Tuesday’s Guardian article about Welsh language education caused huge controversy. In it, some parents protested about their village school switching to Welsh-language teaching. The print headline was: Welsh-only teaching – a political tool that harms children?
The framing of the teaching of Welsh to children as a question of ethics, and the suggestion that it could put any child in Wales at a disadvantage, upset me and other Welsh speakers. Focusing on a bitter row that took place last year in Llangennech, Camarthenshire, the article emphasised the concerns of one parent, with voices on the other side of the debate largely absent, leading to a rather one-sided argument.
I would like to redress that balance, and that means restating the benefits of a bilingual education, as we Welsh speakers are so often required to do. I say bilingual education and not Welsh-medium education, because that is what it is. The main language used to teach the children may be Welsh, but pupils learn to speak, read and write in English to the same level. In this day and age, all minority language (Welsh) speakers – whether inside or outside an educational context – also use the majority language (English).
Having been educated at a Welsh language primary school, I didn’t know a single child who wasn’t fluent (even having to state this is irritating, considering the ubiquity of the English language). My little brother speaks Welsh at school and at home, and switches between the two languages with ease. Even my severely autistic middle brother has vocabulary in both languages, having heard English at home, attended a Welsh-language special needs school, and been a much-loved part of a Welsh community.
Preserving the Welsh language is an emotive issue because it comes after hundreds of years of attempted linguicide by the English authorities. In the 19th century, children who spoke their native language in the playground were required to wear a heavy block of wood inscribed, with the words “Welsh not”, around their necks. Within living memory, people who strived for their civil rights and the preservation of their language were jailed and penalised financially.
Monoglot users of the majority language are often shocked to find they need to operate in a multilingual context because of these hard-won civil rights. To my mind, the mild paranoia monoglots experience is nothing compared with long years of discrimination, often state-sponsored, suffered by minority language speakers. This is why this “debate” is so emotive – a colonial legacy has left its mark in Wales, and it sticks in the craw that otherwise liberal readers might criticise minority-language activists in the UK as narrow nationalists where they would support similar struggles elsewhere in the world.
Studies and academic literature have stated again and again the benefits of a bilingual education, both in terms of attainment and when it comes to picking up other languages. I speak Welsh, English, Italian and French, and though I may only speak Welsh when I return to Wales, my brain uses it every day; in the way I use language, and structure my thoughts, and solve problems. It is an inextricable part of who I am and has added to my experience of the world in myriad ways, which is why any suggestion that learning it might somehow harm any child is so offensive.
It baffles me that English-speaking parents should be afraid of their children being taught through the medium of Welsh. The question of “immersion” is, to my mind, a non-starter. You might say that I was immersed in a Welsh school at age seven, having previously been taught only in English. But I was given extra help and was soon bilingual. These parents complain they do not have a choice if the English stream is discontinued in their school, but if they choose not to send their children to a Welsh-medium school, they are denying them the opportunity to flourish as bilingual citizens. As the academic Ifan Morgan Jones points out, parents are not given the “choice” to remove other subjects from the curriculum, such as maths, French or art. This is about what gives pupils the best life chances. I have never heard anyone, as an adult, sigh heavily and say: “oh, I really wish I hadn’t learned that other language.”
The absence of “choice” is, anyway, usually a non-issue. In this case, as with many others, there is an English language school nearby (a mere 1.6 miles away). So if you really don’t want your child learning in Welsh, there are other options.
Most people in the world use more than one language routinely. As my father, who learned Welsh in his 30s, says, linguistic diversity is the human cultural equivalent of biodiversity. I do not understand why anyone would not want to preserve it, and as a newspaper we have a duty to report painful issues that spring up with the local knowledge required to navigate a complex dispute taking place in two languages.
Learning Welsh gave me the gift of picking up new languages with ease. It allowed me to converse with my dear grandfather, now dead, in his native tongue. It gifted me with friendships, and slang, and humour. It provided me with literature and poetry and music, and an understanding of the politics of being a minority that still strives for self-determination. I am proud to have been educated in Welsh. It has opened up my world, as opposed to closing it.
In the past few days we have been inundated with messages from others echoing these sentiments. Sadly I don’t feel we did these readers justice.