Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Minority languages and language revitalisation 99
work to persuade private businesses to use Welsh in their communications with
Welsh speakers.
There are limitations, however, both in the reach of the 1993 Act and in the remit
of the Welsh Language Board, that have displeased activists. The Act, for example,
stops short of conferring official language status on Welsh; private businesses are not
bound to its central provisions on language equality; and the Board has powers to
‘recommend’ but not to compel compliance with its demands (Williams and Morris
2000).
That said, many commentators have seen the 1993 Act and the establishment
of a statutory Welsh Language Board as significant institutional developments –
boosting the status of Welsh, furthering its use in the public sector and signalling an
advance towards a bilingual Wales. As Jones (1998a: 17) remarks, with its present
degree of institutional support and its more positive image, Welsh has departed from
the typical path of decline and obsolescence: it is now in some respects, as we see
below, an expanding language.
4.3.2.2 Language acquisition planning
Given the importance of school as an agency for language socialisation and
acquisition, it is unsurprising that Welsh-medium education has engaged so much
of the energies of those working for Welsh revitalisation. Their efforts have been
rewarded in that, over the sixty-five years since the opening of the first bilingual
Welsh school in Aberystwyth in 1939, there has been a remarkable expansion in
bilingual and Welsh-medium schooling, contributing to the recent rise in the
number of Welsh speakers detected by the 2001 census (see above), and to the
perception that bilingual education is a central pillar of the current Welsh revival.
The extent of this expansion is indicated in Tables 4.3 and 4.4, which show the
numbers of primary and secondary pupils respectively studying through Welsh or
studying Welsh as a second language. For purposes of comparison, the figures from
1992/93 are set alongside the most recent statistics for 2001/2002.
One of the more interesting features of these tables, apart from the impressive
numbers studying Welsh or through Welsh, is the sharp fall over the last decade in
the numbers of pupils not taught Welsh. This reflects the transforming effect on
Welsh language education of the 1988 Education Act, which for the first time gave
the teaching of Welsh a statutory basis, and under whose provisions Welsh became
a core, hence compulsory, curricular subject in Welsh-medium schools and a
foundation subject in all other schools throughout Key Stages 1–4. The effect has
been to extend teaching of the language into the anglicised areas of the south and
north-east.
Meanwhile, an increasing proportion of those entering Welsh-medium education
come from English-speaking homes, up to 58 per cent according to May (1999:
162), and even higher in some of the more intensely anglicised areas (Jones 1998a);
a situation reflecting the reputation for high-quality education enjoyed by Welsh
bilingual schools (see Baker 1993: 23), the improved status of the language and