Are “we” all Welsh now?

Welsh, English or British?

So, there was some rugby yesterday. Wales beat Ireland in one quarter final of the world cup, and France beat England in another. The current Welsh team is being lauded as the best in at least a generation, nobody wanting to tempt fate too much by going back further than that. The current English team, on the other hand, is being characterised by everyone but the ITV commentary team, as a bunch of misogynist, dwarf-throwing piss-heads, with an over-developed sense of entitlement.

It’s easy to imagine that mixed in with the sense of disappointment felt by all sports fans when their team is knocked out of a competition, there might be some small measure of relief amongst the more liberally minded English rugby fans that their side are on their way home. What has come as a bit of a surprise, however, is that England’s two leading liberal Sunday newspapers have featured “We’re all Welsh now” articles today.

The Observer’s editorial includes Princes of Wales, which explains to readers:

[Rugby] is ferociously tribal, until the final whistle. After that, all fans are family. Now that England, Ireland and Scotland are out of the World Cup, it is natural for all British rugby supporters to hurl their weight behind the one remaining sceptr’d nation. We are all Welsh now.

The Independent on Sunday has gone even further, by translating the headline of their article and putting it on the front cover. We should be grateful that they bothered to proof read it, at least. Maybe less grateful that they mention sheep in the first sentence.

I’m going to go out on a limb here (i.e. I can’t be bothered to do the necessary research) and guess that in 2007, when England were the only British team to go through to the semi-finals, neither the Guardian nor the Independent saw fit to reassure their readers in Scotland and Wales that “We’re all English now”. When England won the world cup in 2003, there may have been a few Scots and Cymry gracious enough to congratulate their celebrating neighbours, but it doesn’t look like many of them joined in the party in Trafalgar Square.

The whole thing smacks of Andymurrayism.

Nobody minds (I assume) when someone who self-identifies as English (and/or British) also happens to support Wales in the rugby. If David Mitchell says he’s always supported Wales in the rugby, due to his mother being Welsh, and his having a soft spot for the place, that’s fine, and it would be churlish to point out that he didn’t bring it up until England had been knocked out of the competition.

But he didn’t, and then he did.

The Guardian is currently running a series of articles and features on “Britishness”, but they don’t seem capable of drawing the obvious conclusion from the anecdotal evidence they’ve been gathering: for most of the population of England, “English” and “British” are synonyms. Englishness has nothing to lose by being subsumed by Britishness occasionally. The idea that Tim Henman would get chippy about being described as a “British tennis player” is just laughable; would he even notice? There may well have been English rugby players who thought that they were representing everyone in these islands in 2003, even though a most of us couldn’t have cared less if they’d lost to Australia in the final, even if we weren’t actively hoping that they would be thrashed.

Should Wales be similarly successful (I know, I know, one game at a time), do you think the Guardian will expect the victory parade to be in London, since that’s “our” capital too?

Thankfully, most of the people who read the Observer and the Sindy don’t seem to be taken in by the silliness.

Letters From Wales

A post on Morfablog from 10 years ago, about a Jan Morris review of Joan Abse’s collection of Letters From Wales, which includes the following gem:

Machynlleth, wretched town, hardly a person could speak English… Welsh seem a pleasant, intelligent race, but I should think awkward to live with… the language is past description.

That was Beatrix Potter in 1885. Plus ça change…

Another quote from Morris’s article which I didn’t include in 2001:

The most telling of all the book’s quotations, to my mind, comes from the Welsh patriot and dedicated European, Saunders Lewis, who wrote in 1921 that it would take ‘many generations, a century perhaps’, for the Welsh people to recover their sense of faith and beauty, stamped out of them down the centuries by Nonconformism and Englishness.

A century, did he say? Twenty years to go.

Ten years now.

Ill-bred

Excuse the self-indulgence, but I just want a place to dump my comments on the Independent on Sunday‘s recent article on the “Roger Lewis affair”.

I won’t link to Lewis’s nasty review of Jasper Rees’s book, Bred of Heaven, as I tend to agree with Carl Morris, that the piece is just link-bait. I certainly can’t see any point in attempting to engage with readers of the Daily Mail. If you really need to read the review, but would rather not add to the Mail’s ad revenue, there are some suggestions in the comments on Carl’s post on how to go about it.

