Next week, Cymdeithas yr Iaith will publish its new vision ahead of the 2021 Senedd election. The group’s national chair, Bethan Ruth, sets out the vision.
It is five years since Cymdeithas yr Iaith published our vision ‘A million Welsh speakers’, and three years since the Welsh Government published its strategy for reaching that target.
There were three aims to Cymdeithas yr Iaith’s vision of a million Welsh speakers that was published in 2015, which were to ask the parties to commit to the following:
Increase the number of Welsh speakers to one million
Stem out-migration and sustain communities while ensuring pathways to bring Welsh speakers back to their communities
Use the Welsh language in all walks of life to ensure it is the natural language from cradle to grave
Since devolution, several Welsh language strategies have been published by successive Welsh Governments, each of them laudable enough, but they have subsequently been forgotten ‒ left on the shelf, not to be discussed again.
On the whole, the story of these devolved policies and strategies has been one of failure. A combination of factors is responsible for this failure, including the rampant neoliberalism that is accepted almost without question in our public discourse. Another is the fact that the Welsh language has been treated as an exception to the norm of administration and public life in Wales; as a marginal, symbolic language only, to be treated tokenistically.
You don’t need to look much further than the discussions in our Senedd to see and hear clearly that our public life is one that is conducted almost entirely in English alone. A Senedd where you often hear some argue that Welsh is not an inclusive language, and indeed that it excludes.
Without a doubt, now is the time to challenge this dangerous misapprehension, and we must do so urgently.
Over the past few months, Cymdeithas yr Iaith has been consulting with people from all over Wales on their views on the position of the Welsh language, and the language strategies of the Government and public authorities. Many of the people we have consulted over the past few months have expressed a desire for the next Government to focus on delivering a million speakers: an objective that has gained consensus across political parties and civic society.
After three years of aiming as a country towards this goal, there is a consensus that the actions of the current national Government and other authorities are not sufficient to achieve it. There is a danger therefore that we will repeat the history of previous language strategies of promising a lot but not being able to deliver, despite the strong public support.
Normalise
Cymdeithas yr Iaith’s new vision, ‘Mwy na miliwn ‒ Dinasyddiaeth Gymraeg i bawb’ (More than a million ‒ Welsh language citizenship for all), which will be launched in an online discussion on Monday July 27, is an attempt to analyse and build upon the consensus, by highlighting opportunities to go further and faster, by deepening and extending the original vision.
Looking forward, Cymdeithas is fully confident that, if the next Government is prepared to follow the right steps, a target of one million speakers will be reached, by 2050 at the latest.
As we are confident that the next Welsh Government can take the right steps to reach one million speakers, we believe that the Government should introduce the ‘mwy na miliwn / more than a million’ agenda in order to normalise Welsh as the language of our nation in all aspects of life.
The ‘mwy na miliwn’ agenda does not refer primarily to the target of creating more than a million speakers (although this will need to be a focus too) but rather on deepening the agenda by focusing on the everyday use of the Welsh language in our communities, workplaces and public services, and extending the Welsh language to everyone, not just the lucky few.
In our consultation work, many people have referred to the barriers that some groups face in accessing the language — including geographical, economic, information or social class barriers. This is what leads us to also call for ‘dinasyddiaeth Gymraeg i bawb’, Welsh language citizenship for all, to ensure that everyone, without exception, is able to learn, experience and use the Welsh language in a meaningful way in their everyday lives.
From the refugee who’s just arrived in our country, to the long-established Eastern European community and the cleaner at a Welsh-medium school, the structures and policies are not in place to ensure that everyone has meaningful access to learning, enjoying and using our national language. This pattern is a matter of social injustice that must be tackled ‒ Welsh language citizenship needs to be extended to everyone who sees Wales as their home, not just some of us.
In the post-Covid era, with the failure of the current economic system and the growth of the extreme right, now is a more important time than ever to engage people from all backgrounds in the Welsh language ‒ with the language as a tool for solidarity against increasingly reactionary politics.
Undermining
The other side of this coin is a lack of maintaining, supporting and creating Welsh language-only spaces; all too often, it is said that Welsh is not an inclusive language. And so Welsh speakers and non-Welsh speakers alike are under the impression that maintaining spaces ‒ from geographical communities, to workplaces to events ‒ in Welsh only is unacceptable.
Ensuring genuine access to the Welsh language for all is therefore essential as part of increasing the number of spaces where Welsh is the ordinary medium of communication.
The Government is not only failing to support efforts to create and maintain monolingual Welsh spaces, in many areas it intentionally and unintentionally undermines them ‒ from the lack of rights for support staff in Welsh-medium schools to have time and resources to learn Welsh, to the attempt to persuade the National Library to not specify Welsh as an essential skill for the National Librarian, when it is one of the far too few institutions whose internal administration is in Welsh.
There is no real recognition from politicians and public organisations of the huge qualitative difference that monolingual Welsh spaces make in increasing the use of the language, normalising it and creating confident Welsh speakers.
This attitude extends to the apathy we see towards the fragile condition of some of our communities where a large proportion speak Welsh and use it in their daily lives. There is no meaningful recognition of the value of Welsh as the main language of everyday life, nor are there the socio-economic measures in place to tackle the structural problems which drive the out-migration of young people, the decline of local economies and the loss of community assets.
By focusing on the ‘more than a million ‒ Welsh language citizenship for all’ agenda outlined in our new vision for the next Welsh Government, the Welsh language can become the language of everyday life for everyone in our country, from every background.
With the next election coming after twenty years of devolution, it is high time to demonstrate how self-government can make a real difference.
Embracing and embedding Welsh language citizenship for all would go a long way towards building the Wales we want to see: a country where every one of us, and every community, stands on a firm foundation for a sustainable and just future, with the Welsh language at its heart.
Cymdeithas yr Iaith will be launching their vision ‘Mwy na miliwn ‒ dinasyddiaeth Gymraeg i bawb’ Monday the 27th of July at 6:30pm in an online event. Details here.