2018/01/29 by Michael Hornsby, Dick Vigers
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity #Multilingual Education and Policy
paper · doi:10.1080/01434632.2018.1429452
openalex publication_date 2018/01/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Educational initiatives in many minority language communities in Europe and beyond are producing ‘new speakers’ of the languages in question. The status of such speakers is often contested, however, and many people who have been through immersion education in a minority language can find themselves on the fringes of the language community of which their schooling was meant to make them members. This article explores the cases of new speakers of Welsh in Wales and includes data in particular from the heartlands – West Wales – in which a number of new speakers discuss their membership of Welsh-speaking communities, the difficulties they sometimes face and, crucially, how they manage to negotiate their own sense of speakerhood under such conditions. Also examined in this article are discourses on the same topic which appear in online blogs, and which would appear to point to a certain commonality of experience which is not confined to just those areas of Wales where Welsh is, or recently was, a community language, but is further echoed by new speakers in other parts of Wales outside the heartlands who have had similar experiences.