The same could be said for Matthew Rees’s sloppily written piece in the Indie, of course, so all I can say in my own defense (since every comment posted there delivers more ad revenue for the IoS, and stoking the fires of indignation only helps the them pay for more crap like this) is that I don’t believe that the Independent’s readership is naturally racist, and there remains a hope that people’s minds may be changed over this issue.

I’ll excuse my self-indulgence further by explaining that I’m currently going through the archives of my main blog, and have come to rue the day that I changed from one old fashioned external commenting system to another, both of which have since given up the ghost and taking with them to their digital graves the literally* dozens of comments that my blog attracted in its first 5 years of life.

I don’t trust disqus, is what I’m getting at.

Anyhow, here are some of my comments from over there, with links to the originals.

[28 August 2011]

Here we go again…

Would the Independent (and the bulk of its readers, if the comments here are indicative) be so willing to defend other racists’ right to free speech as robustly as they are defending Roger Lewis here?

Was David Starkey let off the hook so easily, for instance? How many of you were defending him by pointing out that he was “only quoting Enoch Powell”. Or mansplaining to us that he can’t be a racist because he’s the same colour and nationality as the people who’s language and culture he obviously hates so much?

Also, if anti-Welsh comments are simply harmless fun which should be laughed off, why are Welsh people routinely hounded by the press when they forget themselves and bite back?

How many liberal hands were wrung here when Beca Brown was reported to the CRE and the police for writing an “anti-English” column in the Welsh language journal Barn?

When Aled Cottle lost his job for writing an “anti-British” email to an anonymous blogger who passed the message on to the Liverpool Daily Post, how many English game show hosts were contacted by your newspaper to explain to you how it’s all a bit of fun?

You won’t have heard about those stories, of course, because as far as I can see the Independent didn’t think them worth covering.

[28 August 2011]

If nothing else good comes out of this, at least Welsh has gained a new word today:

saisbonio – vb. from Sais (an Englishman) + esbonio (to explain)

The act of an English explaining to a Welsh why a perceived slight was, in fact, just a harmless joke.

Usage: “Gad i fi saisbonio hynny i ti, Dai.” (Let me engsplain that to you, Dai.)

No, the English version isn’t very elegant, but that’s the Teutonic languages for you.

You’re welcome.

I can’t remember, and the disqus system isn’t helping my memory, in which order these things were posted. This next one was a reaction to someone who’d defended the IoS’s position,as they were simply “reporting the facts”. Good grief.

[28 August 2011]

Reporting the facts?

Like the fact that “the English author tries to become “a real Welshman” after discovering his grandfather is Welsh”?

If Matthew Bell had bothered reading the book, he would have seen, in the first chapter, how Jasper Rees travelled to Carmarthenshire regularly throughout his childhood, to stay with his grandparents, both of whom were Welsh. He also would have read how Rees’ (Welsh) father encouraged the children to clap and cheer as their car crossed the border back into England.

He would then have read a pre-emptive strike against exactly the sort of anti-Welsh language nonsense that Roger Lewis produced in his review.

By the time he got to the middle of the book, he would have seen that Roger Lewis’s claim that “Luckily, [Rees] doesn’t make much headway with the lingo”, is a lie. I’m only half-way through the book, but Rees is already able to converse in simple Welsh. And judging by his recent tweets in Welsh, he has continued to improve.

If Matthew Bell had any journalistic integrity, he would not allow Roger Lewis to get away with the line “the irony is that I’m 100 per cent Welsh myself”. Since when has sharing a nationality with a minority group within said nation been a proof against racism? Roger Lewis is the same nationality as the people he seems to despise; so is David Starkey. It’s really not ironic. It’s par for the course.

While I tend to agree that reporting Lewis to the police was a mistake, it’s certainly consistent with what has happened to Welsh speakers who have published “anti-English” diatribes in the press. And as many here have pointed out, had Jasper Rees’ book been about being his attempt to become part of any other ethno-linguistic group in these islands, an article like Roger Lewis’s would have certainly attracted the attention of the Equality and Human Rights Commission and possibly the police as well.

My bringing up of Aled Cottle and Beca Brown attracted the attention on an anonymous poster, who sounds strangely familiar. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. It’ll come to me eventually.

Animal_Farm accused me of distortion in my account of the Cottle and Brown cases. He may have had a point, at least in the Cottle business, but he was certainly going out of his way to avoid recognising my point. He also suggested I must be in love with Beca Brown. That’s about the level of the discussion, unfortunately:

[28 August 2011]

I didn’t say either of them were my heroes, just pointing out that neither case was reported in the Independent, as this storm in a teacup has been.

