Language Used in the Valleys
Increasing immigration from outside
Wales had a marked effect on the percentage of people
in South Wales who could speak the Welsh language.
By 1911 only 38% of the population of Glamorgan
claimed to be able to speak Welsh and this percentage
was concentrated in the older age groups of the
population. However, this was only slightly below
the average for Wales as a whole (40%) which had
fallen from 54% since 1891 when the first census
of language was taken in Wales. In the other two
counties covering the area of the coalfield the
figures were both higher (Carmarthenshire) and lower
(Monmouthshire) than Glamorgan.
Immigration from outside Wales
played a major part in the decline of the numbers
speaking the Welsh language. Even in 1891, before
the wide scale immigration from outside Wales had
begun, only 49% of the population of Glamorgan spoke
Welsh. In addition the actual number of Welsh speakers
in the three South Wales counties was increasing
because so many immigrants from rural Wales were
Welsh speakers. Some historians argue in fact that
had South Wales not provided a home for so many
Welsh speakers, then these hundreds of thousands
of people would have left Wales altogether and the
Welsh language would have suffered an even worse
decline. It seems that even among some Welsh-speakers
the language was declining. Some people like Thomas
Jones blamed this on the neglect of the language
by schools:
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No Welsh was spoken or
taught in school in my time and this fact
tended to oust it from the home and the
street. I have been told that we spoke Welsh
at home until I was about six and that thereafter
as the children went to school the family
turned to English and reserved Welsh for
the purposes of religion.
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This letter to a newspaper
in 1902 also touches upon the same point:
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A good number of our Welsh
parents cannot prevail upon their own children
to learn the Welsh language upon their own
hearths and among their own family and I
admit that it is a most difficult matter
in many instances in a town like Pontypridd
where the English tongue is so predominant
among all classes. Even in the Welsh
chapel after a Welsh service we find as
soon as the service is over that most of
the conversation takes place in English.
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This decline of the numbers speaking
the Welsh language, did not occur so much in the
anthracite coalfield of West Wales where the language
of work and life in general continued to be strongly
Welsh.
