Piece Description

By the middle of the 20th century, the Welsh national language (known as Cymraeg, related to Cornish and Breton) appeared to be dying. Everything from road signs to traffic tickets were written in English. Students were punished for speaking Welsh in school, and the mass media flooded the country with English pop culture. Linguists assumed that Welsh would go the way of Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland?the focus of much nationalist rhetoric, but spoken on a daily basis only in the poorest and most isolated areas. Today the revival of Welsh is shaping up to be one of the world's most impressive linguistic success stories. Census figures show, for the first time, an increase in Welsh speakers both in real numbers and as a percentage of the population. The rise is especially marked among the young, and in traditionally English-speaking areas in the south and east. "We can now say, hand on heart, that the language is in the ownership of people throughout Wales," says John Walter Jones, former director of the Welsh Language Board. "It is not something that is being ghettoized and left in a corner. It is there throughout society." But relearning a language is never easy. In this unnarrated feature, we spend an afternoon with the Steel family of southern Wales. The daughter is in Welsh immersion school, the mother is trying gamely to keep up, and the father isn't sure it's worth the effort.