Welsh Language Census Report

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

Number of speakers % of the population Number of speakers % of the population Number of speakers % of the population

1901 280,905 15% 648,919 35% 929,824 50%

1911 190,292 8.5% 787,074 35% 977,366 43.5%

1921 155,989 6% 766,103 31% 922,092 37%

1931 97,932 4% 811,329 33% 909,261 37%

1951 41,155 2% 673,531 27% 714,686 29%

1961 26,223 1% 629,779 25% 656,002 26%

1971 32,725 1% 509,700 20% 542,425 21%

1981 21,583 1% 486,624 18% 508,207 19%

(Price, 1984:110)

The total number of Welsh speakers in Wales can be clearly seen here to have almost halved in this time. This is due to a lack of education in Welsh, and the introduction of big companies in major cities such as the DVLA in Swansea, which not only entices English speakers from England to move, but also means that due to the fact that business is generally made in English, this is the language that will most often be used in these urban areas. In 1901, 50% of the Welsh population could speak Welsh, however, in 1981 this is down to only 19%. To study this decrease in Welsh speakers, I will look more closely at the areas of Swansea and the Lliw Valley, relating the numbers of Welsh speakers to their age, migration of speakers, degree of literacy (regarding whether or not they can read or write Welsh), and finally economic activity.

Looking at the number of Welsh speakers aged 3 and over in each area, I have used data in censuses from 1961 to 2001, however, due to boundary changes it is not possible to provide an accurate number of Welsh speakers for the Lliw Valley in either 1971 or 2001. This table shows the number of speakers of Welsh in my two chosen areas:

Area 1961 1971 1981 1991 2001

Lliw Valley 53,504 - 24,788 22,369 -

Swansea 171,399 21,430 18,465 17,500 5,973

We can see that the number of speakers has greatly decreased in both areas, however it should be noted that recently there are more speakers of Welsh in the more rural area of the Lliw Valley. The number of Welsh speakers in Swansea in 1961 seems to be rather large, and I feel that it should be discounted as a misprint. This is due to that fact that it does not seem feasible to state that around 150,000 Welsh speakers were lost from Swansea in the decade between the 1961 and 1971 censuses. If we look at the data from the years 1981 and 1991, we can see that in the Lliw Valley the number of Welsh speakers decreases by 2,419, whereas the number of speakers decreases in Swansea by 965. This could be due to migration of Welsh speakers from rural areas to urban due to the increase of industry and jobs in the city. We can test this theory by looking at the 1991 census data.

The largest numbers of Welsh speaking people that have moved from Dyfed, a rural area in Wales, are those that have moved to West Glamorgan, 257(where Swansea lies), followed by South Glamorgan, 171 (where Cardiff lies). These two areas include large cities, so they follow my idea that many Welsh speakers have moved from rural to urban areas. Even though there are currently more speakers of Welsh in rural areas, this number could eventually start to settle due to this migration, however without the continuation of teaching Welsh in schools and support from the government, the numbers of speakers would still continue to deteriorate.

We can look at recent census data from 1991 to divide up the numbers from Table A and look at the degree of literacy Ð'- whether these people are able to speak, read or write Welsh, or do a combination of the three:

Area TOTAL PERSONS Speaks Welsh Reads Welsh Writes Welsh Speaks and reads Welsh Speaks, reads and writes Welsh Either speaks, reads or writes Welsh

Lliw Valley 60,588 22,369 17,179 13,736 16,067 13,262 23,522

Swansea 174,962 17,500 14,715 10,937 12,180 9,894 20,183

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