CAN ANYONE SPEAK WENGLISH?
General Discussions ( Anything Goes )
We're in the middle of the National Eisteddfod this week where inevitably the issue of the Welsh and English languages arise.The 22 unitary authorities in Wales where the vast majority are English speaking Welsh now subsidise the Eisteddfod because the Welsh speakers couldn't make it pay. However the Welsh speakers who run the thing still maintain that ony Welsh speakers are really Welsh and they want to keep all competitions and ceremonies in Welsh.I think this is absolute nonsense. If the majority who pay for the event are English speakers then the very least that could be done is to make the Eisteddfod totally bi lingual. Unfortunately there's still that attitude that only Welsh speakers are really Welsh. This causes a certain enmity between the various factions.The alternative is to let the Welsh speaking minority pay for the whole event again and keep it totally Welsh speaking.On another point S4C - the Welsh language channel is the most subsidised in the world. It gets 100,000,000 a year to run a channel that rarely had an audience of more than 80,000. Wales has a population of over 3,000,000 fifteen percent of which speak Welsh. When it became obvious that the Welsh language viewing figures were consistently low they weren,t published anymore.The arguement for maintaining and increasing further funding for a channel that would long ago have died in a market economy is that, no matter how low the viewing figures the demographic the channel is aimed at is looked at as 100% of its posssible audience Therefore if only 60,000 Welsh speakers out of a Welsh speaking population of 600,000 ( THEIR FIGURES NOT MINE ) watch a programme it is deemed to have been a riotous success. Some two million nine hundred and forty thousand Welsh people of both languages DIDN'T watch the programme. Can you imagine if that kind of logic were applied to all broadcasters. The ironic thing is that English production companies are paid to make programmes for S4C - none of which have any knowledge or interest in the Welsh language whatsoever.If I had my way I'd create an independant State around Machynlleth and the Lleyn Peninsula and let the Welsh speaking self professed elite get on with it. The rest of us so called false Welsh - all of whom are from generations born in Wales can then get on with the 21st Century.
