Newport City Council has published a draft plan directed towards increasing the number of Welsh speakers in Newport through education, visibility and employment.
The well-defined proposal is the latest in a string of efforts to promote the native tongue as part of the Welsh Government’s Cymraeg 2050 plan.
The Welsh Government’s national strategy, which was created in 2017, aims to increase the number of people speaking the language, which is part of the Celtic language family, to one million and to double the daily use of Welsh by the year 2050.
According to the last Census in 2011, 562,016 people (19.0% of the population of Wales) aged three and over were able to speak Welsh.
The Welsh city of Newport has “one of the most significant regeneration programmes in the UK, with investments delivering huge transformation and creating new business opportunities”, according to Newport City Council, the city’s governing body.
Newport is the third largest city and a principal area in Wales, located on the river Usk, some 12 miles northeast of the Welsh capital, Cardiff. The city boasts a university, a cathedral and football club as well as the famous transporter bridge (one of the very few that remains in the world today).
A public consultation into the draft Welsh in Education Strategic Plan was launched on Monday, 27 September, allowing residents to have their say on the plans.
Councillor Jason Hughes, the council’s Welsh language champion, described the Welsh language as “living, vibrant and vital” and described the process as a way to bring Welsh to many more people.
He said: “We want residents to be a part of this process as this will be a long-term strategy to bring Welsh into everyone’s lives.
“Welsh is living, vibrant and vital and we want to ensure that all residents, whatever their age, have the opportunity to learn and speak their national tongue. Our message is to see, hear, learn, use and love the language. Let us know if you think our draft plan will help us achieve that ambition.”
Currently 20.5% of people in Newport can speak fluent Welsh, placing the local authority in 15th out of 22, just below Swansea.
Council leader Jane Mudd said the council aims to increase the number of places in Welsh-medium schools within the next ten years.
Following the opening of Ysgol Gymraeg Nant Gwenlli this month, Newport now has four Welsh-medium primary schools.
Ysgol Gyfun Gwent Is Coed opened in 2017 and is Newport’s only Welsh-medium secondary school.
Cllr Mudd added: “We recognise there is still more we can do to help achieve the national target of one million Welsh speakers by 2050 and increase the percentage of those who use the language every day.
“We want our national language to be part of the fabric of the city, woven into every aspect of people’s lives. The draft plan is the next step to making that ambition become a reality and we want to know what you think of it.”
The council’s Cabinet Member for Education, Deborah Davies, said young people are crucial to the future of the Welsh language.
Cllr Davies said: “It is a gift they will have for the rest of their lives.
Welsh is not just something that should be preserved and treasured as a significant part of our heritage, but something that should be nurtured so it can continue to flourish and enrich lives in the 21 century.”
The public consultation on the plan will run until the 22nd of November.
It comes as Welsh students and friends Frances Bather and Ellie Wornip spoke to Business News Wales about their passion to keep their native language alive.
Last month, the girls told the news outlet of their plans to study Welsh, commencing this year at Cardiff University after succeeding in their A Level exams at Coleg Cambria’s Yale campus in Wrexham, North Wales.
Frances, from Llangollen, and Mold-based Ellie both received As in Welsh and passed other subjects including Media Studies, English Literature, Welsh Baccalaureate and English Language.
The students urged other young people to consider a career utilising Welsh and thanked Cambria – notably its branch of Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol – for their support.
Frances, 18, said: “We are both very passionate about keeping the language alive and being able to use it in our day-to-day jobs, so that was a big reason we chose to study it at university.
“I would like to teach Welsh, either at primary or secondary school level, and believe there is a lot more for us to learn about the language, from its history to the relevance and importance of a bilingual society.
She also referred to efforts to try to bring the native tongue into the lives of more people across Wales, stating: “As there is a campaign to increase the number of people who use the language it’s an exciting time to be taking on this degree – I can’t wait to get started.”
