The Welsh Language - A History (gnv64)

The Welsh Language: A History
by Janet Davies
University of Wales Press | March 2014 | ISBN-10: 1783160195 | True PDF | 192 pages | 18.1 mb
http://www.amazon.com/The-Welsh-Language-A-History/dp/1783160195

The existence of the Welsh-language can come as a surprise to those who assume that English is the foundation language of Britain. However, J. R. R. Tolkien described Welsh as the 'senior language of the men of Britain'. Visitors from outside Wales may be intrigued by the existence of Welsh and will want to find out how a language which has, for at least fifteen hundred years, been the closest neighbour of English, enjoys such vibrancy, bearing in mind that English has obliterated languages thousands of miles from the coasts of England. This book offers a broad historical survey of Welsh-language culture from sixth-century heroic poetry to television and pop culture in the early twenty-first century. The public status of the language is considered and the role of Welsh is compared with the roles of other of the non-state languages of Europe. This new edition of The Welsh Language offers a full assessment of the implications of the linguistic statistics produced by the 2011 Census. The volume contains maps and plans showing the demographic and geographic spread of Welsh over the ages, charts examining the links between words in Welsh and those in other Indo-European languages, and illustrations of key publications and figures in the history of the language. It concludes with brief guides to the pronunciation, the dialects and the grammar of Welsh.

CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii
List of Maps viii
Acknowledgements ix
The Welsh Language: A Personal Perspective xi
1 The Origins of Welsh 1
2 Welsh in the Early British Kingdoms 15
3 Welsh in the Middle Ages 23
4 From the Act of ‘Union’ to the Industrial Revolution 33
5 The Welsh Language in the Era of Industrialization 55
6 Welsh in the Later Nineteenth Century 69
7 Welsh in the First Half of the Twentieth Century 87
8 The Second World War and After 101
9 The Welsh Language Today 159
10 Welsh and the Other Non-State Languages of Europe 171
11 The Characteristics of Welsh 179
Postscript 189
Further Reading 191
Index 193