Welsh Language Census Report :: essays research papers

SociolinguisticsLING 2150Assessment 1Use the census data available on welch to build up a drawing of what happened to a chosen tenuous subject field of Wales over a period for which data is available in the census. The focus of your discussion should be on the start/fall/stability of the nonage language. Try to use data about the age of speakers, and degree of literacy.For this essay, I plan to look at what has happened to the number of speakers of Welsh in both Swansea and the Lliw Valley over time by using census data, comparing the two areas which both lie in South Wales in the county of West Glamorgan. These areas are of a similar size, with Swansea recorded in the 1991 census as being 24,590 hectares, and the Lliw Valley as 21,754 hectares. These measurements do not differ much than 500 hectares from year to year in the data I will use, however, I will have to take into account the fact that the boundaries for Welsh counties sometimes change between censuses. For this reas on, I will have to be very careful when choosing my data. The macrocosm of my chosen areas differs dramatically though. In the 1991 census it was recorded that the population of Swansea was 181,906 and the Lliw Valley was 63,099. This means that in Swansea there are 7.4 persons per hectare contrasted with 2.9 in the Lliw Valley. Due to this, I thought it would be interesting to compare such an urban area as Swansea with a rather more rural area as the Lliw Valley to see if there are any differences that can be arrange regarding the number of Welsh speakers.We can see these two areas on the following map. Note the dense network of major roads around the Swansea area contrasted with the small amount in the Lliw Valley. Also, we can see that the counties of Dyfed and Powys are large rural areas, with sparse scatterings of major roads(The publics library and digital archive, 1993)Of the languages spoken at the present(a) time in mainland Britain, Welsh has been here by far the longes t, (Price, 198494), so why, may we ask, has it come to be that it is only spoken by a minority of the Welsh population? We can see from the following table the extent to which the number of speakers of Welsh in Wales has declined since 1901Speaking Welsh onlySpeaking position and WelshTotal