Wales main langy9/19/2023 ![]() ![]() Deindustrialisation in the 1980s robbed the south Wales working class of their identity, based on coal, iron and steel. Bowen grew up in an industrial south Wales – English-speaking, male-dominated, culturally monolithic – that no longer exists, and he seems to some extent to be in mourning for that lost communitarian world. Such views are, however, either outdated or exaggerated. At present, only a fifth of the population speaks Welsh regularly. Meades is more concerned with what he calls a “totalitarian project” to create a million Welsh speakers (a third of the population) by 2050. Nothing else can explain this bilge.”īowen’s argument is that because bilingualism has become essential for many jobs in Welsh government and media, the English-speaking majority has been disadvantaged and marginalised. “But in pockets of Snowdonia and mid-Wales it is a tool not only of communication but of identity and exclusivity, thus of self-harm and curtailment.” To which Edwards curtly responded: “Meades is a brilliant writer and I have enjoyed his work over many years. “So long as it’s a hobby language it is as harmless as a Sunday painter,” wrote Meades. Fellow BBC journalist and evangelical Welsh speaker Huw Edwards echoed that criticism: “We are all products of upbringing – this take is 1970s Cardiff.” Edwards was even ruder about a parallel attack on Welsh, headlined “Tacsi for a moribund language”, by Jonathan Meades in the current issue of The Critic. The Welsh online media has suggested this is the view from Camberwell, where Bowen lives, rather than Criccieth – a journalist’s whistlestop tour of a country he last resided in more than 40 years ago. This argument has not gone down well in the land of his fathers. Bowen, born in Cardiff but domiciled in England and a non-Welsh speaker, did that most dangerous thing – he attacked what he saw as the way the Welsh-speaking minority in Wales dominates the cultural conversation. But his recent assignment – a three-part series on Radio 4 in which he made “a personal journey through Wales”, the country of his birth – must still have left him a little shellshocked. He is no stranger to division and disputation. B BC foreign correspondent Jeremy Bowen has spent almost three decades reporting on the Middle East. ![]()
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