The 1947 Welsh Delegation to Brittany: Paradiplomacy and Propaganda

Abstract: The Welsh Government’s plan to ‘create a bilingual Wales’ is ambitious – aiming for significant increases in Welsh use across Wales, a country with no Welsh monolinguals, and including areas where everyday use of Welsh has become negligible. How the devolved Welsh legislature promotes the Welsh language as a national icon touches on the fractious territory of heritage, identity, authenticity and cultural survival – all politically charged issues in the context of post-devolutionary nation-building. This paper examines ideological orientations in three Welsh language policy documents – 'texts' which are informed and contoured by overarching national and international legislation. Discourse historical analysis (a form of critical discourse analysis) is used to weigh up their ideological orientations. The orientations are categorised using De Schutter’s (2007) tripartite framework of language ideologies: - ‘instrumental’ (language is a means to achieve other non-linguistic human capabilities); - ‘constitutive’ (language influences identity); - ‘intrinsic’ (language is valuable irrespective of human interests). The findings show that the intrinsic ideology predominates significantly and consistently across the three texts. Action is planned not in the interests of human capabilities or even identity, but of the Welsh language as an independent entity. Furthermore, there are instances where potential discriminatory effects on non-speakers of Welsh are acknowledged, and explicitly justified within the pursuit of increased Welsh usage. Overall, these ideological orientations make Welsh language policy quite unusual when compared to other areas of Welsh social policy (e.g. Sayers, Rock & Coffey, in prep.). References: De Schutter, Helder (2007). Language policy and political philosophy: On the emerging linguistic justice debate. Language Problems and Language Planning 31(1): 1–23. Sayers, Dave, Frances Rock & Michael Coffey (in prep.). Speeding up or reaching out? Efficiency and unmet need as policy priorities in Wales.

2012

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Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2023

This paper engages with the negotiation of insider and outsider researcher identities in the context of Welsh-English bilingualism in Wales. It aims to develop a reflexive approach to researching bilingualism, foregrounding the actions and experiences of doing bilingual research in a minority language context. Taking data from education and business as our starting point, we present two selfreflexive accounts of how our research identities, specifically our language profiles, (as an L1 British English speaker and an LX English user, both of whom have only limited understanding of Welsh), and positionalities are questioned, (de)legitimised and assessed in our research projects. In light of this, we reflect also on the methodological consequences and decisions that were taken during the research process. Taken together, these two reflective perspectives allow us to generate new theoretical, methodical and analytic understandings of language within the bilingual Welsh-English context specifically and researcher reflexivity more broadly.

2019

In 1996 the poet R. S. Thomas claimed that 'my country, Cymru, to be understood presents a problem of translation, and if it is to maintain a separate and valuable identity, it must continue to do so.' Thomas, a native speaker of English, and a self-taught user of Welsh, seemed to be questioning the value of English to reflect the reality of Wales, and with it his own status as an 'Anglo-Welsh' poet. This inner conflict mirrored the language situation in Wales, and the lack of language choice facing writers, since native Welsh speakers carried the psychological onus of remaining faithful to the 'old language', and non-Welsh speakers had no choice but to use English. But the last two decades have seen considerable social, political, and linguistic change in Wales. An extensive bilingual education policy, the emergence of a Welsh language television channel, and the establishment of the Welsh assembly, seem to have halted the decline in the number of Welsh spea...

Gyermeknevelés Tudományos Folyóirat

This article examines issues of language usage in Welsh and the identity of this region’s residents. The stress is upon people and language as they are inseparably inter- and entwined when forming one’s identity (Evans, 2018, p. 7). In accordance with this approach, I focus on three aspects (of this people, language, and identity): 1) the “diachronic” analysis of the Welsh language; 2) bilingual language use in general and in Wales in particular; 3) the recent period and research that slowly led to Welsh becoming an official language, effective in 2012. In this paper I will discuss what has happened since the poet, R. S. Thomas, captured the feelings and thoughts of his era while expressing his worries for his nation’s fate in the poem, The Welsh Hill County. I believe that my inquiry suits the environment of languages and cultures as the success story of an almost extinct language that survived its foretold death may provide valuable insight into the actual problems minority groups...

