New Geographies of Language: Language, Culture and Politics in Wales

New Geographies of Language: Welsh and English in Wales develops a new and comprehensive understanding of the geography of language, with a specific focus on the Welsh language. Academic studies of languages are relatively limited in number and they also tend to focus on particular aspects of language ability, use and tranmission/shift (REFS). Other studies focus solely on the policy and activist aspects of language use (REFS). The proposed book uses insights from Geography as a way of providing an alternative comprehensive account of language ability, language use and the responses made within public policy and by various activist groups to address language shift.

As well as advocating the need for a comprehensive appreciation of language ability, use and policy responses, the book’s main conceptual significance lies in its promotion of a novel understanding of the geographies of language. First, a geographical perspective – focus on issues of place, space, territory, mobility and so on – enables one to understand and explain the various processes affecting languages in relation to language ability, use or transmission/shift: out-migration and immigration; the significance of local and regional economies for language transmission; the development of place-based attachments; the micro-geographies of language use (e.g. on the playground and in the pub) and so on. Second, a geographical perspective allows one to develop a more nuanced interpretation of the policy and activist responses to changing language abilities and usages, as well as language transmission. Understandings of the development of policy assemblages, as well of the transfer and translation of public policy (e.g. from certain innovative linguistic milieux, such as Catalonia to places such as Wales), illustrate the need to understand how policies travel from one place to another, as well as the way in which they are developed and become accepted and embedded within particular locales, while being rejected from others. Third, a geographical perspective has the potential to allow one to develop novel techniques for responsing to language change/shift. Work on behaviour change has shown how a manipulation of the decision-making environments experienced by individuals within a whole range of policy contexts has the potential to lead to innovative and effective policy solutions (e.g. Jones et al 2013). New Geographies of Language will provide the first academic account of the potential effectiveness of using these new insights as a way of addressing language change/shift.