‘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.

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