Wales rightly can get passionate about rugby football and the welsh language. The world's languages are disappearing at the rate of one a fortnight.
The National Assembly Commission which runs the National Assembly has been warned it could face legal action if it abandons written translations of debates from English into Welsh.
The recommendation by an independent panel that a fully-translated record of proceedings should no longer be published yesterday has promoted debate. In view of public expenditure cuts this is sensible but surely there are bigger issues like the activities of S4C and preservation of its budget.
I will be interviewed tomorrow on BBC Wales as to my views on whether business should embrace the welsh language. The answer is simple business will do it if it benefits customers and the company and those they serve from a community responsibility perspective. Businesses will adopt the language of their employees and customers.Over regulation will not win the day in this regard.
The late Kenneth Hale, who taught linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), put the issue of language more passionately: “When you lose a language, you lose a culture, intellectual wealth, a work of art. It's like dropping a bomb on a museum.”
At present the world has about 6,800 distinct languages (and many more dialects), according to Ethnologue, a database maintained by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Dallas. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.Worse, probably 3,000 or so others are also endangered. Linguists classify languages on a scale ranging from “safe” (learnt by all children in the group, and spoken by all its members) to “critically endangered” (only a few old speakers). On that scale, “endangered” comes in the middle, meaning that children no longer learn the language and only adults speak it.
At the last count, 575,730 individuals could speak Welsh, some 20.5% of the total population of Wales. Between 1991 and 2001 there was an increase in the number of Welsh speakers in 14 of the 22 counties with a significant rise amongst schoolchildren.
It is nonsense for some to say the Assembly does not promote the language when it does. But what is more critical is the budget of S4C being cut. S4C's budget is set each November, adjusted upwards for the retail price index, and paid annually as a grant through the Westminster Department for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport.
The broadcaster's current grant is worth £100m annually, and it receives a further £25m subsidy, in the form of programming supplied by BBC Wales, including Welsh language news and Pobol-y-Cwm, the long running daily soap. The Welsh Assembly does not have devolved powers over broadcasting, but S4C's contribution to the nation's creative economy is up for debate. The funding formula has been set since S4C was founded in 1982 and is protected by statute.
S4C faced criticism after the Western Mail published ratings data revealing that only 20% of its programmers attracted more than 10,000 viewers over a three-week period in February and March.
Concentrate on the big picture.
The demise of any language is a loss for all mankind, but most of all a loss for its speakers. As one Navajo elder told his grandson:
“If you don't breathe,
There is no air.
If you don't walk,
There is no earth.
If you don't speak,
There is no world.”
Sources
Endangered languages
Babel runs backwards Dec 29th 2004
From The Economist print edition
http://www.clta-gny.org/article/endangered_language.html
Proposed Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2010
Government Proposed Measure – Introduced by Minister for Heritage
The Proposed Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2010 is intended to modernise the existing legal framework largely governed by the Welsh Language Act 1993 regarding the use of the Welsh language in the delivery of public services.
S4C braced for cuts to £100m grant
Welsh-language broadcaster's chairman admits it needs to change its output and expand online activities
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/20/s4c-cutbacks