The Welsh Language
It was only around 1900, as the cosmopolitan population of the south Wales coalfield (at that time the powerhouse of the British Empire) reached its peak, that the linguistic balance in Wales tipped in favour of English. Even at that date about half the population still spoke Welsh, and well into the nineteenth century the overwhelming percentage of the population had been monoglot Welsh speakers, although the English language that had developed following the Norman conquest through the fusion of Saxon and Norman culture had, virtually from its inception, been the language first of English settlers and then of the anglicized gentry and the professional and middle classes of Wales. The period between the two World Wars saw a precipitous decline in Welsh speakers, but this slowly bottomed out in the postwar period, and by today a reasonably stable fifth of the population is now fully bilingual. Around the half million in number, these Welsh speakers are sufficient to sustain a vigorous culture that can boast its own Television Channel, its own modest "film industry", a lively pop scene and a thriving literary culture which continues to capitalize on the energies released during the remarkable Welsh language literary renaissance during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The language is therefore at once "ancient" and modern, "worn new" (as Edward Thomas, a poet of Welsh descent put it) by the abrasive processes of recent historical changes.
The roots of Welsh go back some 2000-3000 years, to the Brittonic branch of the Celtic language (Goidelic - that gave rise to modern Irish - being another branch). Welsh itself originated during the period 400-700 CE, and was the product of a fusion of the original Britonic with the Latinate culture that was the legacy of the collapse in Britain of the Roman Empire. The emergence of Welsh was synonymous with the making of a new people in the West of Britain - the Welsh (Cymry), roughly translated as "comrades; a people bonded together in resistance to the "foreign" threat from Saxon and Viking, who in turn regarded these native inhabitants as foreigners and styled them so, using a word that was eventually to provide the root of the word "Welsh".