24th language or dud?
I guess that everybody is proud of their own language, after all, languages contain millennia of a people’s history, culture and identity; it may come as no surprise then that the Welsh Nationalist Party Plaid Cymru and the Welsh Labour Party, are currently at loggerheads over the future status of the Welsh language.
Jill Evans, a Plaid Cymru MEP has called repeatedly for the Welsh language to be granted official status as the 24th official language of the EU; Wales currently has four MEP’s elected to the EU Parliament. A major sticking point here though is that to bring this proposal into fruition would entail a cost of over half a million pounds. Welsh Labour MEP Eluned Morgan has stated that such an expenditure would be of greater benefit to the Welsh language if it were to be spent upon the establishment of ‘grassroots’ projects to promote the Welsh language…the whole proposal has currently been blocked on economic grounds.
This, of course, re-kindles several old arguments regarding minority languages: should the Welsh language be afforded such a status within the EU when it is only spoken by a minority (currently 18% of the total population) within its own homeland and when the de-facto language of Wales is actually English?
What do you think?