Distribution of Welsh Speakers
Welsh has been spoken continuously in Wales throughout recorded history, but by 1911 it had become a minority language, spoken by 43.5% of the population. While this decline continued over the following decades, the language did not die out. By the start of the twenty-first century, numbers had begun to increase again. The 2004 Welsh Language Use Survey showed 21.7% of the population of Wales to be Welsh speakers, compared with 20.8% in the 2001 census, and 18.5% in 1991. The 2001 census also showed that about 25% of Welsh residents were born outside Wales. The number of Welsh speakers in the rest of Britain has not yet been compiled for statistical purposes. In 1993, S4C, the Welsh-language television channel, published the results of a survey into the numbers of people who spoke or understood Welsh, which estimated that there were around 133,000 Welsh-speakers living in England, about 50,000 of them in the Greater London area.
Historically, large numbers of Welsh people spoke only Welsh. Over the course of the twentieth century this monolingual population "all but disappeared", but a small percentage remained at the time of the 1981 census. Most Welsh speakers in Wales also speak English (while in Chubut Province, Argentina, most speakers can speak Spanish - see Y Wladfa). However, many first language Welsh speakers are more comfortable expressing themselves in Welsh than in English. A speaker's choice of language can vary according to the subject domain and the social context, even within a single discourse (known in linguistics as code-switching).
Welsh as a first language is largely concentrated in the north and west of Wales, principally Gwynedd, Conwy, Denbighshire (Sir Ddinbych), Anglesey (Ynys Môn), Carmarthenshire (Sir Gâr), north Pembrokeshire (Sir Benfro), Ceredigion, parts of Glamorgan (Morgannwg), and north-west and extreme south-west Powys, although first-language and other fluent speakers can be found throughout Wales.
Read more about this topic: Welsh Language
Famous quotes containing the words distribution of, distribution, welsh and/or speakers:
“Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)