The Welsh Language and its Social Domains

This book seeks to shed new light on the distinctive place which Welsh occupied in a variety of social domains, the factors which promoted its welfare and the obstacles which stunted its growth. It is a well-known fact that English was reckoned to be the language of progress in this period, and robust groups of utilitarians, Darwinians, Celtophobes and upwardly-mobile Welsh speakers believed that Welsh and its sister Celtic languages were a grave, even absurd, social handicap. Those who were convinced that Welsh had no place in a swiftly modernizing society used their best endeavours to cordon it off into homespun, benign and ‘unpolitical’ domains such as the home, the rural workplace, the chapel and the local eisteddfod. However, the content of
this volume presents a different picture.