Welsh English

Heli Paulasto, Rob Penhallurick, Benjamin Jones

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501500350
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is the first comprehensive, research-based description of the development, structure, and use of Welsh English, a contact-induced variety of English spoken in the British Isles.
Present-day accents and dialects of Welsh English are the combined outcome of historical language shift from Welsh to English, continued bilingualism, intense contacts between Wales and England, and multicultural immigration. As a result, Welsh English is a distinctive, regionally and sociolinguistically diverse variety, whose status is not easily categorized.
In addition to existing research, the present volume utilizes a wide range of spoken corpus data gathered from across Wales in order to describe the phonology, lexis, and grammar of the variety. It includes discussion of sociolinguistic and cultural contexts, and of ongoing change in Welsh English. The place that Welsh English occupies in relation to other Englishes in the Inner and Outer Circles is also analysed.
The book is accessible to the non-specialist, but of particular use to scholars, teachers, and students interested in English in Wales, Britain, and the world. It provides an unparelleled resource on this long-standing and vibrant variety.

1 Geography, demography, cultural factors, and variation

1.1 Introduction

This chapter introduces the backdrop for Welsh English (WelE). It is a variety with considerable internal variation, largely as a result of the geography of the country, which has guided the Anglicization process along specific pathways during the centuries. Between the two main forces of the indigenous Welsh language culture and the neighbouring English language one, WelE has been forged differently according to the historical phase in question, the geographic region, the demographic factors at play, and the linguistic elements that these factors have brought into the mix.

We will begin by describing the geography of Wales and its impact on patterns of demography and language shift. Section 1.3 presents demographic changes in Wales over time, particularly in terms of numbers of Welsh and English speakers, in and out-migration, and the shifting sociolinguistic roles of the two languages to their speakers. Section 1.4 focuses the discussion on the Welsh varieties of English and the linguistic result of the geographic and demographic factors, in other words, on models of regional variation within WelE based on linguistic and perceptual evidence. The section also describes the main forces in operation in the regional varieties and presents an overview of research conducted on different regional varieties. Section 1.5 contains a similar overview of the sociolinguistics of WelE and sociolinguistic research on the subject, including dialect attitudes and perceptual dialectology as well as variationist research. We will also briefly consider the role of WelE as a symbol of Welsh national and cultural identity in light of the thoughts and opinions that our informants have presented on the subject during the sociolinguistic interviews. The final section of this chapter describes the WelE corpora and surveys that have been utilized in the linguistic analysis of this book. Other corpora and resources on WelE are described in Chapter 6.

1.2 Geography

There is a conservation charity called Size of Wales whose aim is “to raise funds for forests and raise awareness of the importance of forests in tackling climate change” (Size of Wales website). The charity chose its name because the phrase “an area the size of Wales” has been frequently used to depict rates of forest destruction. In fact, the phrase has been used in various contexts since the 1840s: to help us picture the size of other (apparently less well-known) territories; to describe a huge Antarctic iceberg called A-68 (actually only a quarter the size of Wales); and to estimate the zone that an asteroid or a nuclear bomb could devastate (Frampton 2019). The subject of the present book, Welsh English, is, we can safely claim, spoken in an area larger than the size of Wales, for the reason that not all speakers of Welsh English spend all of their lives domiciled in Wales. We can also state with certainty that the Urheimat of Welsh English is Wales, and that Wales is an area the size of over two million hectares (or 21,000 square kilometers) located at the west of the main island of the British Isles. From north to south it measures some 320 kilometers, and from east to west about 190 kilometers at its broadest, 80 kilometers at its narrowest.

In this section, we give an overview of the geography and geology of Wales, offering also some introductory analysis of the effects on demography and language use, which leads us to propose our basic model of the regional divisions of Wales.

Wales is known as a land of mountains and hills, but there are low-lying areas too, and the lowlands are the most populated areas. The majority of Wales is over 180 meters above sea level, and this central highland mass rises to a peak of just beyond one thousand meters at Mount Snowdon in the northwest. The west and northwest are dominated by the Cambrian Mountains and the south by the Brecon Beacons. In addition, there are the Clwydian Hills in the northeast, on the east flank of the River Clwyd, and the Black Mountains at the eastern edge of the Brecon Beacons. The highlands can be divided into the mountains, above 600 meters, mostly restricted to the northwest, and the moorlands, between 180–600 meters, characterized by rounded hills, damp soils, and coarse pasture. Fringing the central highland mass on all sides are the lowlands, that is, those areas below 180 meters. These are the coastal areas to the north, south, and west, and the borderlands with England to the east.

