The Welsh Language in Cardiff

A history of the Welsh language in Cardiff over a thousand years.

Review :
The author, a native of the metropolis born in 1939, and a lifelong resident, learned the Welsh language while in his late twenties, and was a member of the National Assembly from 1999 until 2007, serving as shadow minister for the Welsh language, culture and sport. In 1990 he completed an MA dissertation on the history of the Welsh language in Cardiff, a pioneering work which spawned the present volume. Throughout his professional career, the author was himself a strong advocate of Welsh-medium education which began in the city as early as 1949. He also has family roots in the area which he has traced back to the 1830s. The main theme of Thomas' research is a dramatic refutation of the deeply held myth that our capital city has been primarily an English-speaking citadel since the Anglo-Norman conquest of c. 1100 which was an especially powerful fillip to the process of Anglicization, notably in areas such as Roath and Leckwith. To propound his thesis he has made use of a very wide range of disparate source materials including title deeds, court records, census returns, personal correspondence and diary entries, and legal documentation. He makes especially widespread use of the evolving story of place names and personal names, both of great importance. And all this is buttressed throughout by exhaustive secondary reading. All his findings, some quite dramatic, have been woven into a coherent, lucid dissection which is a pleasure to read and study. This book, then, is the story of a fully bilingual Cardiff, with the fate of the two languages closely intertwined, waxing and waning in turn at different periods in history. The material is neatly arranged into nine sequential chapters which analyse the theme chronologically from 75AD, when a Roman fort was built at Cardiff, until our own times with an analysis of the numbers of pupils in attendance at the city's Welsh-medium schools and an account of the Welsh-language places of worship still in existence in 2018-19. Both of these, we are told proudly, have played a major role in the continuation of the language. The author attributes the survival of the language against the odds largely to the practice of the working classes to make use of it, and these included even significant numbers of Welsh speaking alcoholics and sex workers who lived a miserable existence in the city's slums. This ran parallel to the role of the middle classes, notably the sober chapel-going Nonconformists, in perpetuating the language. Especially informative is Thomas's lively use of slander records, many of these dealing with fallings out between individuals fuelled by alcohol, a prominent feature of urban life throughout the ages until today. Many devotees of the Welsh language will read with great sadness the author's analysis of the manifold reasons for its dramatic retreat from about the mid nineteenth century until today. English and Irish immigration, together with folk who migrated from the West Country in large numbers, were part of the story certainly, but the author pinpoints with conviction, too, an abject failure on the part of many parents to convey the Welsh language to the next generation and beyond. Outrageous, too, was the widespread practice of many Welsh-language denominational chapels, and the majority of these were indeed Welsh, to convene Sunday school classes solely through the medium of English. By the time of the 1891 census, we are told, no more than 11 per cent of the population of Cardiff spoke Welsh. The author also bemoans with regret the abysmal lack of attention generally given to the teaching of Welsh history in the schools of Wales. Useful appendices to the main text of the book include a full, helpful bibliography of the main sources used, and lists of place names, the Welsh names of the parishes within Cardiff, and of the Welsh circulating schools which were operational from about 1738 until 1775. But, in spite of the considerable negativity chronicled in these pages, the author ends his volume with a positive, optimistic note in relation to the future well-being of the Welsh language within our capital city and indeed beyond which contrasts graphically with the negative attitudes which prevailed back in the 1970s. He fondly and proudly, describes the Cardiff of today as 'a bustling capital city with its own bilingual legislature and thousands of children being educated through the medium of Welsh'. It is a great pity that the onset of illness will prevent the author himself from pursuing these crucial themes any further, but he expresses the hope and belief that others will advance his pioneering researches in future years.