‘Industrialization saved the Welsh language.’ Discuss. By the mid-18th century, industrialisation closely followed by its unavoidable companion, urbanization had collided with Britain and continued to expand into the 19th and 20th centuries. The scale of the industrial revolution led to an amount of migration and indeed, immigration that had never occurred in Britain before. Pouring its way into the heart of Wales itself, the industrial development transported the English language into the Welsh valleys and forever left its impressions within the lands of the idyllic principality. Historians and researchers have encouraged many debates about whether the industrial revolution had a positive or negative effect on the Welsh language and these debates will undoubtedly last as long as the Welsh language itself. In order to fully comprehend the effects that industrialisation had on the Welsh language, one must first go back and understand what the Welsh language was before industrialisation. In 1801, the majority of Welsh people spoke Welsh, 90%, and 70% of these Welsh speakers were ‘monoglot’ Welsh who spoke only in the common tongue and knew no English. During the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, these figures were radically altered due a massive, 135% population increase from 1545 to 1801. However, depleting almost as quickly as they grew, these figures began their notable inclination as industrialisation began to perpetually inhibit the Welsh land. Welsh industrialisation arose much more rapidly than in England and this is an important factor to consider when reflecting on the social problems that industrialisation caused. Industrialisation in England was a slow growth which extended over almost 2 centuries. The economic and most importantly, social changes in Wales were hasty, and considerably more intrusive on the idyllic lifestyle that the Welsh people were accustomed to. In early nineteenth century Wales, the majority of the population habitually spoke Welsh. The language was predominant in all aspects of Welsh life: the workplace, in the home and even in places of worship. It seems that in 19th century Wales, Welsh monoglottism was custom and bilingualism was the exclusion. This monolingual tradition had been around for centuries prior to the industrial revolution. Languages are a very important part of a person’s identity and early modern Welsh people held their language in high esteem. Dr John Davies claimed in 1621 that the Welsh language was “in a thoroughly healthy condition, almost totally unblemished and uncorrupted.” Nevertheless, industrialisation pushed its way into Wales at a time where the population was largely increasing. Wales’s population had increased by 135% within a few centuries and there was already a significant amount of movement both in and out of the country due to migration. Englishmen began making their way into the heart of the Welsh Valley, and they were shortly followed by Irish and Scottish migrants who fled their own nations due to terrible famines. Migrants were not strictly British either, some even travelled from various parts of the British Empire as far as India. These migration and emigration developments can be largely associated with the dawn of the railway age. People simply learned to be become more mobile and found that these innovative railway systems no longer necessarily grounded them to their traditional homesteads. As historian, Dai Smith commented on the matter of railways, “you can have countries without maps but you can’t have nations without railways.” The new era of transport was crucial to the dispersion of industrial developments to the Welsh land. Not only did it bring industry, but it was an important factor in the creation of the nation. This particular outcome of industrialisation could be seen as a positive effect as it brought the world’s attention to the sleepy Gwerin and later identified Wales as an essential feature of the British Empire. The Welsh iron trade became particularly important to the overall effect of Welsh industrialisation. The Welsh iron industry hurled Wales into the industrial economy with phenomenal effects and between 1796 and 1846, Merthyr’s iron export production increased from a reasonable 16,000 tons to over 200,000 tons. As written by the Morning Chronicle in 1850: “Just as Manchester came to epitomise industrialisation in England, so Merthyr rapidly came to symbolise the transformation in Wales.” This immense increase in production obviously meant that more workers were needed in order to keep up with material demands. Iron wasn’t the only industry that Wales operationalized, the South Wales coalfields were the richest, covering an area more than a thousand square miles and in 1870, coal production surpassed thirteen million tons and more than half of that coal was taken by the railway system and ordained for the export trade. Consequently, immigrant workers flocked to the mining areas in search of work mostly coming from within Britain from places such as Ireland, the English Midlands and of course Scotland. In 1801 the population of Monmouthshire was 45,000, a hundred years later it had increased to 450,000 and this was the result of heavy industrialisation. The flood of immigrants inundated the native Welsh speaking residents and in many districts of South Wales the old language became a distant memory. At this stage it would be fictitious to say that the industrial revolution was beneficial to the Welsh language. Urbanisation and industrialisation were not popular among all Welsh and there were those that historically spoke out against it. Most notably of them all perhaps is historian, Welsh poet and political activist, Saunders Lewis. Lewis was very much a Welsh Nationalist and his views on non-integration were extremely passionate. Lewis greatly feared a bilingual Wales and regarded the decline in monoglot Welsh speakers as a “tragedy”, “We cannot therefore aim at anything less than to annihilate English in Wales...It is bad, and wholly bad, that English is spoken in Wales. It must be deleted from the land called Wales”. It has to be said that Lewis’s words are a little farfetched. Even though by 1911, English was seen as the language of progress and Welsh had become the minority language, 43% of the population still spoke Welsh. Certainly, this does show a substantial decrease which is largely linked to the arrival of industry but to ‘annihilate’ the English language from Wales would have been detrimental to Wales’s growth as a nation. Interestingly, Lewis also believed that “Agriculture should be the chief industry of Wales and the basis of its civilization”. In this statement, it appears as though Lewis’s emotional state has interfered with his sense. Regardless of the revolutions negative impact on the Welsh language, it catapulted Wales into modernisation: an inevitable development. Solely relying on its agricultural vocation, Wales would have sunk into the same state that Ireland practically drowned in. When the Welsh population was doubling, the Irish was halving due to starvation as a result of the Great Famine that plagued the country. Albeit the population decrease was partly because of indentured servants leaving Ireland for a more prosperous life in America, and some were indeed voluntary migrants. During that period Ireland not only had to deal with the loss of half of its entire population but the culturally devastating realisation that only 20% of its Gaelic people remained. Wales suffered no such losses and benefited greatly from the economic boom. Welsh culture seemed to thrive and many migrants took up the common vernacular in order to converse with their newly made Welsh colleagues and friends. The migrants seemed to enjoy the friendly, cheerful nature of the Welsh and it has to be noted that there were Welsh people who began to appreciate the flexibility of the English tongue and the benefits of learning it and this naturally led to a fair decrease in Welsh monoglot speakers. Still, nothing compared to the Gaelic Irish or the Scottish Highlanders. Historian, Philip Jones notes that industrialisation wasn’t a saviour straightforwardly as it did contribute to a bilingual society and certain areas such as South Wales became more anglicised. A positive outcome of the Welsh industrialisation is that it highlighted Welsh patriotism: not since the 1700s had the Welsh shown so much passion. The Welsh Department of the Board of Education was founded in 1907 and a group of Welsh nationalist formed the political party, Plaid Cymru which is still at work today. This gave the Welsh their own identity amongst parliament for the first time in history and established Wales as more than working class land. Another aspect of welsh nationalism brought about by industrialisation is the recognition of Welsh as an official language enforced by the Welsh Language Act in 1967. The act demanded that Welsh be treated equally with English and secured the languages future for those who sought to keep it. In 1988 the Welsh Language board was established and this assisted in the re-birth of the nation. National identity had never been so high and museums, a university and libraries were positive outcomes. Cultural expression in the form of eisteddfods became more significant and meaningful to those who partook and this re-birth even spread as far as Welsh television programmes. Wales had finally placed themselves on the map and were no longer the sleepy principality at the edge of Britain. A little off point perhaps but relevant to the re-birth of Wales, renowned author, J.R Tolkien became fascinated with the Welsh language after he saw it written on the side of a Welsh coal truck that arrived in England when he was a child. The native language itself would later become the basis for Tolkien’s linguistic invention that appeared in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, perhaps something that would never have happened if not for industrialisation and what would the world be without The Lord of the Rings? Overall, considering the scale of industrialisation and Welsh involvement in this, it doesn’t seem logical to believe that the Welsh language could have fully survived such social change. Was it really possible to save something that was inevitably going to decline at any rate? Modernisation had struck Wales as it had always threatened to do however it secured so much more than it lost. The surge of patriotism that was sparked by the industrial revolution was necessary for the native tongue to ever survive. These nationalists such as Saunders Lewis secured a future for the Welsh language by generating nationalist opposition to a bilingual Wales. Even though the nationalists may have failed to completely eradicate the English tongue from the Welsh mind, they successfully made the welsh language important. Welsh is a compulsory subject in schools across Wales and Plaid Cymru are still a relevant political party today. Unlike the Gaelic language, the Welsh tongue did not die out and the language continues to grow each year. To say that industrialisation didn’t contribute to the decline of the Welsh language would be untrue but without the industrial revolution, Wales and its people would have suffered greatly: agriculture was becoming obsolete and it was essential that Wales kept up with the modern world. In conclusion, Industrialisation not only saved the Welsh language but the Welsh people too.