The west coastal strip is comparatively narrow and less populated, containing a scattering of small towns, the largest being Aberystwyth, which recorded a population of just under 16,500 in the 2011 UK census. The most densely populated and urbanized areas are the southeast and northwest. The southeast contains Wales’s three biggest cities: the capital, Cardiff (the city authority area has a population of nearly 350,000), Swansea (240,000), and Newport (145,000). (Precise figures are provided in Section 1.3 below.) We should mention that many would dispute our putting Swansea into the southeast, for in terms of traditional rivalries in the national sport, rugby union, Swansea belongs to the southwest, in contrast to the eastern clubs of Cardiff and Newport. To be more geographically accurate, then, Swansea and its neighbour, Llanelli, are located pretty much midway along the south coast of Wales. Wales is also home to the two smallest cities in Britain: the cathedral communities of St David’s in the far southwest and St Asaph in the north. There is one more city in Wales, Bangor in the northwest corner (population 19,000, over 50 per cent of this number made up by students at the University). The fourth largest urban area in Wales is Wrexham (60,000) in the northeast, only 20 kilometers from the historical English city of Chester, and within the sphere of influence of the great northwestern English conurbations of Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

The coastline of Wales runs for 1,200 kilometers in total. The north coastal plain is narrower than that of the south, and it is only since the completion of the Chester to Holyhead railway in 1848 that it has been used for a major routeway. The lowlands of the south are broader, and are not unvaryingly flat but undulating with their own hills and valleys. The Gower Peninsula in particular is renowned for its stunning sandy beaches and limestone cliffs with their sea caves, including Paviland Cave, site of one of the first discoveries of modern archaeology, the oldest anatomically modern skeleton found in Britain, that of a young man ceremonially buried 34,000 years ago. The southern lowlands allowed the Romans and later the Normans to penetrate westwards across Wales, and provided the location in the 1850s for the railway that linked Newport in the east with Milford Haven in the west. The most extensive stretch of motorway in Wales, the M4, completed in 1993, also runs east–west through the southern lowlands. Communication routes in Wales have historically been located much more along the east–west axis afforded by the southern and northern coastal plains than on the north–south axis across the lightly populated central highland mass. This is an important factor in the development of the chief north–south dialectal divisions in both Welsh and Welsh English.

The central mass is itself not uniformly elevated. There are also many lowlying valleys following river courses radiating outwards from the highland. Along the eastern border with England, for example, three expanses of lowland issue respectively from the River Dee in the north, the River Severn in the centre, and the Rivers Wye and Usk in the south. These too have been historical routeways into Wales from the east. The boundary between Wales and England corresponds generally to the linear earthwork Offa’s Dyke, constructed in the late eighth century probably by the Angles who had settled east of it, and which therefore denotes approximately the western limit of an English-speaking population at that time. The border runs north–south for over 200 kilometers. The Local Government Act of 1972 confirmed that Monmouthshire in the southeast was considered to be part of Wales, having enjoyed a rather ambiguous nationality previously.

As can be gathered from the above, Wales is surrounded on three sides by the sea: the Bristol Channel to the south, and St George’s Channel and the Irish Sea to the west and north. Like the other western coastal territories of Europe, Wales enjoys (if that is the right word) a North Atlantic climate carried by prevailing westerly winds, and temperatures tend to be mild and precipitation plentiful. Maritime contact across the Bristol Channel with the southwest of England was involved in the early Anglicization of the Gower Peninsula and south Pembrokeshire. The southwest coast of England is just 50 kilometers away from Gower. In ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• The authors dedicate this book to David Parry, whose contribution to the study of varieties of Welsh English outshines all of us.
• Maps of Wales
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Geography, demography, cultural factors, and variation
• 2 Phonetics and phonology
• 3 Morphosyntax
• 4 Lexis and discourse features
• 5 History of Welsh English
• 6 Survey of essential works and resources
• 7 Sample texts
• Index
• Sachregister