> >Pour repondre a votre question, a propos des raisons poussant a employer >l'anglais pour ecrire a cette liste, j'ai de multiples reponses : Personally, none of the reasons you mentioned applies to my situation. I can understand French well enough to respond, but certainly not well enough to compose understandable messages in it. However, I think that the question of English on WELSH-L in some sense begs the question. The charter of this list is to provide a medium for people to exchange messages in Welsh and to discuss issues related to the Welsh language. For this reason, I (and many others on the list) consider the preferred language on WELSH-L to be Welsh. Here is my ranking of the preference towards languages on this list: 1. Welsh 2. Breton/Cornish 3. English 4. Any other language including Gaelic and French The history of this list is such as to tolerate messages in categories 3 and 4 only if they involve direct discussion of the Welsh language, culture, or geography. Some discussion of Celtic mythology, origins, and so on is occasionaly tolerated but not really approved (people interested in such discussions are pointed towards CELTIC-L). It is encouraged but not required for those posting messages in Welsh to provide either a translation or a synopsis in English for the benefit of those who are in the earlier stages of learning Welsh. If you or anyone else wants to discuss the Welsh language in any language, I don't think there would be any objection to your doing that. If you post a message in French asking questions that I understand and can answer about Welsh, I'll be glad to answer, though my answers will be in either English or Welsh. I think your second answer about the number of francophiles also applies. Like it or not, it is overwhelmingly likely that anyone on the net who is interested in speaking/learning Welsh speaks English. Below are the access statistics for my Welsh course by country. I am counting each unique host once below, regardless of how many accesses were made by that host. The number of hosts approximates the number of unique users, and counting each host only once measures interest in the course rather than ability to use the course (which is in English) and so should eliminate some of the English bias. ---- Country statistics (by hosts): ---- * United States 960 * United Kingdom 298 Germany 47 Netherlands (Holland) 40 + Canada 37 * Australia 36 France 35 Switzerland 26 Sweden 19 Finland 18 Italy 11 Norway 9 Japan 9 * New Zealand 8 * Ireland, Rep. of (Eire) 7 Austria 5 Spain 5 Denmark 4 Brazil 3 Belgium 3 Hungary 2 Iceland 2 * South Africa, Rep. of 2 Mexico 2 * Canal Zone (Panama) 1 Korea, Rep. of (South) 1 Hrvatska (Croatia) 1 Slovenia 1 Luxembourg 1 Poland 1 C.I.S. (Former U.S.S.R.) 1 Turkey 1 Ecuador 1 Singapore, Rep. of 1 Total: 34 countries for 1598 hosts Of these, I assume that those in the countries I have marked with * have an excellent command of English. I'll assume conservatively that 2/3 of those in Canada also speak English. Thus, the percentage of English speakers among those on the net interested in Welsh is conservatively approximated to be 84%. Even if we counted all of France, Switzerland, and Canada as French speakers, this quantity still totals only 6%. --Mark