Welsh Journals

compilation. Information on artists is not conveniently recorded for the researcher. The notorious unreliability of artists in answering letters and providing accurate information about themselves doubtless created difficulties and could have caused inaccuracies and omissions. The author's wide brief must have produced a chaotic situation, to which Kirstine Dunthorne has brought order; she has produced a book which the reviewer would certainly have found useful when working on recent exhibitions of contemporary art in Wales. SHELAGH HOURAHANE Aberystwyth LINGUISTIC MINORITIES IN WESTERN EUROPE. By Meic Stephens. Gomer Press, Llandyssul, 1976. Pp. xxxv, 796. £ 9.50. There are over fifty linguistic minorities in western Europe, and their cultural and political situation is here set down in a compendium of over eight hundred pages. The writer is, as he disarmingly concedes, 'neither a professional historian nor a qualified socio-linguist [but] a Welshman of socialist convictions who supports the nationalist movement in my own country' (p. xvi). The account takes us from Cornish, with no native speakers, and the language almost limited to holiday camps and an activist's children reading Celtic studies at Oxbridge, to Catalan with five million speakers, but still little official recognition. The comparatively familiar but still little under- stood cases of Belgium, Brittany, Wales, Ireland, Norway and Switzerland are treated alongside Germans, Occitans, Lapps, Finns, Sorbs (Sorbs?). In a few areas, notable Schleswig, comparative harmony reigns; in most, discontent ranges from the mild and passive to the sharp and active. Wales is to be found somewhere along that line. The subject is a worthy one, and the treatment useful. Much basic infor- mation has been assembled industriously and set out in a clear style. There are good accounts of recent activity by protesters and governments, and in some cases, where the writer's firsthand experience is relevant, the real nature of linguistic problems, tensions and aspirations is well conveyed. The observer's own commitment on the whole helps him to present a sympathetic but well-grounded account. There is a great deal of information here, conveyed with a light touch. However, a different approach might have been more valuable. As a com- pendium and guide the book could have been briefer and more accessible, with a clear structure of sections and signposting. But the material presented here deserves much fuller discussion, reflection, assessment, above all comparative analysis. This would require from the writer a sure footing in at least three major branches of scholarship, and a special scepticism towards the self-justification of governments and the self- righteousness of language movements. Mr. Stephens does not obtrude his own stance; this is not at all a polemical book. Yet the simple integrity of that stance in the end leaves