Sociolinguistics
LING 2150
Assessment 1
Use the census data available on Welsh to build up a picture of what happened to a chosen small area of Wales over a period for which data is available in the census. The focus of your discussion should be on the rise/fall/stability of the minority language. Try to use data about the age of speakers, and degree of literacy.
For this essay, I plan to look at what has happened to the number of speakers of Welsh in both Swansea and the Lliw Valley over time by using census data, comparing the two areas which both lie in South Wales in the county of West Glamorgan. These areas are of a similar size, with Swansea recorded in the 1991 census as being 24,590 hectares, and the Lliw Valley as 21,754 hectares. These measurements do not differ more than 500 hectares from year to year in the data I will use, however, I will have to take into account the fact that the boundaries for Welsh counties sometimes change between censuses. For this reason, I will have to be very careful when choosing my data. The population of my chosen areas differs dramatically though. In the 1991 census it was recorded that the population of Swansea was 181,906 and the Lliw Valley was 63,099. This means that in Swansea there are 7.4 persons per hectare contrasted with 2.9 in the Lliw Valley. Due to this, I thought it would be interesting to compare such an urban area as Swansea with a rather more rural area as the Lliw Valley to see if there are any differences that can be found regarding the number of Welsh speakers.
We can see these two areas on the following map. Note the dense network of major roads around the Swansea area contrasted with the small amount in the Lliw Valley. Also, we can see that the counties of Dyfed and Powys are large rural areas, with sparse scatterings of major roads:
(The public's library and digital archive, 1993)
“Of the languages spoken at the present time in mainland Britain, Welsh has been here by far the longest,” (Price, 1984:94), so why, may we ask, has it come to be that it is only spoken by a minority of the Welsh population? We can see from the following table the extent to which the number of speakers of Welsh in Wales has declined since 1901:
Speaking Welsh only Speaking English and Welsh Total
I also have to take into account the transport routes to the town, and how these might affect the number of visitors from each region. Betws-y-Coed is one of the smaller towns in the Snowdonia National Park, North Wales, with a population of approximately 615 people. Located on the upper end of the Conway valley where the Afon Llugwy joins the Afon Conway, the village is cut in half by the important A5 road which is one of the transcontinental routes from Ireland to the European mainland. The development of the A5 means that Betws-y-Coed is simply accessed from the Midlands and Southern England, examples being Birmingham and Stoke-On-Trent. The town today attracts tourists to the area throughout the year with the greatest number of people visiting in the summer months.
Newman, David. "Integration and Ethnic Spatial Concentration: The Changing Distribution of the Anglo-Jewish Community." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10.3 (1985): 360-65. JSTOR. Web. 19 Mar. 2010.
In pre-industrial society, over 80% of people lived in rural areas. As migrants moved from the countryside, small towns became large cities. By 1850, for the first time in world history, more people in a country—Great Britain—lived in cities than in rural areas. As other countries in Europe and North America industrialized, they too continued along this path of urbanization (Modern World History
Tallichet, S, and C. Hensley, and R. Evans. (2012). Place-Based Differences in the. International Journal of Offen, 56 (8), pp. 1283-1298.
Another difficulty cultures deal with is language and the way people speak. In some cases, people struggle to belong by making changes in the way they speak the English language just to be assimilated. They attempt to use words and letters, as well as body language that fit in the norm; all in an attempt to denounce their original intonation and style of pronunciation. One ...
Spanning approximately 20,000 square kilometers, with three provinces in the “north” under French rule, and four provinces in the “south” under Spanish rule, the Basque people enjoy a strong sense of pride in their culture. This pride stems mainly from their unique language; the true essence of Basque identity. Its roots trace to before the invasion of the Indo-Europeans, around 4,000 years ago. Therefore, it is the oldest known language in all of Europe.
There were an abundance of spatial differences in terms of ethnic, convivial and occupational status, while there were low occurrences of the functional differences in land use patterns. The concentric model postulated a spatial disunion of place of work and place of residence, which was not generalized until the twentieth century.
The last speaker died, is how the story began. Not long ago, after having an epic battle with the Bokmal, the Nynorsk was sent to the infinite oblivion. Norwegian population preferred to adapt the Bokmal to their modern lifestyle. Throughout history, languages have been victimized by malevolous political, social and economic forces. These dominant factors can reach languages at any hidden corner of the world and damage them until they go out of existence. According to Gaici Vince’s article, Can We Save the World’s Dying Languages? 7000 languages will die by the end of the 21st century, which means two vernaculars
This essay will explore the contemporary language situation in Wales. Welsh had declined to a minority language status in Wales at the beginning of the 20th century but recent efforts carried out by the Welsh Government saw the language experience signs of revitalisation. I will consider the level of success of a possible revitalisation and the ways in which the country attempts to encourage it. I will refer to statistical data to support my arguments and apply the works of language theorists such as Joshua Fishman and David Crystal. I will explore the Welsh language as an endangered, minority language and the attitudes and behaviour of it's speakers. I will then go on to investigate it's recent decline and discuss the actions of the Welsh State and how they have affected the current circumstance in Wales.
It is reported that every year, there are hundreds of minority languages have been vanishing. Although governments have pour money in preserving these languages from dying out, some people would argue that it is not a good idea to waste tax revenue in this protection.
To prove my point that the Irish people share the same language I will explain the unique qualities that the Irish culture possesses. Many of these qualities are unique to the people of this region. The first is the Irish language. It is often referred to as Gaelic, but I have found that it is just called the Irish language now. This language is one of the oldest in Europe and it boasts one of the earliest written literatures in the entire world. A study was conducted b...
We all like to think of ourselves as being good people. However, we quite often we are selfish. A person can be begging for help to save their way of life, and we won’t bat an eye. We will often think that the person begging needs to get with the times or that they are just whining over nothing. However when we ourselves need help, we become shocked and outraged when we receive no such thing. This is what Tom Law attempts to convey in his article “Cachau Bant: Mind Your Language”, where he asserts to the British population, the need to save the Welsh language and culture from fading away.
Office of National Statistics (2004), Education, Ethnicity and Identity, Available from: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=461 [accessed 28 September 2010], Cite as (office of National Statistics 28 September 2010)
To commence this discussion, it is first essential to establish an understanding surrounding the role of language in relation to national identity. Theoretically, the more power language has in this relation, the more powerful language planning may be when creating a national identity. However, the role language plays in this respect is somewhat problematic to define and has proven to be a debatable topic among nationalists, sociologists and sociolinguists. For instance, May demonstrates that ‘sociological commentators, unlike sociolinguists, have generally been loath to apportion a prominent role to language in the explanation of minority ethnic and national identity claims’ (2001: 8). Consequently emulating distaste from sociologists to credit language with significant power in a national identity. In a similar sense, de Vries notes that, in relation to a language community, ‘social scientists have generally ignored the systemic properties of language’ (1991: 39), thus, concurrently suggesting with May, a disagreement from the social sciences over the role of language in terms of identity and national identity. Similarly, circa the French revolution, the concept
The town planner is expected to make the best use of available statistics on various aspects of urban area which he is developing. The town planning cannot be adequate without statistical information because much of the statistical information is based on factors which have economic significance. With the aid of statistics, the town planner can use economic forces to increase the usefulness of his plans.