The battle to save a language
March 12th 2010 04:25
Well, so we thought.
One of the languages under threat of extinction is Welsh. It is a Celtic language spoken as a native tongue in Wales and, surprisingly, in a Welsh immigrant colony in the Chubut Valley in Patagonia.
British census figures from 1991 and 2001, and a Welsh Language Use Survey in 2004, show that usage of Welsh is in fact growing, but this is marginal and is largely due to a lot of government money and effort, including legislation introduced in 1993 giving Welsh equal status with English in the public sector in Wales.
It is not known if the law extends to Patagonia.
Another way the government has tried to generate public interest and knowledge of Welsh is to fund television programming in the language. Just last month, Channel 4 in Wales showed 890 programs in Welsh.
Television viewer figures just released show that 196 of them got a zero rating.
A zero rating does not mean that nobody watched them, although it could. Technically, it means those 196 programs were watched by fewer than 1,000 people.
At the other end, 139 of the 890 programs were watched by more than 10,000 viewers.
The Cardiff-based Channel 4 was launched by Gwynfor Evans, leader of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, after Evans threatened to starve himself to death if the station was not set up. Channel 4 receives 100 million pounds a year for Welsh-language programming.
With the release of the latest viewing figures, one television insider said the channel was failing viewers. "The cost per viewer must be absolutely astronomical," he said. "It would be cheaper to send every viewer a DVD."
Sometimes it's hard to save the things we love.
dailymail.co.uk
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