The Survival of a Language

The Welsh had faced considerable efforts by the English to persuade them to alter their way of thinking and speaking. The infamous Blue Books of the late 1840s were a gargantuan parliamentary report on the state of Wales in the late 1840s, which to cut a long story short, concluded that the twin evils hampering the progression of Wales were respectively, the Welsh language and its addiction to non-conformism. As quoted in the ‘The Story of Wales’ by John Gower, Jellinger Symons, the report asserted that:

The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales… It is not easy to over-estimate its evil effects…It dissevers the people from intercourse which would help advance their civilization, and bars the access of improving knowledge to their minds. As proof of this, there is no Welsh literature worthy of the name.

The newspaper, the Morning Chronicle, apparently went so far as to call for the total extinction of the language.

Hetty Jane Owen’s grandmother. From the Ancestry.com pages of ‘Bethany1321’

The heavy prevalence of printers and bookbinders in the family however provides us with a clue to the resistance of the North Welsh in the nineteenth century to such naked racism. The very strength and dominance of the Calvinist-Methodist movement generated demand for Bibles, hymn Books, catechisms, tracts, expositions, educational material and more in both English and Welsh. It is a fair guess that the printing and binding businesses of the Jones and Owen families were sustained at least to some extent by the hunger of their community for religious literature.

And walking the streets of Bala and elsewhere to this day, is to immerse oneself in the Welsh language, spoken by young and old alike, and a tribute to the survival skills of the Welsh people and their language.