Bibliography

Evans, H.T (1924). Industrial History of Great Britain. London: The Eductional Publishing Company. 108-165.

Hooker, Mark T (2012). Tolkien and Welsh, Tolkien a Chymraeg. England: CreateSpace. 20-60.

Jenkins, Geraint H. (1997). The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1-289.

Jenkins, Geraint H. (2000). The Welsh Language and its Social Domains. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 1-151.

Smith, Dai, Wales! Wales?
Strange, Keith (2005). Merthyr Tydfil Iron Metropolis. Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Limited. 7-22.
Williams, David (1950). Modern Wales. Great Britain: Butler and Tanner Ltd. 213-269.

Williams, Gwyn A. (1985). When Was Wales?. England: Black Raven Press. 47-141.

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[ 2 ]. Jenkins, Geraint H. “The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911”48
[ 3 ]. Jenkins, Geraint H. “The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911” pp47
[ 4 ]. Williams, David. “A History of Modern Wales.” p229
[ 5 ]. Jenkins, Geraint H. “The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911”.pp1
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[ 7 ]. Evans, H.T “Industrial History Of Great Britain” pp162
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[ 9 ]. Jenkins, Geraint H. “The Welsh Language and its Social Domains 1801-1911”.pp
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[ 12 ]. Strange, Keith. “Merthyr Tydfil Iron Metropolis” pp7
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[ 15 ]. Evans, H.T “Industrial History Of Great Britain” pp161
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[ 17 ]. Lewis, Saunders. “Y Ddraig Goch”
[ 18 ]. Lewis, Saunders. “Y Ddraig Goch”
[ 19 ]. Lewis, Saunders. “Y Ddraig Goch”
[ 20 ]. Williams, Gwyn A. “When Was Wales?” pp245
[ 21 ]. Williams, Gwyn A. “When Was Wales?” pp247
[ 22 ]. Hooker, Mark T. “Tolkien and Welsh, Tolkien a Chymraeg” pp25