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Minority languages and language revitalisation 87 More useful, perhaps, as a guide to action are Crystal’s ( 2000: 130–42) six propositions (or factors), presented below by way of conclusion to this section: 1. An endangered language will progress if its speakers increase their prestige within the dominant community. 2. An endangered language will progress if its speakers increase their wealth relative to the dominant community. 3. An endangered language will progress if its speakers increase their legitimate power in the eyes of the dominant community. 4. An endangered language will progress if its speakers have a strong presence in the educational system. 5. An endangered language will progress if its speakers can write their language down. 6. An endangered language will make progress if its speakers can make use of electronic technology. 7 All the factors above, save perhaps the sixth, are likely to be familiar to readers of Fishman (1991, 2001) or Giles et al. (1977), but they nonetheless constitute a useful list because they reaffirm, and highlight, the central roles of prestige, power, economic incentives, education and institutional recognition in language revitalisation. 4.3 LANGUAGE PLANNING AND LANGUAGE REVITALISATION: A CASE STUDY OF WELSH AND BRETON We now move to the main business of this chapter – a comparative case study of Welsh and Breton, covering their decline and contrasting trajectories of revival. Bringing them together in this contrastive fashion may help cast light on some of the factors that affect, and even determine, success or failure in language revitalisation more generally. Our starting point, however, is a historical overview of the slow decline of these two languages. 4.3.1 Welsh and Breton: a historical overview of language decline We turn first to Welsh. 4.3.1.1 Welsh The Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542, joining Wales with England and asserting English as the dominant language of law and governance, are a convenient starting point for an account of the decline of Welsh (Cymraeg), not because 1536 initiates the territorial contraction of Welsh, that having got underway much earlier with the Anglo-Norman invasions of around 1070, but because it marks the onset of the retreat of Welsh from public domains and its progressive inferiorisation relative to English. The Acts are seen as, if not triggering (see Jones, R. 1993), at least hastening
88 Language Planning and Education the steady anglicisation of the Welsh gentry, who had little alternative but to acquire English if they wished to carve out a career in public life. Over time this process produced a linguistic-social correlation: English for the upper-class gentry, Welsh for the mass of the population. A secondary effect of the ousting of Welsh from the public domains of law and administration was a restriction in the register range of the language and, more tellingly, a loss of prestige. Welsh came to be associated with homeliness, rurality, farming and ultimately, by the mid-nineteenth century, economic backwardness. Not every trend from this time was so negative, however. Into the late nineteenth century, Welsh remained the predominant language of the majority of the population, compelling its use in lower level administration. Meanwhile, the monolingual Welsh heartland (y fro Gymraeg) waxed strong, and the language retained a rich, prestigious literary heritage dating back to the medieval prose romances known as Mabinogi (Price 1984), and beyond. William Morgan’s 1588 translation of the Bible, employing a literary form of Welsh deriving from the bardic literature of previous centuries, not only added to this heritage but is seen by many writers (e.g. Jones, R. 1993; Jones, M. 1994, 1998a; Price 1984; Thorne 1994, Barbour 2000c) as an event of critical significance since it helped establish, disseminate and popularise a standard written Welsh, thereby averting the fragmentation of the language into mutually incomprehensible dialects, a fate not entirely avoided by Breton for instance. It also set in train a process of codification culminating in the 1928 publication of the report ‘Orgraff yr Iaith Gymraeg’ (the Orthography of the Welsh Language), which laid down rules and principles for standard written Welsh. As Jones, M. (1994: 245) notes, this is an ‘a-regional’, common core variety arrived at by a standardising process different from the more typical elevation of a prestige dialect, and – perhaps for this very reason – it commanded widespread loyalty. Another positive effect of the Welsh Bible, quite apart its enhancement of the language’s prestige, is that it laid the basis for the use of Welsh in the religious domain, which is widely seen as playing a crucial role in the maintenance of Welsh, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, the Methodist revival of the eighteenth century and the growth of religious nonconformity (i.e. non-Anglican Protestantism) in the nineteenth century provided – through the chapel – not just a Welsh-oriented centre for social life but a formal domain in which Welsh held sway and from which it derived prestige. The use of the language in prayer meetings, Sunday schools, sermons and the like exposed a considerable swathe of the population to relatively formal models of spoken Welsh, and – no less importantly – the churches contributed to the spread of literacy in Welsh, and hence to increased book publication in the language. Particularly remarkable here is the work of Griffith Jones, vicar of Llanddowror, who in the 1730s established a system of ‘circulating schools’ staffed by itinerant teachers. By the time of his death in 1760 these had equipped no less than 160,000 children and adults in 3,325 schools with sufficient literacy to read the Bible in Welsh (Price 1984, Jones, R. 1993). Placed alongside the revival of eisteddfodau, 8 and the growth of Welsh debating
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