Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

102 Language Planning and Education
has ‘legitimised the status of Welsh in society’, and its success now serves as an
‘additional marker of Welsh (national) distinctiveness’.
Thus far, the tone of the last two subsections has been upbeat, so it may be
appropriate to qualify this picture with a conclusion summarising the challenges that
still confront the revitalisation project. Perhaps the most serious of these is the
ongoing contraction of the Welsh native-speaking heartland, and the ageing of its
inhabitants. It is true that the shortfall in family transmission of the language is partly
compensated by increased school-based language production, but it is unclear
whether these Welsh learners, many of whom are L2 speakers, will keep using the
language throughout their lifetime, and still less clear whether they will in due course
transmit it to the next generation. The question has particular pertinence for the new
generation of young speakers in south-east Wales, for here a substantially anglicised
urban environment makes it that bit more difficult to resist the perception that
Welsh is principally a language of the school.
A second area of concern is the extent to which census figures reflect language
acquisition. On the surface, certainly, they show a rise in the numbers of those able
to speak Welsh, but a slightly different picture emerges if one examines the fluency
levels of these speakers. Aitchison and Carter (2000: 141), for example, report
headteachers’ assessments from 1996/97, showing that, despite curriculum exposure,
around 55 per cent of primary pupils had limited or no fluency in Welsh, and 30 per
cent partial fluency. On the more positive side, by 1998/9 around 16 per cent of
primary pupils spoke Welsh fluently, up from 13.1 per cent in 1986/87 (Williams
2001: 77).
A related issue is the variety of Welsh spoken by immersion learners attending
Welsh-medium schools in the strongly anglicised areas of South Wales. Here, there
are limited opportunities for practising Welsh outside school or for native-speaker
monitoring, and a consequence, Jones (1998a: 258) argues, is that learners emerge
speaking a ‘school dialect’ characterised by an absence of idiomatic constructions
and a proportion of historically inappropriate forms, all of which adds weight to
Fishman’s (1991) key point that educational institutions cannot bear the entire
burden of revitalisation. They need to be supported by, and linked to, a familycommunity
base.
4.3.2.3 Concluding remarks on the future of Welsh revitalisation
Turning for a moment, finally, to status matters, it might be argued that the establishment
in 1999 of a National Assembly pledged to treating English and Welsh
on the basis of equality signals a further advance in the reincorporation of Welsh
into the civic realm. There are some, however, who see this new level of political
autonomy as an insidious, long-term threat to the language, because, in so far as it
enhances the vitality of civic Welsh institutions – an assembly, university, national
museum, opera, and so on, it also creates an option for these to become over time a
new locus for the expression of Welsh identity, relegating language to a secondary,