So in order to use Welsh properly and confidently you need to be 100% fluent – it’s all or nothing right?
Actually, no.
I’ve been revisiting this paper Towards a philosophy of language diversity by Wales-based linguist David Crystal after some pretty involved chats with various people over the summer about language purism and what people sometimes refer to as the “declining standard” of Welsh.
If you’re a Welsh learner, whether you feel 1% fluent, 90% fluent, or somewhere in between, this bit could be just for you. Crystal talks about the value of semilingualism and how we all lie on various continua for our listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities. He then says:
In actual fact, most people living in a community where there is a small language are already, to a degree, on the continua. Very few people in Wales know no Welsh at all, or in New Zealand know no Maori at all. My Icelandic has actually grown by 300 percent since Wednesday – I now know three words. It is inevitable that, as soon as you come to visit a community or come to live in it, you start moving on the various continua: you will start hearing the language regularly, you will see it around you routinely. Intuitions begin to be shaped. And people need to have this foetal sense of the small language reinforced. If I were in charge of a marketing drive for Welsh, for example, I wouldn’t draw a contrast between Welsh-speaking and non-Welsh-speaking. That is divisive. I would say: everyone in Wales uses Welsh. You can’t avoid it. Just by crossing the border, your reading comprehension starts to climb. You are already on the continuum. So, you know one Welsh word? Double your competence, learn another…! Minority language planners need to think positive, not negative: not how much Welsh don’t you know but: how much Welsh do you know? And if you need to mix two languages together to make communication work (the phenomenon of code switching), then mix them!
It’s highly recommended reading – Crystal celebrates the validity of standard Welsh grammar as well as the need for diversity and inclusion of other forms. The whole paper is online as a PDF here.
Are you concerned about declining standards of Welsh? Are you a purist? If so, kindly go elsewhere.
(Only kidding, comments below are open.)
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I started writing a comment on this, which I’ve been thinking about ever since you mentioned this paper last week on Quixotic Quisling, but things got out of hand, and will probably be the basis of the next post on Most Peculiar People.
Briefly, I agree with you, and I generally agree with David Crystal, but I think he missed the point about the Manics’ poster campaign. The villain of the piece wasn’t the “stuffy academics” objecting to the unidiomatic Welsh, but the happy troll-feeders in the English language media. But I have to stop writing this very minute.
I am very much reminded of these statistics on how many characters one has to know to understand Chinese. There they more or less have one-to-one character-to-word mapping. So replacing the word “character” with the word “word” gives some approximation of approaching fluency in any language. It’s roughly twice as hard to get from 90% to 99% as it is to get from 1% to 90%.
Unfortunately, the standard of Welsh expected increases with fluency. Somehow it’s worse to write something that’s 99% correct than, say, 75% correct. There seems to be a confusion in the popular imagination between correctness and register: one doesn’t need to fill a text with impersonal verbs, “hwy”, “canys”, and “nis” to get told that one is writing posh Welsh. And that shows a curious national attitude: in most places, writing the national language well would be considered a good thing; but for some reason we tend to find it a threat.