Mind Your Language

Those sitting exams in various Asian languages are apparently to be made to declare whether they are learners or native speakers. In other words, such is not currently the case. Give that a moment to sink in. And ask yourself what has taken so long, when learners and native speakers of the Celtic languages have always been set entirely different examinations at the end of entirely different courses.

Not that those languages are in especially rude health at the moment, with more speakers of Urdu than of Gaelic in Scotland, with Northern Ireland’s only Irish-language daily newspaper going begging for a public subsidy because no one wants to read it, and, rather more surprisingly, with the same fate awaiting the scheme for a Welsh-language daily newspaper.

Again, give that last a moment to sink in – there is not at present any Welsh-language daily newspaper, since there is simply no demand. This is understandable in the case of Irish, which has few or no remaining native speakers (although newspapers in Latin do exist). But a third of a million people really do speak Welsh, albeit every single one of them can also speak either English (in Wales) or Spanish (in Patagonia).

Yet both languages, like Gaelic (and, indeed, Scots and the arguably entirely fictitious Ulster-Scots), have followings so well-connected that they can make serious demands, with reasonable likelihood of success, for subsidy out of the pockets of the very working class – black and white, Catholic and Protestant, whether in Wales or in Northern Ireland (or, indeed, Scotland) – that they use these same languages to exclude from the best economic, social, cultural and political opportunities in Wales, increasingly in Northern Ireland, and doubtless also in Scotland before too long.

Wales, in particular, needs watching. The appointment of Paul Murphy as Secretary of State is the clearest signal yet that any request for further devolution is going to be a met with a flat No. So the Labour-Plaid Cymru coalition rightly detested by Murphy (and Brown) will doubtless seek to hold itself together by seeking instead a new and even more draconian Welsh Language Act, despite the dramatic recent fall in the take up of services already offered pursuant to existing legislation.

Very rightly and necessarily, all matters relating to the Welsh language are reserved to Westminster. Will it be guilt-tripped yet again into making four fifths of the Welsh (including practically the entire working class and all ethnic minorities) unemployable in theory and confined to the least desirable jobs in practice? Or will it insist instead that Welsh can have all the status it likes in demonstrably Welsh-speaking areas, but only in those areas?

As for the Asian languages, are they taking up curriculum time that could be devoted to the teaching and learning of languages (ancient and modern) integral to our own Western civilisation, the Biblical-Classical synthesis? I strongly suspect so. And it is civilisational suicide that this should be the case.