Until recently, studies of how Wales entered the First World War have generally been overlooked. Often, the British narrative has been assumed for the Welsh experience, with the once popular topos of war enthusiasm being recently displaced by a more nuanced approach. This paper revisits the July Crisis of 1914 as presented in the Welsh press and argues that on the whole, a complicated picture existed in Welsh newspapers where narratives of race and civilization formed the roots of war culture, yet justification for war was often submerged beneath feelings of opposition and indifference. Eventually, despite some strong feelings of opposition, the Welsh press succumbed to the inevitability of a general European war.

The Welsh Government’s plan to ‘create a bilingual Wales’ is ambitious – aiming for significant increases in Welsh use across Wales, a country with no Welsh monolinguals, and including areas where everyday use of Welsh has become negligible. This paper uses a form of discourse analysis to examine ideological orientations in three Welsh language policy documents. These orientations are categorised using De Schutter’s (2007) tripartite framework of language ideologies: ‘instrumental’ (language is a means to achieve other non-linguistic human capabilities); ‘constitutive’ (language influences identity); and ‘intrinsic’ (language is valuable irrespective of human interests). The findings show that the intrinsic ideology predominates. Action is planned not in the interests of human capabilities or identity, but of the Welsh language as an independent entity. Furthermore, possible discriminatory effects on non-speakers of Welsh are justified as acceptable collateral. These ideological orientations make Welsh language policy quite unusual compared to other areas of social policy. -- De Schutter, H. 2007. Language policy and political philosophy: On the emerging linguistic justice debate. Language Problems and Language Planning 31(1): 1–23.

Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period, 2022

This chapter explores how the revision of national myths in Early Modern Britain and France reflects conflicts and contradictions between the perspectives of the dominant nations, England and France, and those of two subordinate nations, Wales and Brittany, formally annexed by their larger neighbours in the 16th century, and how the national myths in turn impinged on the status of the vernacular languages of the subordinate nations, Welsh and Breton. In order to legitimise the new Church of England, English protestant apologists claimed that its protestant faith was the continuation of the pure faith of the Early Church, which the ancient Britons, ancestors of the Welsh, had acquired directly from a disciple of Christ. Richard Davies’ preface to the 1567 Welsh New Testament, however, re-appropriated the narrative as specifically Welsh. Davies’ narrative was influential in Wales and contributed to a cultural context, together with the Welsh Bible translation, in which the Welsh language could flourish despite the increasing dominance of English. In the case of Brittany and France, the paper explores the contradiction between the antiquarian prestige conferred upon Breton by contemporary language antiquity myths and its actual subordinate sociolinguistic status vis-a-vis French.

The Welsh Government’s plan to ‘create a bilingual Wales’ is ambitious – aiming for significant increases in Welsh use across Wales, a country with no Welsh monolinguals, and including areas where everyday use of Welsh has become negligible. How the devolved Welsh legislature promotes the Welsh language as a national icon touches on the fractious territory of heritage, identity, authenticity and cultural survival – all politically charged issues in the context of post-devolutionary nation-building. This paper examines ideological orientations in three Welsh language policy documents – 'texts' which are informed and contoured by overarching national and international legislation. Content analysis is used to weigh up their ideological orientations. The orientations are categorised using De Schutter’s (2007) tripartite framework of language ideologies: - ‘instrumental’ (language is a means to achieve other non-linguistic human capabilities); - ‘constitutive’ (language influences identity); - ‘intrinsic’ (language is valuable irrespective of human interests). The findings show that the intrinsic ideology predominates significantly and consistently across the three texts. Action is planned not in the interests of human capabilities or even identity, but of the Welsh language as an independent entity. Furthermore, there are instances where potential discriminatory effects on non-speakers of Welsh are acknowledged, and explicitly justified within the pursuit of increased Welsh usage. Overall, these ideological orientations make Welsh language policy quite unusual when compared to other areas of Welsh social policy (e.g. Sayers, Barchas-Lichtenstein, Rock & Coffey, in prep.). References: De Schutter, Helder (2007). Language policy and political philosophy: On the emerging linguistic justice debate. Language Problems and Language Planning 31(1): 1–23. Sayers, Dave, Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein, Frances Rock & Michael Coffey (in prep.). Speeding up or reaching out? Efficiency and unmet need as policy priorities in Wales.

