Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Minority languages and language revitalisation 89
societies, it is perhaps tempting to view this extension of literacy as signalling
something of a Welsh renaissance, but Aitchison and Carter’s (2000: 31) assessment
is more sober, and probably more realistic:
The movements of the eighteenth century deepened and extended the domains in
which Welsh was already used, and it conserved the language because of that; but
it did not extend the domains and that was to be crucial in the next century.
One circumstance particularly unfavourable to the Welsh language was its exclusion
from formal education for most of the nineteenth century, a situation formalised in
the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which completely ignored the language.
Only at the end of the century in limited ways did Welsh teaching reappear in
schools, but by then a process of domain exclusion (from education, law, government
and science), the anglicisation of the upper strata of society, and episodes such as the
1847 Education Report, known thereafter as the Treason of the Blue Books, had combined
to undermine confidence in the relevance of the Welsh language to progress
and modernity, leaving it, despite its apparent demographic strength, ill-equipped to
resist the dislocation the twentieth century would bring.
Inward migration into Wales
For most commentators, the key factor in the decline of Welsh in the first half of the
twentieth century is the industrialisation of Wales, a process already underway in the
nineteenth century but whose effects on the language did not become apparent until
considerably later. One of the early effects was migration from North to South Wales:
in the period 1861–1911, for instance, no less than 160,000 people migrated to
Glamorgan from other Welsh counties (Price 1984: 116). It might be thought that
this internal migration, with its depopulating effect on the rural Welsh-speaking
areas of the north, would have been highly detrimental (and it can hardly have been
helpful), but there are some (e.g. Brindley Thomas 1987) who argue that the
population redistribution increased the urban presence of the language, and that,
had Wales remained largely agricultural and rural, like Ireland or northern Scotland,
many, many more people would have emigrated and been lost to the language.
Whether or not this thesis is correct, there is little doubt that a second wave of
industrialisation centred on the South Wales coalfields in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries had a dramatic anglicising effect, in as much as it produced
high levels of in-migration from England and Ireland. Jones, R. (1993: 546) reports,
for example, that in the years 1871–81, 57 per cent of incomers into Glamorgan
came from England. The overall effect, in combination with the ensuing urbanisation,
was to increase contact between Welsh and English speakers, to dilute the
demographic concentration of the former and to extend a bilingual zone in which
English speakers remained monoglot and Welsh speakers became bilingual. This, of
course, was bilingualism in one direction, and it prepared the ground for subsequent
language shift.
Other influential accompaniments of industrialisation should be mentioned here
as well. First among these was the advent of new railway systems, ending the relative