if you cannot speak Welsh,do you have the right to call yourself Welsh?
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at
3:40 pm
I don't know any Welsh people who don't speak it,and found it shocking when i travelled down to the southern part of Wales and heard hardly any spoken.....can you imagine being English/French/German and going to a part of England/France/Germany and found out they couldn't speak their own language....very strange indeed.
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Tagged with: england • english french • france germany • french german • wales • welsh
Filed under: Written and Spoken Welsh
Only 21.7% of the population of Wales is able to speak Welsh. It is part of Great Britain and they speak English.
Do Americans speak Native Indian languages?
Probably a Welsher.
yes. plenty of people come from ancestries that do not carry on traditions like language.
ex.
My mom is Filipina but can’t speak a word of Tagalog
So if I am able to speak English/Geman/French then I’m allowed to call myself a English/German/French person. My country has 11 official languages and I obviously can’t speak all of them but that doesn’t stop me from being South African? I heard Welsh was really hard, I wish I could speak it though! Have a nice day!
I am not sure that ability (or otherwise) to speak a language has anything to do with it – I CAN speak Welsh but, being English, would never dream of referring to myself as Welsh.
You must count yourself fortunate that you grew up in a part of Wales where it was utterly natural to speak Welsh in all areas of your life. As you will have worked out for yourself, if you start life in an area of Wales where not much Welsh is spoken, you will have to make quite an effort to acquire the language and even then you might not have complete confidence in expressing yourself in your mother tongue. It seems harsh, therefore, to strip such a person of his right to call himself Welsh, when his lack of knowlege of the language is not attributable to him so much as his circumstances. If you were to go to Scotland you would have to travel to its furthest extremities before encountering people who spoke Gaelic as their mother tongue. Are you suggesting that the vast majority of Scots should consider themselves barred from describing themselves as such? History has a lot to answer for, as this link will show. http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/language/pages/education.shtml
Mae’n anodd iawn i bobl y de deall acen y Gogledd ac ambell waith mae’n hawddach siarad Saesneg yn eich cwmni.