Welsh Journals

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5. THE DECAY OF A WELSH-SPEAKING STREET COMMUNITY: MIGRATION AND ITS RESIDUAL EFFECTS* D. Keri Rosser INTRODUCTION One of the recurring themes within both the political and social spheres in Wales in recent years has been the gradual erosion of the so-called 'Welsh Culture' and its subsequent effect on the language. In this context, emphasis has been placed on the deleterious consequences of the influx of large numbers of English people into predominantly Welsh-speaking rural areas, where the prices of properties have been far more compatible with the economic circumstances of these in- migrants than those of the indigenous population. However, since the advent of the industrial revolution, migration has been a familiar and continuous feature of life in Wales. The rapid industrialization of the nineteenth century resulted in an extensive internal movement away from the rural areas to the new industrial settlements; while the acute unemployment of the 1920s and 1930s accelerated an external migration trend which has continued almost to the present time, leaving Wales with a large ageing population, an erosion of its traditional culture and a decline in its number of Welsh speakers (Williams, 1977). Nowhere has the effect of migration been more apparent that in the decline and virtual demise of the gemeinschaft type of old Welsh- speaking communities which grew in the wake of industrialization and which formed the social and cultural fibre of the industrial towns occupying the coastal strip of south-west Wales. This chapter is concerned with one such local environment: a small street community. It examines the causes for, and the residual effect of, the out movement of a group of Welsh-speaking migrants over a period of 30 years.