Yes, Cottle was stupid and drunk enough to react to extended provocation by the anonymous blogger. Not behaviour I would condone, but certainly something I could understand in this case; at about the same time, I had my address published by this same anonymous blogger, with a suggestion that I was a hypocrite and deserved to be burned out of my home.

But of course, you’re right, Cottle was the villain, because he used some bad words about the English.

As for Beca Brown, I don’t have the original article to hand, but I do recall that the parts about her being ashamed to admit to such prejudices, and how they had been formed, were not included in any of the translated excerpts.

But my point was, that when the Conservative AM David Davies said “Anti-English racism is just as bad as any other form of racism and should be dealt with in the same fashion”, nobody at the Independent felt the need to get all Voltaire on his ass, and protect Beca Brown’s right to free speech. When he reported the case to the police, no articles appeared in the liberal London press, suggesting that perhaps this was improper behaviour for an elected representative. When he urged S4C to fire her, Stephen Fry and Gyles Brandreth were conspicuously quiet, and nobody even bothered to ask Carol Vorderman what she made of the whole thing.

Because “anti-English racism” is a real thing, apparently, whereas “anti-Welsh racism” is just a joke.

By this point, I’ve given up trying to be subtle with terminology. I know Cris Dafis and others object to “racism” being applied to any situation where the participants on either side have the same coloured skin, but personally I can’t be arsed splitting linguistic hairs just because people like Roger Lewis aren’t quite as hateful as people like Nick Griffin.

Took a break yesterday. Went to an eisteddfod, of all things.

[Posted at 17:00, 30 August 2011, but in moderation.]

(How many of you lot are regular readers of the IoS, I wonder? The only people arguing in favour of the God-given right to abuse the Welsh sound more like Daily Mail readers to me. No offense, mind.)

“This can’t be racism, the Welsh aren’t a race” is a complete red herring. The relevant anti-racism legislation makes no distinction between ethnicity and race, and Welsh speakers (the target of Roger Lewis’s distain) are certainly an ethnic group by any reasonable definition. If “the Welsh”, in the way Lewis uses the term, do not constitute an ethnicity, then neither do “Jamaicans” or “Pakistanis” or what have you, and the BNP and their ilk can have at it without any fear of legal reprisals. Arguing that an attack on an abstraction like a language can’t be construed as an attack on an ethnic group is just silly, otherwise anyone could attack Urdu as a “moribund monkey language” without fear of legal reprisals from incensed British Asians.

If you don’t believe in the general principal that individuals have a right not to suffer abuse in the press on the grounds of their ethnic background, then you should at least be consistent about it. I’m sure that there are legions of Roy “Chubby” Brown fans who find it outrageous that their hero’s comic genius is muzzled in the so-called free press; even the Daily Mail won’t print his gem-like Paki jokes.

When I were a lad, there were Paki jokes on the telly of a Saturday night, and “thick Paddy” jokes, and “stupid bloody women” jokes, and “disgusting poofter” jokes, and “stingy Jew” jokes and just about any other kind of joke that a The Comedians would stoop to in order to wring a cheap laugh out of their audience. Some of the “thick Paddy” jokes were told by actual Irishmen, as I recall. So that must’ve made it all right.

In my opinion, there is no qualitative difference between all those forms of “humour”, and the article that Roger Lewis wrote for the Daily Mail, and nobody defending his right to do here on the Independent’s website has yet convinced me otherwise. “He’s just expressing his opinion” is not a defence, unless you think that Chubby Brown has the same right to express his “opinions” just as forthrightly, and who knows, even more wittily, in the pages of the Daily Mail.

Once I start using terms like “qualitative difference” it’s usually a sign that it’s time to step back from the computer. Luckily, it’s time to cook.

I’m happy to rant more in the comments here, but I’m not going to engage with anyone on the level of “Roger Lewis was right, the Welsh are over-sensitive/chippy/uppity/humourless”. If you think so, you’re an idiot. That may be open to debate, but not on this blog. Get your own, and whine about it there.

* “literally” in the figurative sense

Storm in a sosban fach?

