I came to Wales with an open mind on the issue of state support for the Welsh language. It is now closed shut.
Wales, 1998: I stood amazed in the playground of my daughter's school. (Pretty little school, surrounded by woods and meadows, in a popular tourist destination near Cardigan.) Had I heard correctly? "We don't teach your child any English until she's seven years old." My four-year-old daughter (already fluent in English and Japanese) had been bringing back a series of Welsh-language reading primers for study at home, but nothing in English. In the absence of any other information about what she was learning there, I had gone to the school to ask my daughter's teacher why she not was being taught any English.
In 1992, I had moved to the west coast of Wales from Japan, where I had spent 13 years teaching English. Japan is a narrowly monolingual country and I had become increasingly exasperated by my Japanese neighbours asking me whether it was a "good thing" for my children to be absorbing one language at home and learning another at school. Wouldn't they become confused and lose their identity? From Japan, west Wales looked like a good choice: all the population speaks English, but about half are bilingual. My family wouldn't be regarded as "exotic" for speaking three languages; I had assumed we would be among friends.
Until then, I had viewed cultural independence movements somewhere on the scale between indifference and approval. After all, isn't diversity a good thing? But my views on the Welsh language first began to shift when the local comprehensive my son attended suddenly abandoned separate streams for English and Welsh, and broke into three streams with high, medium and low Welsh content. At the explanatory meeting, we were not even told whether parents had the final say in which stream their children were placed: I had to press a very reluctant headmaster for a clear answer.
The headmaster clearly regarded me as an unhelpful trouble-maker. None the less, I decided to question him in a long and futile interview. No parents had been asked whether they approved of the change. Why not arrange an informal secret ballot to reveal majority opinion? Not necessary, said the headmaster. By sending their children to the school (the only secondary school in the town), parents were showing their approval. I showed my disapproval by withdrawing my son from the school. Less affluent parents, lacking the time and money to drive to the school in the next town-the last port in this storm-do not have that choice.
According to the last Welsh Office survey, 13 per cent of the population of Wales say they are fluent in Welsh, but 62 per cent claim no knowledge of the language at all. Welsh Language Board figures indicate that there is widespread support throughout Wales (71 per cent) for using the Welsh language. This seems impressive, but it may not be as conclusive as it sounds. There is probably 100 per cent support for the free availability of tomatoes, but this is not a mandate for legislation requiring tomatoes to be served (and eaten) at every school meal.
Compulsion is the problem, and compulsion creates collateral damage. Take the quality of teachers, for example. Teachers charged with the task of reintroducing Welsh naturally have to be Welsh speakers. This means that they come from a very small pool of talent: the 300,000 adults in Wales who are fluent Welsh speakers, rather than the 35m or so English-speaking adults in the rest of the Union, not to mention the billions of other English speakers worldwide. This is a wonderful protected-work scheme for Welsh-speaking teachers, who have just seen 99 per cent of the competition removed.
Freedom of choice, the right to education in one's mother tongue, and tolerance for cultural variety have been the first victims of the Welsh language crusade. Ironically, these are the exact arguments used by the language lobby to justify state support for teaching Welsh.
I want my children to receive a liberal education, like mine, which gave me a passport to the rest of the world. The Welsh language deserves to survive in some form-but not at the expense of democracy and freedom of choice. The ultimate aims of the reintroduction of the Welsh language have remained suspiciously vague. If I worked for the British government in Wales, I would be especially worried. In certain parts of Wales, where anti-English feeling has been incubating for centuries, the boot is now on the other foot. With a mixture of intimidation and sleight of hand, a new cultural order is being imposed.n
