately reflect my own experience of the percentages, including those people I know who are from the valleys

Of course I am repeating myself now, you obviously have made your mind up that a couple of trips to Barry island, the only place south of Cardiff, and nowhere near the valleys, makes you more of an expert than people who have lived there and worked there and have provided evidence to the contrary of everything you say.

I think you are in so much denial that if all 1000 welsh medium students of Ysgol Gyfun Cymer- a school in the centre of the Rhondda Valley - set up an eisteddfod on your lawn, you would convince yourself they were ghosts!

I would agree with your definition which is the one I use. But in that map and data everybody who even understands it but cant speak it is included. I have been able to find data that approaches yours and mine definition.

Using such a loose definition would make the Dutch almost all English speakers as almost all Dutchmen understand English in some form. Speaking it is something else.

Welsh as been taught in Welsh schools since 1967 so you expect a much higher number of people understanding the language or not?

English-speaker does not necessarily mean "native" English-speaker. That's why we add the word "native", so that we can disambiguate.

Saim

After all that what are you trying to say?

There is no justification to teach a dying static language to people that do not want to speak it.
It is a waste of time and money.
Ireland proves it does not work. Do they speak Irish in the Irish Parliament? No.

And Wales, the Basque Country and the Catalan Countries show that it does work. There is no way that endangered languages are "static". You can make whatever value judgements that you want about endangered languages, but desist with the factual errors. In many ways, endangered languages evolve much faster than stable ones because they adopt features of the dominant language. The Neo-Irish of Dublin and Belfast is idiomatically (i.e. the way things are phrased) quite different to the traditional Irish dialects of the Gaeltacht, AFAIK.

"It is a waste of time and money." Not to many members of the peoples associated with those endangered languages. Once again:

Who are you to tell them that their identity is wrong?

Saim wrote:And Wales, the Basque Country and the Catalan Countries show that it does work. There is no way that endangered languages are "static". You can make whatever value judgements that you want about endangered languages, but desist with the factual errors. In many ways, endangered languages evolve much faster than stable ones because they adopt features of the dominant language. The Neo-Irish of Dublin and Belfast is idiomatically (i.e. the way things are phrased) quite different to the traditional Irish dialects of the Gaeltacht, AFAIK.

"It is a waste of time and money." Not to many members of the peoples associated with those endangered languages. Once again:

Who are you to tell them that their identity is wrong?

When is Australia going force the Aboriginal landguage on the other Australians?

It is not working in Wales. The percentage who use it as their first language has gone down. The only thing that has gone up is the number of people that can read Welsh roadsigns. A great success!

It is a flop in Ireland. Have you ever lived there or travlled around? People outside the Irish language areas do not use it. That is less than 1%! Why waste public money. If people want to learn these dying languages let them pay for it themselves.

Scot Dutchy wrote:

Saim wrote:And Wales, the Basque Country and the Catalan Countries show that it does work. There is no way that endangered languages are "static". You can make whatever value judgements that you want about endangered languages, but desist with the factual errors. In many ways, endangered languages evolve much faster than stable ones because they adopt features of the dominant language. The Neo-Irish of Dublin and Belfast is idiomatically (i.e. the way things are phrased) quite different to the traditional Irish dialects of the Gaeltacht, AFAIK.

"It is a waste of time and money." Not to many members of the peoples associated with those endangered languages. Once again:

Who are you to tell them that their identity is wrong?

When is Australia going force the Aboriginal landguage on the other Australians?

There is no "Aboriginal language", there are dozens of them, and there were hundreds before European colonization. Unfortunately, 1) hardly any non-indigenous Australians consider an indigenous language to form part of their identity, 2) there is no single indigenous language that could be promoted throughout Australia, 3) Aboriginal Australian languages have always had less speakers than the Celtic languages and are today much less healthy outside of remote communities. I would certainly promote Aboriginal language education, but this would probably work much better among English-speaking Aborigines (about 75% of the Aboriginal population) than among non-indigenous Australians.

It is not working in Wales. The percentage who use it as their first language has gone down. The only thing that has gone up is the number of people that can read Welsh roadsigns. A great success!

It is so working. 25% of Welsh students study through Welsh which pretty much always produces proficient speakers. That's in comparison to only 20% of the total population that can use it. In Wales, Catalonia and the Basque Country younger people are more proficient in the language than the middle-aged, and are more literate in the language than old people.

It is a flop in Ireland. Have you ever lived there or travlled around? People outside the Irish language areas do not use it. That is less than 1%! Why waste public money. If people want to learn these dying languages let them pay for it themselves.

Actual linguists prefer to use the term "endangered language". There are plenty of second-language Irish speakers in urban areas, and plenty of new fluent speakers being produced by Irish immersion schools. With enough proficient students at a certain point Irish will reach critical mass and become a major community language outside of the Gaeltacht.

There are definitely more countries in Europe with multiple officially recognized languages than countries with one official language. For instance Switzerland has four, French, German, Italian and Romanche. A country like Italy has only one "official" language, but Italian minority languages like South Tyrolese, Franco-Provencal and Slovenian are used for administrative purposes in their regions. I'm not sure if there is even one country with only one language

I think it's an organic thing, you can believe the government has a duty to keep a minority language alive, but if it doesn't really appeal to the people who originally spoke that language then it's probably a waste of time.

Arjan Dirkse wrote:I think it's an organic thing, you can believe the government has a duty to keep a minority language alive, but if it doesn't really appeal to the people who originally spoke that language then it's probably a waste of time.

I don't think I've seen any Irish people on this thread in support of canning it.

HughMcB wrote:

Arjan Dirkse wrote:I think it's an organic thing, you can believe the government has a duty to keep a minority language alive, but if it doesn't really appeal to the people who originally spoke that language then it's probably a waste of time.

I don't think I've seen any Irish people on this thread in support of canning it.

Of course, I didn't say they were, not in the case of Ireland. It seems there is an interest in Ireland to keep the Irish language alive from enough people to see that it does in fact stay alive. It was more something in general. There are lots of languages that are at the point of going extinct, and when not enough people are bothered to become fluent, they will go extinct.

Yes I fully agree.