Welsh Journals

THE BRITISH CENSUS AND THE WELSH LANGUAGE. W.T.R. PRYCE Pryce, W.T.R. 1986: The British Census and The Welsh Language. Cambria, 13 (1) pp. 79 to pp. 100. Part III of Davies, W.K.D. (ed) Human Geography from Wjales: Proceedings of the E.G. Bowen Memorial Conference. ISSN 0306-9796. A survey of the variations on the amount of information provided by the British Census on the Welsh language from 1891 to 1981. Particular attention is paid to the spatial units used to aggregate the various data, to the potential sources of error in the tables and to the changing nature of official commentary on the numbers and spatial distribution of the Welsh speaking population. W.TJt. Pryce, The Open University in Wales, 24 Cathedral Road, Cardiff, Wales, U.K. CFI 9SA. It was not until 1926 that the first study of the distribution of the Welsh language by a professional geographer, Mr. Trevor Lewis (1926), appeared even though a few pioneering maps had been published in the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is significant that this was written in French but it is clear that this was the first piece of scientific writing on the geography of the Welsh language. However, as D. Trevor Williams (1937) was to point out a decade later, the mapped distributions related solely to the monoglot Welsh rather than, as later users of Lewis's map assumed, the total numbers able to speak the Welsh language, bilinguals as well as monoglots. Since that time there have been a large number of publications interpreting the Welsh language using the census returns as the principal data source. Many of these relate to just one particular census and restrict the discussion of changes to those occurring within the decades in which the study had been completed. This restriction probably stems from the fact that the census has continued to use a series of different spatial frameworks, related to immediate administrative considerations, for the presentation of results. This paper is based on a review of all the official reports and tabulations concerning the Welsh language that have ever appeared. In it the attitudes of census officials towards the Welsh language itself will be considered as well as the nature of the empirical data that they collected. To set the scene for the evolution of the historical information this review begins with a summary of the information available at the most recent dates in 1971 and 1981.