SURVIVAL OF MINORITY LANGUAGES

The socio-linguistic explanation would seem to involve Indo-European spreading into territory that had been more extensively non-Indo-European speaking at an earlier date, with peaceful adoption rather than conquest and replacement of the population. It would also involve Iberian and Basque-speaking people of a wider region in ancient times learning Indo-European by putting the stamp of the Basque and Iberian languages on the form of Indo-European that was spoken. Indo-European would thus have been turned into the Celtic that we find attested in pre-Roman times and the Celtic languages that still live on today. One of the reasons that we are interested in the Basque Country in Wales of course is that it’s not just the question of the origin of the Celtic languages and possible ancient prehistoric contacts with the ancient form of the Basque language. Their later history is of course in many ways similar and parallel and we can learn something from studying how the Basque language survived through the Roman occupation in much the same way that the Celtic languages in Britain and on parts of the Continent survived through Roman occupation. What we have here is a story of cultural survival resilience; in other words, we have something to learn from common experience there and then down into modern times of course. These questions of language policy, education, how minority languages are going to make their way, find their own traditions and find a future for themselves in Europe and the modern world today. The tomography, the statistics, language policy, education policy and so on between the Basque Country and Wales are quite similar. They are countries of approximately the same size and population, similar numbers of students and so on, similar numbers of learners and speakers of the older language, so there’s much to be gained from cultural exchanges between Wales and the Basque Country. (2’35”)