Yr Iath Cymraeg: Preserve the heartlands

Well, one of the proposals on this thread was to resist the mechanisation of agriculture and fishing. This amounts to preserving much of rural Wales as a museum of subsistence farming, which is terribly picturesque, but (without massive subsidy or a totally different set of industrial/agricultural policies across Europe since WW2), is going to leave the population grindingly poor.

Encouraging employers to hire locals would help, definitely. But for the more skilled / high-tech employers, that runs directly counter to the goal of not having big, bilingual universities. Even an aluminium plant can probably use skilled industrial chemists, and back in the day Bangor was quite good at those.

Taxing second homes and discouraging industries/developments which will require scads of incomers are all well and good (particularly the former), but what are you replacing them with as sources of employment? Having whatever devolved institutions exist located somewhere outside SE Wales would help, but the people of Cardiff and Swansea would be understandably irate - they'd be paying the freight.

Does better transport to England help preserve Welsh at all? Better transport (especially public transport) within North Wales would be lovely, but linking the whole better to e.g. Birmingham might be counterproductive.

Are you saying that everyone in Caernarfon and Llangefni is unemployed?
 
Are you saying that everyone in Caernarfon and Llangefni is unemployed?

Of course not - but a lot of what has been proposed upthread as a means of preserving the Welsh language involves preventing stuff that came in and provided employment in OTL. So if you cut tourism, don't move in the RAF and shrink the universities, what source of employment replaces those, and how do you avoid it being something that has to import lots of English-speaking skilled staff in the short term (like the things you're getting rid of did)?

I am saying that a decent proportion of the population of Caernarfon are employed in tourism, leisure and jobs in some way dependent on Bangor Uni. If you sharply reduce those things, yes, unemployment will presumably rise, not fall, unless something better replaces them. I don't know Llangefni very well I'm afraid - what are the main employers there OTL?
 

GarethC

Donor
Encouraging employers to hire locals would help, definitely. But for the more skilled / high-tech employers, that runs directly counter to the goal of not having big, bilingual universities. Even an aluminium plant can probably use skilled industrial chemists, and back in the day Bangor was quite good at those.
But the aluminium plant was the base load for the Wylfa nuclear station, which (again, anecdotally), like Traws, had mostly-English staff shipped in by the CEGB/BNFL, which won't have helped.
 

GarethC

Donor
This is the kind of change this thread is talking about. One question that just cannot escape my mind is what on earth has happened to West Wales?

Can you have a look at your post? It looks like you've embedded the image data as text or something.

And if that shows what I think it does, you also need to look at the change in population with time, and the distribution of ages with time - are people moving in, moving out, or dying off without replacement?
 
In 1961, most of what was then Anglesey, Caernarfonshire, Meirioneth, Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire as well as large areas of Denbighshire and Pembrokeshire were over 80% Welsh speaking. Today the heartland is in crisis and few such areas remain.

How do we retain those areas so that areas where more than 80% of the population speak Welsh don't shrink? Welsh seems to have also lost many of the important Fro Cymraeg towns, since then, such as Holyhead,Bangor, Carmarthen and Aberystwyth. How do we preserve them?

How would this stable, Belgium like scenario, affect the status of the language overall, it's revival outside the heartlands and Welsh politics?




You're eliding together two problems:
  • The decline in the number of people in the area
  • The decline in the proportion of people in the area who speak Welsh
The cure for one is the cause of the other. Greater prosperity sucks in Anglophone migrants and decreases the Welsh-speaking proportion locally, less prosperity makes Anglophones leave and increases the Welsh-speaking proportion locally.




So.
  • If you want to increase the Welsh-speaking proportion, isolate the areas (destroy transport links) and induce local poverty
  • If you want to increase the population regardless of language, increase transport links and encourage inward investment
 
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I don't know who your Welsh teacher is, but I'd ask for my money back, if I was you.
 
Apparently in 2011, only 32% of people in Aberystwyth could speak Welsh. I'd love to know the census figures for the town since 1891 and when the language became a minority there.
I wonder, if as well as surviving as the vernacular of the towns folk, it was the first language and medium of instruction of 50-70% of the students and the first language of the catering staff, how many non-Welsh speaking students would be signed up on Welsh courses? Would most want to 'fit in', or would the argument 'everybody speaks English so why bother' prevail?


That figure is misleading in one sense in that the University students are included, and by 2011 they numbered about 8,000 while the non student population of Aberystwyth would be about 11,000. Obviously the majority of students come from outside Wales (a lot from outside the UK) so that would distort the figures by a considerable degree.
 
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