> Is this really true ? Having been born and brought up in the second largest > city in Wales (Swansea) during the 70's and 80's I have to say that I hear > Welsh spoken so rarely that I would be inclined to say that maybe 5% of > people in Swansea (population about 180,000 I think) speak Welsh. At the > age of 16 my family moved to Newport, where Welsh seems even thinner on > the ground. If Welsh is so rarely spoken in two of the largest cities in > Wales, there must be areas (presumably mid and North) where very high > percentages of people speak Welsh to give a 25 % average. Does anyone > have any more statistics on the percentages of the population who speak > Welsh ? > Justin Fackrell jwaf@ee.ed.ac.uk Most sources seem to agree on about 18-20% Welsh speakers in Wales, although S4C did a survey a year or two back suggesting as many as 50+% of Welsh people understood Welsh - although they must have used a very broad definition of what "understanding" Welsh means in order to get such a high figure. The question of definition of a Welsh speaker is important in considering the figures. Also there is the question of the opportunities available for speaking Welsh - in the mainly English-speaking large towns and cities there fairly large numbers of Welsh-speakers, but who have few opportunities to speak Welsh in their day-to-day lives. My grandfather moved to Newport from North Wales before WWII - until then he was a monoglot Welsh-speaker. He used to go to the Welsh church in Newport to find Welsh-speakers (mainly teachers from Welsh-speaking parts of Wales) as he was never very comfortable in English. There are also parts of Wales where over 90% of the population speak Welsh as their first language. To get a clearer picture, there is a recent book by Prof. Harold Carter of the University of Wales which gives an interpretation of the language situation following the most recent (1991) census. Ar o+l dweud hyn i gyd, mae rhaid i fi ddweud fy mod i'n ffindo dadlau am gyflwr yr iaith yn hynod o ddiflas, ac rhywbeth i'w osgoi ar bob cyfrif! Michael Morgan, Heythrop College, Univ. London