Cosa ci fanno il gallese in modo diverso?
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di Scribbles2021
Cosa ci fanno il gallese in modo diverso?
https://i.redd.it/tw91o62ru95f1.jpeg
di Scribbles2021
22 commenti
They speak Welsh.
The Welsh kept their language, the Irish their faith as the quote goes. The funny answer is protestantism.
Wales never lost the language as much as we did, and part of that is down to a literate tradition partly thanks to having protestant/christian texts in Welsh.
There’s other reasons of course. But that’s one.
Welsh never declined to the degree that Irish declined. It is much easier to revive a language the less it declines in the first place.
Cultural identity. Apart from language, Wales doesn’t really have any strong cultural differences from England which differentiate them from the empirical capital. Even the accent isn’t too dissimilar in many parts of Wales, including Cardiff. Ireland and Scotland have a lot of other cultures and traditions which make them feel unique.
You don’t need to be able to speak Irish to feel Irish or identify as Irish. I doubt the Irish language is even in the top ten aspects of the culture that most people internationally associate with Ireland, whereas Wales has the red dragon and famously long words and place names.
I’d say the Irish language needs a proper “face”. Something that incentivises young people to use it.
They speak the language daily, it seems quite obvious 🤣
An bhfuill cead agam
The level of speakers never fell as much as Irish, quite simple really. I mean, it’s not even like it’s growing – the 2021 census showed the lowest proportion of Welsh speakers in history.
Reviving a language that’s fallen out of use is next to impossible, I’d say actually 100% impossible in the modern era. Hebrew could be in Israel because of the particular circumstances, but there’s absolutely nothing that could drive a major return to Irish use for this country.
add on to what others said, the way it’s taught in schools turns a lot of people off learning it more too. If they made learning it fun and interesting, more would speak it
Very different history.
I’ll just paste this old comment by u/scubasteve254 as he sums it up better than I could have:
(*edit:* reddit seems intent on deleting anything I put into a quote block, so here it is in old-fashioned quotation marks!)
“In the nineteenth century Irish was the language of a destitute rural poor and it became easy to associate the language and poverty. The penal laws which discriminated against Irish speakers had a lot to answer for that. At the same time, Welsh was spoken by a literate emerging middle class benefiting from the industrial revolution.
At the turn of the 20th Century, Welsh had receded somewhat but was still spoken by half the population of Wales. It had a stable heartland, in part because rural areas of wales remained economically stable up until de-industrialisation in the 70s and 80s. It was never really killed off like Irish was from colonialism. The treatment of Wales and Ireland and especially their languages was never equal either. David Lloyd George who was PM spoke Welsh in Westminster without a problem. The last time someone tried to speak Irish in Westminster (Thomas O’Donnell), he was ordered to stop speaking it.”
Being honest the vast majority of people in this country either don’t care about, or actively resent the Irish language.
Welsh language was always in a better state than Irish in modern times. I believe that last time this came up someone posted that even early 1900’s there was more Welsh native speakers than Irish.
The Welsh government also gives a fuck and have brought in a lot of stuff over the years to help revive the language. They have Adult Language schools based off the system the Israelies used to help revive Hebrew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wlpan
A big issue here is how it’s taught in schools.
It isn’t taught like a living language, but more like an academic exercise, particularly at higher level.
This is being revised in the Leaving Cert curriculum to be more inline with how other European languages are taught (with an emphasis on speaking and practical use) so should improve (at least within the school system) when that rolls out.
But it’s not a solution in and of itself, more a step in the right direction.
I think people need to find a reason that will motivate them to put effort into learning the language. In school, I didn’t see the value in it, and I was unfortunate with Irish teachers and their teaching styles. They were borderline bullies and made me feel stupid and so I gave up. I regret not fighting harder for it. I now speak another language fairly fluently and can barely say a thing in Irish. It doesn’t feel great.
Grew up in Wales.
The main reason is that welsh was never subjected to the same sort of pressure the Irish language was.
There’s the famous welsh not where English medium schools were set up and kids who spoke welsh had to wear a dunce style wooden necklace to punish them for speaking welsh. The thing about this is that this wasn’t an English policy. It was set up by welsh councils and schools to boost English speaking as it was seen as a way to develop economically. It wasn’t an external law or power banning welsh in schools, it was local welsh disastrous decisions. That isn’t to ignore that that decision was made because wales was intwined with England is was part of the kingdom of England for centuries and so wasn’t able to develop its own institutions.
There’s the treachery of the blue books and medieval laws saying English had to be used in court. But the main reason it stuck around more than other languages is it wasn’t subjected to the same sort of pressure as Breton, Irish or Scottish Gaelic.
Welsh is famously easy to learn.
As an adult learning Welsh and trying to learn Irish the difference is stark.
Wales has a nation-wide accredited curriculum for learning Welsh as an adult, it’s standardised, has excellent resources, funded tutors and is accessible world-wide with online and face-to-face options. It’s also incredibly reasonably priced. Around £50 a year after discounts or free for certain age groups and professions.
Irish has… well… fuck all that compares in any meaningful way… It is blatantly obvious that the Irish government don’t give a fuck about the language, if they did they’d put a tiny % of the massive budget surplus towards actually resourcing the language as a cultural beacon and meaningfully increasing usage by setting targets and requiring usage / bilingualism.
Welsh government had the easier job – more of a base to start with – but they’ve also worked fucking hard to increase the numbers – yes the proportion is down but raw numbers are up – significantly. It’s just being outpaced by population growth.
Speaking Welsh by the looks of it.
I think it likely comes down to the fact the expressions of Welsh identity are often very heavily linked to language. Expressions of Irish identity are far more obviously geographically defined and multifaceted.
Wales didn’t lose it as deeply as Ireland and Scotland both did, but also they revived it in a far more modern era of teaching than Ireland did.
When native speakers are largely gone and the contexts it was spoken in have faded, unfortunately languages tend to die as you’re being taught by people who are speaking a second language and the further you remove it from where it is actively and naturally spoken the worse it gets.
I know many of my primary teachers clearly had fairly basic grasp of Irish and often it was basically English though the medium of Irish — a lot of bad phonetics and direct translation.
I went to primary school in Wales and Welsh was not compulsory once you were about 13/14
What is Brittany doing?
The way it’s taught in schools has been actively killing the language for the past few decades. It’s not possible to teach a language primarily through literature.
From what I’ve been told, the aul ones who decide the curriculum don’t want to change this.
To be fair 14% of the Welsh population is probably like 6 people