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According to most estimates, about four per cent of Irish people, or 72,000 people speak the Irish language on a daily basis, in their homes. Of the Celtic and Brythonic nations on these islands, this means we are doing much better than the Scots, where barely 1% of the population speaks Scots Gaelic on a daily basis. But both nations languish miles behind the Welsh, who have managed to preserve their language to a much greater extent than either: nearly one in five of the Welsh population report speaking Welsh at home most days.
Of course, in the annals of bringing a language back from the dead, nobody can really compete with the state of Israel, which has revived Hebrew from near extinction to becoming the native first spoken language of about five million people worldwide. More on that later, but first I think it’s useful to look closer to home.
Of the three non-English “home nations”, Wales stands out for being the one with almost no mainstream tradition of nationalism. Ireland and Scotland, with varying degrees of success, have been attempting to shake off the English yoke for most of the past five hundred years, while the last major Welsh rebellion was the Glyndŵr rebellion, which was functionally ended with the capture of Harlech Castle by the future Henry V in 1409. In the 613 years since then, there has not been one single serious attempt to divorce Wales from the Kingdom of England. Even today, while nationalist parties garner massive votes in Scotland and in both jurisdictions of Ireland, Welsh nationalists are a minor factor in that country’s politics, commonly third or fourth behind the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat parties.
You might think, then, if you were an Anglophile who knew little, that maybe because Wales essentially submitted to English rule, the English felt little need to suppress the Welsh language and foster an English speaking identity in Wales, in the way that they did in Ireland and Scotland. But this would be wrong. While many English still deny responsibility, the fact is that huge efforts were made to suppress Welsh in the 18th and 19th centuries in particular, with Welsh-speaking children actively being punished if they spoke the language in school. See, for example, the history of the Welsh Not. From the very beginnings of English rule in Wales, the language was officially suppressed – English became the mandatory language of the law courts and public administration. After the English protestant reformation of Henry VIII, it became the mandatory language of the established Church. The pattern of language suppression in Ireland and in Wales is not so different. To get ahead, or to advance yourself, speaking English was (and was intended to be) a huge advantage, which often in practice recruited Welsh and Irish speaking parents in the cause of ensuring that the next generation spoke English.
Yet in Wales, the language proved substantially more culturally resilient. Why?
Part of it, I think, is related to Wales’s constitutional status and the psychology that comes with that. Since most Welsh people remain comfortable subjects of their (fluent welsh-speaking, as it happens) King, Welsh nationalism is freer to express itself culturally rather than politically. Readers are free to disagree with me here, but in Ireland and Scotland, to a greater or lesser degree, nationalism tends to focus on distinguishing itself from England politically, as opposed to culturally. You don’t have to speak Irish to differentiate yourself from the English when you can sing an English-language Wolfe Tones tune or cheer for the Germans against the English in disciplines as varied as football, the Eurovision, or various World Wars.
Relatedly, I suspect that the constitutional status of Wales imbues in the Welsh a greater national sense of an imperative to retain a distinct and different culture and language. In Ireland, or at least in that part of the Island which is independent, the freedom to be ourselves is guaranteed and thus likely valued less. It is interesting, I think, that many of the great movements to restore our national language were founded in the pre-independence era. In its first days, for example, the Gaelic League was successful in drawing several prominent unionists to the cause of the language – people who were happy to embrace a distinct cultural identity but were content with their existing political identity. As the league became more explicitly politically nationalist, the language became more associated with politics and that Unionist support became what it is in Northern Ireland today – outright hostility to the Irish language as a symbol of political nationalism rather than cultural identity.
There’s a case to be made – I would argue – that this link in Ireland between political nationalism and the language has to some degree softened affection for it. Its mandatory teaching in schools to leaving cert level, for example, is a reflection of an inherited political link between the language and political nationalism. In Wales, learning the language in school became compulsory (up to the age of 12) in 1990, and then in 1999 up to the age of 16.
But here’s the rub: Since the Welsh made learning Welsh in schools compulsory, the number of people in Wales who say they can speak Welsh fluently has barely budged at all, going from 30% of the population in 2001 to 29% of the population in 2024. In other words, the results of making the language compulsory in Wales appears to be as effective in Wales as it is in Ireland – despite the Welsh starting from a higher base.
That leaves us with the X factor, which seems to be desire in a population to be culturally distinct.
This, I think, is the biggest reason for the aforementioned success of Hebrew in Israel. The particular history of that country, being founded as it was shortly after a remarkably successful attempt to eradicate Jewish culture from the world entirely, might again point to a desire for cultural distinctiveness as being the key factor in the success of bringing back a language.
The Israelis also made a virtue of necessity in a way the Irish likely cannot: The nature of their society, being as it was (and still is) a nation of returning refugees from around the world, meant that there was no natural common language. Rather than making Russian-speaking Jewish returnees speak English, or French speakers learn Polish, the Israelis settled on a common Jewish language that everybody would have to use to access public administration. That’s a unique circumstance that Ireland does not have, nor does Wales.
Which brings us back to culture: The welsh have reasons to differentiate themselves culturally, since they are not distinct politically. Do the Irish?
It is no coincidence, I would argue, that the Gaelic league was founded just a few decades after our famine, which was a real threat to the continued viability of the Irish race. It is also not a coincidence, I suspect, that the progress made by the Gaelic league stalled somewhat after independence, when the perceived threat to that viability receded. It’s also observably true that the proportion of Irish speakers in Ireland has declined since Independence, and declined dramatically since the 1870s. My theory, for what its worth, is that achieving independence when we did deprived our language of some of the momentum behind it, rather than enhancing it.
This is not, lest I be misinterpreted, an argument against independence. But it might be worth thinking about why the Welsh have retained so many of their welsh speakers, when we have failed to do the same. Perhaps a re-think is in order.
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