Briefly, I live in a broadly bilingual country (Wales of course) that has a ratio of 1 Welsh speaker (very old language, older than English) in every 6 Welsh people. I don\'t speako the lingo (though I can identify words, phrases and stuff in converstaion) but I get annoyed with majority languages (in our case English) being used like a bludgeon to batter minority languages. Even now in Wales some companies (both big and small) try to ban Welsh (Cymraeg to give it its proper name) being spoken in the confines of the workplace. Thomson\'s - a travel agent - tried it recently and got a right pasting for it. A Tesco tried it up in Caernarfon if I remember correctly, and they got promptly twatted as well. The biggest culprits (unsurprisingly) are incomers who own hotels in the resort towns. Invariably these people are English and have a paranoia that the Welsh being spoken between Welsh people is always about them, hence not speaking in English. This will then escalate and end up with the hotel owner banning Welsh and then the press get involved and the locals go ape again (quite rightly).
To go a step further, England (and by England I mean the monarchy of England or Parliament at different times) has tried to do a proper job on Wales and the Welsh language historically. In the late 1700\'s and then the 1800\'s, under government rule, law courts were made to operate only in English in an attempt to kill the language off. This was one method anyway. Other methods included English-only in schools and a Welsh Not that was a piece of wood that would be hung round the neck by rope and it had the word NOT written on it. Whenever a child spoke Welsh it was put round that child\'s neck. It\'s an utterly shit thing to do to a country and a language and kids.
I\'ll make that point again though about what I mean by England - I mean Monarchy and parliament. And the gentry actually. They raped our country of minerals for wealth and paid us f*ck all. But that\'s the way things work. No point being bitter about it when you can make your home a better place in the present
Rant over.
