What do three million Welsh gain from the Welsh language?

Anglophone bilingualism can fill the speech bubble

THERE IS no present in Wales,
And no future;
There is only the past,
Brittle with relics

IN RS Thomas’ poem The Welsh Landscape, Wales is stuck in the past, brittle with relics. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to our collective attitude towards the Welsh language. Obviously Welsh is an important part of our past, but we need to be mature enough to openly discuss what role it plays in our collective future.

One of the problems of only looking to the past is that linguistic ‘rights’ have become one of those politically correct Shibboleths that people fight shy of  honestly talking about. It also forces people on both sides of the debate to talk in code and use proxy arguments. This is a shame, because if we have an open discussion about language we may wake up, smell the roses and recognise that we have a resource that can – and should – be exploited for everyone’s benefit.

It’s important to begin by making a point about terms, as we need to be very specific. Welsh language means Welsh language, not what Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society, reverentially describes as “Welsh Communities”. How we preserve places where there are a majority of Welsh speakers actively using the language is a completely separate – and very tricky – question for another columnist to tackle.

So let’s start by offending everyone from Gwent to Gwynedd. Let’s lance the great big elephant in the room by asking a simple question: What does the Welsh language really offer Wales? In some quarters, simply asking such a question can be vieweed as tantamount to treason, but it is honestly asked.

Again, specifics count here. This question is not aimed at answering what individuals gain from speaking Welsh, and the question isn’t some coded anti-devolution trap.  (For the record, I recognise the cultural, social and intellectual advantages of speaking Welsh, and I don’t think the Welsh Language LCO is a plot to shatter the union). But it’s worth being bar stool blunt: What do three million Welsh people gain from continuing to support the future of the Welsh language? Given that 80% of the population don’t speak any Welsh, this question needs to be openly asked – especially as supporting the Welsh language absorbs resources that could be very usefully diverted elsewhere.

One reasonable answer could be that the English-speaking majority get nothing, and that’s OK. Successful nations create strategies to protect minorities and Welsh speakers are a minority whose language needs protecting. This is, however, a fairly loose concept complicated by the sharp elbows of the middle classes, who are choosing Welsh medium schools in ever increasing numbers. Another is that linguistic diversity somehow benefits a majority through cultural osmosis, but it is difficult to argue that S4C viewing figures reflect this. And there is, of course, linguistic rights. But none of these seem to me to be particularly satisfactory positions to put to bar full of sceptics.

There is however a win-win answer that doesn’t seem to have been considered: what value does Welsh have as a comfortable partner to English? Or, to put it another way, why don’t we quantify the benefit we could accrue from exploiting our expertise in Anglophone bilingualism?

It often surprises people to learn that English is spoken by only 380 million people as a first language. In global terms, this is relatively few people. English may be the language of commerce and technology, connecting people and ideas right across the globe, but the majority of up to 1.4 billion people who speak English don’t speak just English. They speak English and another language.  They are bilingual – in fact, they are Anglophone bilingual.

What this means is that the Welsh speaker’s experience of language is closer to the vast majority of English speakers than to most of the people living in the UK. This is worth repeating, because it is a crucial but potentially confusing. Welsh speakers – especially native Welsh speakers, to use the correct terminology – are more like the vast majority bilingual English speakers than the monolingual English-speaking English Irish, Scottish or Welsh (or Australians, New Zealanders, Americans or Canadians).

It is this linguistic feature of the world’s population that we should be actively exploiting. The importance of Welsh and Welsh speakers is not just their connection to our historical past, but our passport to the future. They are a resource that connects Wales to the globe in a way that monolingual populations cannot.

As business and governments move to automating transactional processes, they are going to need an easily identifiable and accessible Anglophone multilingual population to test and develop these services. It is likely that Welsh speakers would probably baulk at being considered as guinea pigs, but the fact remains that they are an incredibly valuable resource through which we can innovate.

On the other side of the equation we have the resource that is English. This is particularly relevant as English will remain the language of base technology, with other languages added on top. A good and obvious example of this is HTML, or the building block of the internet, which is essentially a hybrid codified form of English onto which can bolted 206 other languages.

It is therefore in all our interests to ensure that Wales remains bilingual in the future. In fact, there is an argument that we should accelerate our investment in the Welsh language to ensure we claim top spot in the global battle to develop multilingual services.