1.1 Anglesey, Wales’ Energy Island
A story about the attempts to promote the island of Anglesey, located off the coast of north-west Wales, as a so-called Energy Island may seem a strange place to start a book about the New Geographies of Language. The Energy Island Programme was officially launched by Carwyn Jones, the First Minister of Wales, in 2010 as a way of promoting Anglesey as a centre of excellence for energy generation of different kinds, with this being viewed as a way of developing the island’s economy (www.anglesey.gov.uk, accessed 30 June 2017). While onshore and offshore forms of wind energy play an important part of this energy-related vision for the island, it is significant that much of the emphasis is placed on the economic potential associated with nuclear energy production. Anglesey, in this respect, has been a key site for nuclear energy generation in the UK over the past forty to fifty years. The Wylfa Nuclear Power Station, located on the north coast of Anglesey between the towns of Amlwch and Holyhead, was commissioned in 1971 and was the last and biggest of the Magnox generation of stations to be built. Prior to its decommissioning in 2015, discussions had started about the possibility of replacing it with a new nuclear power station. These proposals have become more concrete over recent years, with a series of public consultations and political debates taking place concerning the possible commissioning of a Wylfa Newydd (New Wylfa). At the time of writing in June 2017, the proposal is to build a new nuclear power station, which will include two UK Advanced Boiling Water Reactors, possessing an operational life of some 60 years, and with the capacity to generate around 2700 megawatts of electricity (Horizon Nuclear Power 2017).
While this account might be of interest to aficionados of energy generation, it does not, in and of itself, provide much insight into academic, policy or public concerns about the geographies of language. And yet, when one assesses the various documents, proclamations and protests made in relation to Wylfa Newydd, it is clear that issues concerning language lie at the heart of the ongoing public and political debate concerning the development. The Isle of Anglesey County Council were well aware of these concerns when they proposed the notion of the Energy Island. Using what are perhaps more florid terms than those usually employed by local authority officials, they maintained that the “Welsh Language and Culture is a golden thread which runs throughout our society here on Anglesey”. They outlined further the different contributions that this “golden thread” made to social and cultural life on the island; “it helps bind our strong sense of community, it is inherently linked to our history and is one of the things which makes us truly unique”. In practical terms, this has meant that the local authority has required “developers to ensure that mitigation measures are taken to keep the golden thread intact” (http://www.anglesey.gov.uk, accessed 30 June 2017). This message has hit its mark. In its most recent pre-planning stage consultation document, Horizon Nuclear Power, the organisation seeking to develop the Wylfa Newydd site, stated in forthright terms that “we continue to recognise that the Welsh language and culture are integral to the communities of Anglesey, and central to many people’s sense of identity” (Horizon Nuclear Power 2017: 3).
Others, however, are not as sanguine about the potential impact of Wylfa Newydd on the linguistic fabric of Anglesey. Various Welsh-language campaign groups, most notably Cymdeithas yr Iaith (the Welsh Language Society)—established in 1962 to campaign for an equal legal status for the Welsh language and for increased opportunities to use it (Phillips 1998)—have maintained that the Wylfa Newydd development will have a marked detrimental effect on the language. According to the most recent census in 2011, 57% of the population of Anglesey described themselves as Welsh speakers, and the likely influx of the thousands of temporary workers during the power station’s construction phase and the more long-term migration of hundreds of non-Welsh speakers to live and work on Anglesey during the site’s operational phase would lead to a situation, according to language campaigners, in which Welsh would become a minority language on the island for the first time (Daily Post 2016). As well as being a development that leads to an important statistical threshold being crossed in relation to the Welsh language, campaigners have used literature and physical protests to draw attention to the more qualitative impacts on the ‘fragile’ Welsh-speaking communities that exist on the island: “we believe that Horizon [Nuclear Power] have not displayed an understanding of the factors that affect the Welsh language and it’s obvious they don’t realise how fragile the situation is on Anglesey in regards to Welsh as a community language” (ibid.). Horizon Nuclear Power has contested such viewpoints by maintaining that the employment offered by Wylfa Newydd would counter the long-running process of out-migration of (usually young) Welsh speakers that has plagued areas such as Anglesey, thereby helping to sustain the Welsh-speaking communities that exist on the island. For Horizon Nuclear Power, therefore, there exists a positive “connection between a strong economy, jobs and the well-being of the Welsh language and culture on Anglesey” (Horizon Nuclear Power 2017: 3). And yet, such arguments do not wash with language campaigners. They assert that “the language would be sacrificed on the altar of Wylfa Newydd”, were the proposed development to go ahead (Daily Post 2016).
Readers will have a chance to learn a little more about Wylfa Newydd in Chapter 4. They will also hopefully, by now, begin to see how the story of Anglesey’s status as Wales’ Energy Island and, in particular, the debates surrounding the proposed development of a new nuclear power station on the island, provides an excellent illustration of some of the key themes we discuss in this book. First, the debate surrounding Wylfa Newydd illustrates at the very outset the fact that this book is concerned with examining the power-laden relationship between languages, rather than exploring language as a form of discourse.1 We seek to show how a geographical approach can be used to analyse the processes affecting language ability, use and transmission, as well as the association between such languages and various identities, representations, materialities and practices. Our claim is that geography, as a discipline, has not paid sufficient heed to these kinds of concern, at least in recent years. While there are notable exceptions, geographers have tended to focus much of their intellectual energy on illustrating the significance of language and discourse—understood in more structural and poststructural terms—for social and spatial formations of different kinds. We contend that there is a dire need for geographers to use their disciplinary insights and interdisciplinary mindsets to examine languages in general terms, as well as the many pressures facing minority languages in particular; pressures that are leading to language decline, language loss and language death. It is reckoned, for instance, that around half of the estimated 6800 languages spoken today will have disappeared by the end of the twenty-first century (Crystal 2000; Nettle and Romaine 2000), largely as a result of a process of language shift, as the speakers of minority languages choose, instead, to speak ‘majority’ languages. Geographers, we posit, can help to understand the processes affecting these minority languages, as well as developing effective mechanisms for countering or mitigating these deleterious trends.
Second, the vignette discussed at the beginning of this chapter begins to highlight the particularities of the geographical approach we advocate in this book. At one level, it is an approach that sees considerable value in exploring different ways of mapping languages and understanding the spatial distribution of languages (e.g. Johnstone 2010; Schrambke 2010). Part of the significance of the proposed Wylfa Newydd development, as many activists have noted, is that it is happening on Anglesey, traditionally part of what has been described by various authors over a number of years as ‘y Fro Gymraeg’, ‘the Welsh heartland’ or ‘Welsh-speaking Wales’ (e.g. Bowen 1959; Balsom 1985) or, in other words, that area of Wales in which a high percentage of the population is able to speak Welsh. Anglesey, and especially the mainland opposite, are deemed to be linguistically and culturally significant for the Welsh nation. The location of the proposed development is, therefore, important. And so is the relatively high percentage of Welsh speakers on the island. The place where a minority language is spoken is important. Space and the mapping of languages matter.
And yet mapping languages, or understanding the spatial distribution of various languages, forms only a small part of the approach we adopt here. Anyone familiar with the contours of the contemporary discipline of Geography will be aware of its breadth and diversity. The discussion of the debates surrounding the so-called Energy Island begin to show some of the different ways in which a geographical approach can enable us to approach the study of languages in effective and insightful ways. The link between language and identity is, obviously, a key one on Anglesey, with the Welsh language being viewed as a “golden thread”, which supports “our strong sense of community” and “our history”, while also being “one of the things which makes us truly unique” (www.anglesey.gov.uk, accessed 30 June 2017)....