[ad_1]
The number of Britons learning a foreign language continues to fall. Within the EU, the British are by far the least proficient in speaking a second language. Partly, that reflects the pre-eminent international role of English, but also the trouble schools have teaching the subjects. Recent British Council research found that fewer poorer students are studying languages, viewing them as pointless post-Brexit. There is a long-term shortage of teachers too. But I have a proposal that could not only arrest the decline but also help preserve the United Kingdom: teach Welsh in English schools.
It should be noted at the outset that Welsh is not truly foreign to England. Before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, the language spoken in much of northern England and lowland Scotland was closely related to Welsh. This belt of the country is known in Welsh as Yr Hen Ogledd, meaning “the old north”. Some of the earliest Welsh language poetry comes from the kingdoms of Elmet in West Yorkshire and Rhegged in what is now Cumbria. It can truly be said to be a language of Britain.
And (to a certain extent) it does not matter which language you learn at school. If you think Welsh is a bit off-piste, remember that private schools still teach Latin and Ancient Greek: yet there is no nation of Romans at England’s doorstep waiting to do business in their mother tongue. The rise of Boris Johnson, Britain’s new prime minister, has not been arrested by his studying these dead languages. Learning any second language can improve your cognitive skills, and can lead to better understanding of your first one, too. I only grasped English grammar properly when I started to learn Lithuanian.
But there are many good reasons for the English to focus on Welsh. The Cardiff government has a lot of experience in how to teach it as a compulsory school subject. London can use the resources they have produced. Given the right incentives, there need not be a shortage of teachers, either: there are roughly 500,000 Welsh speakers in the UK, all of whom speak English fluently as well. The BBC already has a library of Welsh soaps and radio shows that could be used for practice.
Most importantly, learning Welsh would demonstrate that the English are taking seriously the reality of the UK as a multinational state. As the largest by a long way of the four countries that make up the union, England dominates. It lacks its own parliament but cannot help but overshadow the other nations of the UK both culturally and politically. Our union is now under threat — a conscious gesture to aim for parity of esteem for languages would be welcome. Those particularly committed to the union may wish to learn Scots Gaelic — even Irish — too.
Benedict Anderson, the Irish political scientist, saw language as the root of nationalism. By sharing a vernacular, people would begin to belong to an imagined, shared community, he believed. Print capitalism, especially newspapers, facilitated this process, allowing far-flung regions of the nation to feel part of the whole and participate in events hundreds of miles away. The language determined the boundary of the nation.
English, however, has become an international language, which makes this “imagining” somewhat difficult for Britons. The country now imports a large chunk of its culture from America. British tourists can generally find someone who speaks their language, even in the most rural backwaters of Europe. Speaking Welsh, far less likely to crop up outside the British Isles, could aid the process of imagining a distinctively British community.
Queen Elizabeth I, worried about the integrity of her kingdom during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, had the Bible translated into Welsh. It helped preserve and elevate the status of the language. It may have also helped keep the country together. With the UK facing internal divisions and external pressure, the English should embrace the Welsh language once again.
[ad_2]
READ SOURCE