2016

This article explores Anglophobia as a topic in German wartime propaganda aimed at military and civilian communities of France. Anti-British topics were at the centre of a large campaign of propaganda designed to undermine French morale during the Two World Wars. This study will investigate the goals, the content and the effects of Anglophobia in France to determine the relation between these two campaigns of psychological warfare. It will be argued that the Nazis and the Vichy regime almost entirely replicated the original production of Anglophobic propaganda in the occupied territories of France during the First World War. This article will also show that Anglophobia almost invariably failed to convince the French population.

French History, 2004

List of figures and maps page vii Preface viii Acknowledgements xii List of abbreviations xv 1 The context of exile: communities, circumstances and choices The Gaullist legacy Communities and circumstances Piecing together the fragments Tentative conclusions 2 The misfortune of exile: refugees Preparing to receive Arriving: 'We of this country wish to offer you our great sympathy' Late arrivals: The Royal Victoria Patriotic School Les pauvres types Catering for the refugees Travail, famille, patrie: the everyday life of refugees Conclusions 3 The conflict of exile: servicemen Arriving: Narvik, Dunkirk, Compiègne and Oran Counting heads: les effectifs At the races: life in the camps The Randolph Hotel, Oxford: a polite exile Recruiting and proselytising Repatriation Conclusions The surveillance of exile: the Vichy consulates The diplomatic community in London: adieu Agents consulaires or agents provocateurs? La conduite consulaire: conduct unbecoming Endgame Conclusions 5 The tradition of exile: la colonie Française The prewar French community: a statistical overview The colonist response to defeat: organising, rallying and integrating The British government and the colons: internment and restrictions Conclusions 6 Conclusion Appendices Bibliography Index vi Contents Preface ix x Preface Paradoxically for a book that takes issue with much of the wartime mythology of Gaullism, the origins of this study lie in the centenary commemorations of the general's birth when I gave papers, first, at the Maison Française, Oxford, in 1988 and two years later at UNESCO, Paris, at the international colloque sponsored by the Institut Charles de Gaulle, 'De Gaulle en son siècle'. It was during the research for these contributions that my curiosity about the French in wartime Britain was ignited. It was fuelled further by a chance to contribute to the volume edited by François Poirier, of the University of Nanterre, on London at war. Subsequent invitations to deliver academic papers allowed me to sharpen my ideas. I should especially like to thank Dr Martin Conway of Balliol College, Oxford, together with the Wiener-Anspach Foundation, Brussels, for a chance to speak at the 1998 conference on 'Europe in Exile'. Thanks also extend to Maurice Vaïsse, Director of the Centre d'Etudes d'Histoire de la Défense, Vincennes, for the opportunity to contribute to a volume on the French defeat of 1940 as viewed by foreign historians. Segments of the research for my earlier essays, listed in the bibliography, reappear in the present volume, and I am grateful to repeat material already in print. In the course of my research I have visited several libraries and should like to thank the staff of the following institutions

The Museum of Brittany, in Rennes, is organising an exhibition entitled "Celtic ?" which cleverly lures the public by serving a French nationalist purpose.

This chapter examines language policy in Wales before and after the devolution of powers in the UK and shows that the promotion of Welsh in various policy domains has significantly improved in the post-devolutionary era. The chapter also compares the promotion of Welsh with allochthonous languages and concludes that Welsh is prioritised over such languages. However, in common with policies in the EU and Luxembourg, macro-level policymaking considers the needs of minorities in healthcare and social welfare. Even in the domains of business and legal safeguards for minority languages, certain statutes allow the use of languages other than Welsh and English. In addition to offering further evidence for the pattern of including minority languages in the domains named above, the most important finding of this chapter is showing that socio-political changes are reflected at the textual level, precisely in the use of modal verbs may and shall. Over the course of time, statutes made a shift from 'Welsh may be used' to 'Welsh shall be used' which mirrors the growing importance of Welsh in the UK.