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LadyEllen -> RE: "Gaelic: Dying or on the brink of renaissance?" (4/3/2007 4:22:19 AM)
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Welsh is the strongest of the languages of Britain after English - with an unexpected benefit in our current overseas military deployments.....
The opposing forces listen in to what our people are doing via radio monitoring, and of course English being so widely spoken, this is easy for them to do. Except when the Welsh Guards are in the field - they use Welsh for their radio communications between themselves. I'd just love to have seen the looks on the faces of those listening in!
Its great for these languages to have a resurgence of course, but we should always remember that language can be divisive - excluding non speakers totally, not just we English but the people of Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and Ireland that dont speak those languages. Within Wales there is a marked distinction and antipathy between north and south over this issue already, where the north retains the language well but the south less so. And given that we already have large populations of Hindi, Urdu, Gujurati, Chinese and Polish speakers, we have to be careful with all this that we dont inadvertently produce isolation by way of language in the greater whole in the same way that Spanish seems to be doing in the US.
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