Perhaps the only interesting thing about Rod Liddle’s recent post on his Spectator blog, is the range of responses it’s evoked from us Welshers. I wasn’t going to bother joining the fray, but since it’s raining…

For the record, in a post about how S4C should be put out of its misery, Liddle describes its audience as miserable, seaweed munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill tribes.

Meh. Unimaginative troll trolls unimaginatively. If this had been on some UKIP mouthbreather’s blog I wouldn’t have even bothered leaving a comment. Life’s too short.

But it’s still raining.

I first heard about Liddle’s comments via a Facebook post by Mabon ap Gwynfor, who announced that he had reported Rod Liddle to the North Wales police for “racism”. I understand Mabon’s anger, and have no doubt that Liddle fits most reasonable people’s definition of a racist, but I don’t imagine that much good will come of involving the police. Being a racist isn’t actually against the law, and unless the police think that Liddle’s comments are likely to incite racial hatred, I don’t see what they can do about the situation.

Having said that, Liddle is a professional journalist, and the comments appear on the website of a nationally distributed magazine, so he is clearly in contravention of the Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice, specifically Clause 12, Discrimination:

The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.

When the subject of complaining to the PCC came up in the comments section of Liddle’s blog, the classic Spectator reading sophists’ response was “the Welsh aren’t a race, so we can be as hateful as we want”.

This is nonsense. It’s tiring nonsense, and engaging with crap like this is boring. On maes-e, otherwise militant voices are choosing not to feed the troll, usually good advice which I have dispensed myself more times than I care to remember. A regular reader of this blog advocates blocking the Spectator’s website completely, although if we did that every time a English language newspaper or magazine published a trollish article we’d soon be left with very few sources of news from beyond the dyke. (The Guardian would be long gone, for instance.)

Liddle isn’t the problem, he’s just a symptom. It’s a cliche to say that “the Welsh” are the only ethnic-type group, if that’s a vague enough definition, that an English journalist can attack in print with impunity, but cliches don’t emerge sui generis, and this one’s been snowballing along for centuries. We turn the other cheek so fast sometimes that our heads spin. When we react to having pins pushed into our flesh we’re told that we shouldn’t be so thin-skinned.

How’s this for a solution? You stop pushing pins into our flesh, and we’ll stop complaining about it. Really, just fucking stop it, it’s annoying.

Until then, if it sounds like racism, if it looks like racism, and if it smells like racism, then it very probably is racism. And racist journalists should be reported to the Press Complaints Commission.

---

(edit, 3/12/10)

Received an email from the PCC, giving their response to the “over 40″ complaints received.

Commission’s decision in the case of Various v The Spectator

The Commission received over forty complaints that the article discriminated against Welsh people. Some complainants were also concerned that the article included a number of inaccuracies, including the wording of the headline and the reference to the viewing figures of S4C.

The Commission understood that the columnist’s reference to Welsh people as “miserable, seaweed munching, sheep bothering pinch-faced hill tribes” had greatly offended many readers. Under the terms of Clause 1 (Accuracy) columnists are entitled to express their opinions – however robust or controversial – provided that they are clearly distinguished from fact. The Commission acknowledged that the views expressed in the article about Wales and Welsh people would be upsetting to many readers, however it was satisfied that readers generally would be aware that the article reflected the columnist’s personal and, indeed, robust opinions rather than statements of fact about residents of Wales. The Commission was therefore of the view that readers would not be misled on this point.

Several complainants expressed concern about specific points of accuracy in the article – predominantly the wording of the headline and the reference to viewing figures of S4C. The Commission acknowledged the complainants’ argument that the correct spelling of the quotation used in the headline was “Sosban fach yn berwi ar y tan”. However, while more care could have been taken to ensure the correct spelling of the words, the Commission did not consider that the error was significantly inaccurate or would mislead readers in such a way as to constitute a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

The Commission noted that the piece was commenting on a survey which found that “almost 200 of its [S4C] programmes had zero viewers”. This indeed appeared to be an accurate reflection of the report, which had stated that 196 programmes had attracted “zero figures”. The Commission acknowledged that any number of viewers fewer than one thousand was officially rated as zero, and that children under 4 were not included in viewing figures and, as such, it understood the complainants’ objections to the phrase “LITERALLY nobody” to describe the number of viewers. However, it considered that, in this context, the term “literally” had been used in relation to the official viewing figures – which were recorded as “zero” – especially given that any other figure of viewers below the threshold of one thousand could not be established. With this in mind, on balance, it considered that readers generally would not be significantly misled in such a way as to warrant correction under the terms of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

One complainant considered it inaccurate to make reference to HTV (Cymru), which no longer existed. The Commission acknowledged that the channel was no longer named this, however, given that this was the channel’s previous title, it did not consider that the reference was misleading in such a way as to amount to a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code.

