Switching over to a minority language - eg. Welsh speakers who meet in English-speaking contexts

[saaniaa]

Hi, everyone!  I thought about asking this in one of the language comms, but it's not really about linguistics,  so I hope this is the right place

Comments

[justagimmick]

My nana is a native welsh speaker. English is actually her second language, she didn't learn it till her teens. In Wales, learning to speak Welsh is compulsory so my young cousins learn it (in fact they go to a Welsh speaking school), but English is their first language. My cousins and Nana communicate in Welsh, even though the rest of us don't speak it. I guess it is dependent on their comfort level, but it does seem to me that if there is the opportunity to speak Welsh they will.

I don't know if that helps at all.

[bopeepsheep]

In Wales, learning to speak Welsh is compulsory

This is only as a second language, however, and in places is not much more successful than the effort to teach the rest of the British Isles to speak French fluently. 14.8% of secondary school pupils are taught Welsh as a first language. 72% of 5.5K candidates passed GCSE Welsh (1st Language) at A-C in 2010, 73% of 10.3K passed Welsh (2nd Language), 74% of 4.1K passed Welsh Literature - but in Wales as a whole there were 295K entries. At an average of 8 entries per pupil, that's an awful lot of people not taking Welsh at all.

[chilperic]

My Irish teacher told me a nice story about Irish-speakers. (Everyone in Ireland learns Irish at school; almost everyone on a daily basis uses English). Irish speakers who prefer to speak Irish wear a little gold ring in their lapel or on their dress (a fainne -- sp?), to indicate to other Irish speakers that their preference is to speak Irish. So, my teacher repeated what is apparently an old joke: "The fainne is really useful on the continent of Europe. When you see someone wearing it at least you know they can speak English."

[duckgirlie]

Yeah, there's a fainne dór and a fainne airgead (and those are probably not spelled right either) which shows either fluency or a good level of competency in Irish.

[janewilliams20]

That sounds like my mother-in-law on holiday. She met someone, had an idea they might speak Welsh, and asked them - in Welsh - if they did. After that they happily babbled on in their native language.

Incidentally, "when not in the presence of non-speakers, of course" - that isn't "of course". Some have more manners than others. I had the lovely experience of half the guests at my own wedding carrying out most of their conversation in a language they knew I didn't speak a word of, even when I was deliberately coming over to socialise with the "husband's side" group.

My father-in-law, with better manners and more cunning, used to use his knowledge of Welsh in multi-national business meetings. Every now and then the French (all fluent in English) would sulk, and demand an interpreter before they went any further. So in the rare occasion when he wanted to get his own back, he'd demand a French-to-Welsh intepreter :)

[robling_t]

in the rare occasion when he wanted to get his own back, he'd demand a French-to-Welsh intepreter :)

Niiiice. :)

[bopeepsheep]

Two contestants on UK Big Brother one year got told off - more than once - for conversing in Welsh, which was against the rules. They said they forgot they were even doing it.

[clanwilliam]

Definitely. My sister-in-law has done it in front of me and only realised she'd switched to Welsh when talking to her family when I asked her a question in Irish!

She was most certainly not excluding me, she just forgot that I don't speak it.

[minimorr]

As a Swede living in a German-speaking country, I do switch to Swedish when I meet someone who also speaks it. Sometimes I ask people on the street when I hear them speak Swedish where they're from - always get interesting looks for that - and I also tend to stick to Swedish with other Swedes even if we're in the company of non-Swedish-speakers with plenty of translations to go around from all sides.

As a side note, for me it is a way to reconnect with my own language which I tend to forget at times and substitute Swedish words for German or English ones. It's a way of keeping the connection to my "roots" open.

Don't know if that helped much, but here it is. :-)