‘New’ speakers in the heartlands: struggles for speaker legitimacy in Wales

ABSTRACT

Educational initiatives in many minority language communities in Europe and beyond are producing ‘new speakers’ of the languages in question. The status of such speakers is often contested, however, and many people who have been through immersion education in a minority language can find themselves on the fringes of the language community of which their schooling was meant to make them members. This article explores the cases of new speakers of Welsh in Wales and includes data in particular from the heartlands – West Wales – in which a number of new speakers discuss their membership of Welsh-speaking communities, the difficulties they sometimes face and, crucially, how they manage to negotiate their own sense of speakerhood under such conditions. Also examined in this article are discourses on the same topic which appear in online blogs, and which would appear to point to a certain commonality of experience which is not confined to just those areas of Wales where Welsh is, or recently was, a community language, but is further echoed by new speakers in other parts of Wales outside the heartlands who have had similar experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Welsh
• new speakers
• group membership
• linguistic legitimacy
• community integration

Acknowledgements

Research leading to this article has benefited from ongoing discussions on the ‘new speaker’ theme as part of the EU COST Action IS1306 network entitled ‘New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Michael Hornsby http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6075-5929

Notes

1 All names of research participants are pseudonyms. The choice of pseudonym reflects the gender of the participant.