Ellie, 18, aspires to become a bilingual speech and language therapist in the future and applauds the drive to preserve Welsh for future generations.
“Learning Welsh at Cambria and being part of Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol was a lot of fun and also laid the foundations for us to move forward in this sector,” she said.
“The tutors really inspired us and showed there are so many opportunities to use the Welsh language in a variety of roles.
“Whether you’re fluent or a beginner they can help you and that in turn will attract more people to study Welsh, which will be great to see.”
In July, it was reported that basic Welsh is to be required to get jobs with the Welsh Government in the future. The country’s Government said that future employees will need to speak at least a “courtesy” level of basic Welsh, including answering the phone bilingually, as well as pronouncing and understanding simple words.
Candidates will be expected to show the language skills either on appointment or within six months of recruitment. The move is part of what the Welsh government called a “significant change” to its recruitment policies, as part of an aim to become bilingual.
Job adverts for civil servants working in the Cathays Park administration will no longer say Welsh language skills are not required, but that language skills would be “desirable, essential or to be taught on the post” for every vacancy or new post.
Newport’s ambitious plan to create more Welsh speakers also comes as British bank HCSB announced late September that it is to double Welsh speaking staff so that its customers in Wales can speak the native language.
More than 50 branch staff have volunteered to take lessons in the language including online instruction and live tutorials with fluent Welsh-speakers.
HSBC said that the move would double the number of Welsh-speakers in its Wales operation and would enable all its customers to converse in Welsh with an HSBC employee if they wanted. Speaking in Welsh could be particularly desired by customers discussing important lifetime events such as home purchases or bereavement, a spokesman said.
Some staff were planning to learn from scratch, while others were simply a bit rusty.
Jackie Uhi, HSBC UK’s head of branches, said:
“We have a long, proud history of providing banking services in Wales and in Welsh dating back to the 1760s and we were even the first bank to offer a Welsh-language credit card.”
Mathew Thomas, promotion officer at the Welsh Language Commissioner’s office, said: “Research shows that customers value the opportunity to use Welsh with banks and business leaders see the language as an advantage when trading in Wales.”
However, it is clear much work is still needed across the country as an embarrassing Welsh language blunder made headlines this week. The spelling mistake which left a road sign saying something rude, left some people giggling while others were not too happy.
Speaking to Wales Online, Welsh speaker Bethan Morris said: “It is funny, but it does make my blood boil that the authorities can’t get it right. It is a government requirement that they get these bilingual signs up and yet they are still getting it wrong. “If they can’t get it right, then what chance have we got?”
Meanwhile in Ireland, the director-general of Irish-language network TG4 has slammed the “lack of ambition” of Ireland’s government in supporting the channel, compared with the way Welsh language broadcasting is supported in Wales.
Daily users of Irish in the Republic outside the education system number around 73,000 or (1.5%) of the population. The total number of people aged 3 or over who said they could speak Irish was 1,761,420, equating to 39.8 per cent of the population, according to 2016 census data.
The free-to-air public service television channel is needed “more than ever” , said Alan Esslemont, and deserves the same support as broadcaster S4C in Wales.
“Compared to the way Welsh is supported in Wales, the Irish State continues to display a clear lack of ambition for the Irish-speaking communities and for Irish language media,” he said. “The Greeks have a saying: big results require big ambitions.”
The TG4 boss was speaking an a live-streamed virtual event outlining the channel’s upcoming schedule of drama, documentary, entertainment and sport.
“Our unique purpose sets us apart and we’re a vital part of modern Ireland,” he added. “But after 25 years, we do need the Government to show much more ambition for TG4 and free us from the old paradigm of second-class or third-class resourcing in which TnaG was launched in 1996.
“The wording of the 2009 Broadcasting Act delivers very little between the public service duties of RTÉ and those of TG4, however TG4 is only allocated a tenth of the resources of RTÉ. So the present public service media ecosystem in Ireland is clearly monolithic,” Esslemont said.