The majority of complaints were made in regard to Clause 12 (Discrimination) of the Code. While the clause prevents newspapers and magazines from publishing pejorative or prejudicial references to an individual’s race, it does not cover generalised remarks about groups or categories of people. Given that the article did not make reference to a particular individual but rather to Welsh people in general, the Commission could not establish a breach of Clause 12 (Discrimination) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

One complainant also looked to engage Clause 10 (Clandestine devices and subterfuge), although he did not make clear on what grounds he felt the clause had been breached. The clause was designed to prevent journalists from using clandestine devices to obtain material for publication and to ensure that they did not engage in misrepresentation. Given that there did not appear to be any suggestion that the columnist had used such apparatus or engaged in misrepresentation, the Commission could not establish a breach of Clause 10 (i) or (ii) of the Code.

The Commission understood the grounds on which the complainants found the article highly offensive; however, it made clear that the terms of the Editors’ Code of Practice do not address issues of taste and offence. The Code is designed to address the potentially competing rights of freedom of expression and other rights of individuals, such as privacy. Newspapers and magazines have editorial freedom to publish what they consider to be appropriate provided that the rights of individuals – enshrined in the terms of the Code which specifically defines and protects these rights – are not compromised. To come to an inevitably subjective judgement as to whether such material is tasteless or offensive would amount to the Commission acting as a moral arbiter, which can lead to censorship. Furthermore, any possible issue relating to incitement of violence is a legal matter which does not fall within the remit of the Code and could not, therefore, be addressed by the Commission. It could not, therefore, comment further on these aspects of the complaints.

Finally, one complainant had expressed concern that the magazine had not published his comment directing readers to the PCC website. The Commission made clear that the selection of comments for publication was a matter for the discretion of individual editors (provided that the terms of the Code were not engaged) and, as such, it could not comment further on the matter.

Reference No. 105049/105207

So remember, English journalists, you can be as “robust” as you like when having at go at Welshes, just so long as you don’t name one of them while you’re at it. This presumably holds true for Jamaicans and Pakistanis too, but I doubt that even Liddle would dare to be quite so “robust” about those two “groups”.

“No less peculiar” – Jan Morris on Nant Gwrtheyrn

Fear not, Jan Morris, “universally considered one of the greatest living travel writers”, has not turned to the Dark Side. After the silliness of yesterday’s Telegraph article on Duffy, I thought it’d make a pleasant change to recalibrate our persecution complexes with an article by someone who knows what she’s talking about:

The language is still spoken in the villages above, beyond the conifer woods, because the Llyn Peninsula is one of the Welshest parts of all Wales. Even there, though, it is constantly under threat, as the colossal forces of Anglophone globalism, expressed through television and e-mail, newspapers and popular trend, bludgeon all indigenous cultures everywhere. It is said that of the 6,000-odd languages spoken in the world today, half will be dead by the end of the century, and not long ago Welsh seemed obviously doomed too. There were less than three million people in Wales, and more than 40 million in England, and whereas English was one of the greatest of all the world languages, Welsh was spoken only by a third even of the Welsh themselves. Thousands of English people had settled in Wales, seldom bothering to learn Welsh, while the mass of the Welsh themselves found it advantageous to use the lingua franca of half the world, so accessible and so seductive a few miles away across the English border.

[Diolch i heddgwynfor am y ddolen, ac i papalamour am y llun.]

Luckily, we have a word for “bollocks”

The Daily Telegraph published a portrait of Duffy today, which contains a real humdinger of Mostpeculiaritis:

Their new home was only 150 miles from Nefyn, but it was in an English-speaking area, and as well as adjusting to a new family and new lifestyle, she also had to cope with speaking a new language. She still finds Welsh, with its more limited vocabulary, more relaxing to speak.

‘In Welsh, you can’t misread anyone. The simplicity of the language means you don’t really get any hidden meaning, any inflections in the words or ambiguity. I became more complicated when I started to take on the English language. I’d spoken and thought in Welsh until I was 11. And suddenly I had to shift.

