Cymraeg ar Groesffordd - Welsh at the Crossroads

welsh fingers How do you tell whether a language is alive and kicking? Can you tell by the extent to which you come across the language in the public domain – on signposts, in official documents, in the media? Or is it a matter of whether it is taught in schools, or used in songs and literature?

According to these criteria, Welsh is indeed alive and kicking. And it was optimism for the future of Britain's second-largest native language that inspired Jude Rogers to write the first of the two articles below in 2006.

However, a report published in 2012 persuaded Rogers, a Welsh journalist based in London, that her optimism was not as well founded as she had thought. It takes more than government policy to guarantee the life of a language.

Read more in Access to English: Social Studies, pp. 372-374. Then do the tasks in the textbook and on this website.