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NON-VIOLENCE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WELSH LANGUAGE SOCIETY, 1962-c. 1974 THE Celtic nations on the western periphery of Europe have long enjoyed a distinctive identity, which in recent decades has fast been eroded as these areas become increasingly integrated in the social, economic and political life of their respective states. Eire alone has an independent government, whilst Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany each form part of a larger multi- ethnic polity, the United Kingdom and France respectively. Concern within these peripheral regions for the preservation of their national or regional culture and heritage has expressed itself in a variety of ways and has led to the formation of a number of social movements. The aim of this article is to provide an analysis of the methods used by one such movement, the Welsh Language Society, for the pro- motion of the national culture of Wales. More specifically, its aim is to concentrate on the effects of the adoption of non-violence as a social movement tactic in the development of a dynamic pressure group within Welsh Nationalism, namely the Welsh Language Society. LANGUAGE CLEAVAGE: A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE The politicization of language-related tensions is a process well documented in the literature of the social sciences.2 Traditionally attention has been focussed on the institutional arrangements devised to accommodate linguistic differences in such well-researched cases as Canada, Belgium and Switzerland.3 In such studies, language is often used as a surrogate for a more general notion of culture, and we 1 This article is based on a paper delivered to the Political Studies Association work group on United Kingdom Politics, at the University of Strathclyde, September 1976. 1 should like to thank Professor K. Westhues of the University of Waterloo, and Mr. Peter Stead, University College of Swansea, for their comments on an earlier draft prepared whilst the author was a recipient of an English-Speaking Union Scholarship at the University of Western Ontario. See, for example, W. R. Keech, 'Linguistic Diversity and Political Conflict', Comparative Politics, April 1972, pp. 387-404, and Arend Lijphart, 'Linguistic Fragmentation and other dimensions of cleavage: a comparision of Belgium, Canada and Switzerland', a paper presented at the Ninth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Montreal, August 1973. For work on the Language issue in Canada, see Richard J. Joy, Languages in Conflict (Toronto, 1971); the five volumes of the Report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Ottawa, 1969); also the three volumes of the Report of the Commission into the Position of the French language in Quebec (Quebec, 1972); and the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Official Languages (Ottawa). For the Belgian situation, see Val Lorwin, 'Linguistic Pluralism and Political Tension in Modem Belgium', in J. A. Fishman, Advances in the Sociology of Language (The Hague, 1972.). For the Swiss case, see K. D. Mcrae, Switzerland: Example of Cultural Coexistence (Toronto, 1964).