‘It was a blessing in disguise because I now write my songs in English, and I can engage properly and communicate in English.

(It’s also pretty difficult to sell 6½ million copies of a record if you sing in Welsh.)

There’s so much bad journalism on display in the article (“only 150 miles from Nefyn”, eh? so that’d be “at the opposite end of the country”, then?), that I’m going to go out on a limb and give Duffy the benefit of the doubt, assuming that she’s been misquoted, or at least taken out of context. Because that is a really stupid thing to say in a national newspaper.

[Diolch i ifanmj. If you want to know what the Welsh for "bollocks" is, check out his shortened URL.]

David Mitchell on Gaelic

I’m a big fan of the English comedian David Mitchell, which is why I’ve just spent the best part of hour watching his “David Mitchell’s Soapbox” videos on YouTube. All was well, until I reached “David Mitchell shares his views on the Gaelic language” (i.e. it’s a pity it’s dying, but it’s not “the end of the world”), in which he also shares his thoughts on Welsh (might still be worth learning, since there’s apparently still some people in Wales who don’t speak English), and Cornish (completely ridiculous waste of time).

Now, I don’t think for a minute that David Mitchell is “anti-Gaelic”, let alone “anti-Welsh” – he genuinely seems to think that minority languages are a “good thing” and he certainly isn’t crowing with linguistic triumphalism or anything stupid and offensive like that. But I still think he’s wrong, and it’s sad to see someone who is obviously intelligent and of good faith trot out such cliches as “language is fundamentally a tool of communication” and “languages die as a result of natural selection” as if he’s just worked that out and is rather pleased with himself for having done so.

He approaches the truth of the matter when he talks about Cornish “dying” – what actually died, if not on the operating table, was the last native speaker of Cornish. A person. A human being. There was nothing “natural” about the chain of events that led to Cornish falling into disuse. Economic and social pressures of the type that lead to language shift are not the same as the environmental pressures exerted on plant and animal species which can lead to extinction or the emergence of new species. Of course, there is an argument to be made that learning English in 18th century Cornwall, 19th century Scotland or 20th century Wales, may have led to a decreased likelihood of starvation amongst the indigenous population, but I don’t feel that Mitchell has that in mind, since that would imply that there were agents abroad exerting those pressures, rather than the peasants deciding to switch to English because it has words for “deep-freeze” and “overdraft”.

As is unfortunately common with the liberal, Guardian-reader variety of mostpeculiaritis, what is at work here is a simple case of cultural myopia. Mitchell assumes that cultural nationalism is behind efforts to “artificially” sustain endangered languages by throwing “public” money at them, without seeing the beam in his own eye; centuries of cultural nationalism of a far more pervasive variety is also behind the ongoing language shift towards English throughout the Celtic fringe. The extent to which that shift has been slowed (it hasn’t been reversed anywhere except perhaps in Cornwall and the Isle of Man) is proportional to the extent to which the uppity natives have been prepared to make a fuss about their right to exist as an ethnolinguistic group, or if you prefer, as a “people”. Mitchell doesn’t recognise English cultural nationalism as it is the water in which he swims. And as David Foster Wallace‘s young fish would say: what the hell is water?

The fact that it is more difficult to live life as a Cymro Cymraeg within what is now an entirely bilingual, or even monoglot English, Cymru, doesn’t mean that Welsh is somehow less suited for communication than is English, simply that English is a cultural and economic juggernaut that dominates the landscape wherever it rolls, and it’s been rolling around these welcoming hillsides for longer than it’s been rolling anywhere else. This is no more a case of “natural selection” than the proposed badger cull in Pembrokeshire, or indeed the Highland Clearances. Languages are not subject to Darwinian natural selection because they are human artifacts, not species of living organisms. If you really want to get all socially Darwinian on our asses, what is becoming extinct are Gaelic speakers, and what they are being replaced by is English speakers. Yes, I know those two entities are members of the same species, and might even be the same individual organisms, but it’s your sloppy analogy, not mine.

