Language Used in the South Wales 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:

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.

This letter to a newspaper in 1902 also touches upon the same point:

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.

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.

Language Used in the Valleys