Like I said, Mitchell doesn’t (quite) include Welsh in his list of languages which should be mourned quietly as they pass inexorably into that good night. The fact that there are still half a million Welsh speakers seems to let us off the hook, though I wonder what he’d say if he realised that some of us had “learned the language from scratch” (e.g. me, more or less) and that some had even done so with the express intention of bringing up our children as Welsh speakers (not me, but a good proportion of my students). And that beyond a vague wish to be bilingual, and to increase our chances in the job market, or possibly help our kids with their homework, the simplest response to the question “why did you learn Welsh?” is that it’s the right thing to do. If you’re a person who cares at all about human culture (which Mitchell obviously does, as does Mark Lawson, come to that) then it behoves you to care about all cultures and to recognise that your own specific culture is not the only water in the pond. When a culture is in danger of dying, being wiped out, “extinction”, or whatever, it is not enough to stroke the spines of our dictionaries and fondly reminisce; if something’s dying, a bit of raging is in order.

Hence the above, I suppose.

Puns for the ignorant

This definitely falls into Princess-and-the-Pea territory, but it bugs me whenever I see things like this (from the new Sight and Sound, August 2010):

See what they did there? Gruff Rhys looks a bit like a Power Ranger, and he’s from Wales, therefore he’s a “Powys Ranger”.

Exept Gruff Rhys isn’t from Powys. He was born in Pembrokeshire, brought up in Gwynedd, and as far as I know, lives in Cardiff. (Actually I don’t know that, and if it turns out that he lives in Builth Wells or something, I’m going to feel pretty stupid.)

So, a pun predicated on ignorance of Welsh geography/pop singer biography. Well done, Sight and Sound.

Like I said, it’s trivial, and harmless as far as it goes, but the review itself, of Dylan Goch’s Separado!, was excellent, and actually brings up the general ignorance of Welsh cultural history amongst “anyone outside of Wales”. So, it bugs me. I was bugged to such an extent, after reading this in the bathroom at 5 o’clock this morning, that I was unable to get back to sleep and started obsessively trying to think of examples of “puns” that you’ll never see in Sight and Sound, most of which seemed to involve Christopher Eccleston and Yorkshire pudding and none of which was very funny.

My point being, that a pun involving Chris Eccleston and Yorkshire pudding would only make sense if the reader didn’t know that Eccleston comes from Salford, or perhaps didn’t know that Salford isn’t in Yorkshire, or, maybe, just maybe, knew both of these facts but was capable of ignoring them for the sake of enjoying some punful revelry.

But that would be stupid, wouldn’t it?

“A nation mocked too much”

In the interest of BBC-style “balance”, here’s a positive New Statesman article from 2001, which makes many good points, including the one I’ve highlighted below.

There is no doubt that the impossible strangeness of the Welsh language is what most upsets the English. I’ve asked dozens of English people to explain why they don’t like Wales and the response invariably includes a story about finding yourself in a shop or pub, and faced with people speaking Welsh.

If the same thing happens in Italy or France we, the English, don’t mind. It’s because we know the Welsh can speak English, and, secretly, because we think they’re in our country, that we take use of the language as an act of gratuitous hostility. The colonial master is not amused. This is precisely the thoughtless, gut reaction that the English must put behind them, if they are to shape up to questions about their own and other national and community identities.

Lawson and the Lingo, previously

I missed this at the time, but from the comments on the Guardian article in the previous post, comes a link to a discussion between Mark Lawson and John McGrath, the Director of National Theatre Wales. Now here is a man with his finger on the pulse of Wales.

(My emphasis in the following quotes.)

LAWSON: But far more than it arises perhaps in Scotland, you have the language question, which is whether the plays should be performed in English or in Welsh how have you resolved that one?

MCGRATH: Well we’ve come up with a canny solution for that in Wales, which is to create two theatre companies, National Theatre Wales and Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru. Theatr Genedlaethol has been going for a few years now, so that’s really opened a space up for an English language theatre.

LAWSON: So all your plays will be performed in English?

MCGRATH: They’ll be performed in English but more important than that they’ll be performed in theatre.

LAWSON: I understand but we know that this is a big political issue in Wales. You are confident that you won’t have people standing outside the theatre with placards which many of your actors and writers won’t be able to read, protesting about the fact that it’s all in English?

MCGRATH: There’s been absolutely nothing but enthusiasm for the project in Wales and the Welsh speaking community’s been a huge part of the support. It’s an issue I think for people in England, it’s not an issue for people in Wales. Here we’re talking about a very confident country that has increasingly got its own government and wants to speak to the world.

Mark Lawson has recently been interviewed for the role of Controller of Radio 4. I wonder if a drama like Pleidiol Wyf i’m Gwlad would have been made under a Controller who seems to think all Welsh speakers are unstable nutters.