"Welsh first" bilingual signs in South Wales

[Mark Hewitt]

I think it should be more targeted and distinctive. There's no reason for everything to be bilingual and it should be promoted in areas where it is relevent to the local population. They need to realise Chepstow and Caernarfon are different places with different needs. Gaelic seems to be much better targeted in this regard.

Getting back to roads, I would like to see bilingual signs, but using a different font or colour. Most of the supplimentary text could be English only (particaully in English prirority areas) which would reduce massive amounts of signage clutter. These things are for safety after all, and English is the universally understood language.

That kind of targetting, like in Finland does not work, and actually is counterproductive on the comprehension side.

The plan is long term in Scotland to roll these signs out across the country.

Then you're back to the politics of it. Scotland wants to roll out Gaelic road signs even in non-gaelic regions not for any particular concern over those who may not be able to read the signs but as part of it's identity, it wants to say "We are not England, we are not the same", and I don't have any issue with that - the only question is just how much money is spent on that endeavour?

[exiled]

Then you're back to the politics of it. Scotland wants to roll out Gaelic road signs even in non-gaelic regions not for any particular concern over those who may not be able to read the signs but as part of it's identity, it wants to say "We are not England, we are not the same", and I don't have any issue with that - the only question is just how much money is spent on that endeavour?

Of course it is politics, but at the same time Gaelic is a) an official language alongside English, and b) the Scottish Government have a responsibility in Scottish law and the devolution acts, to develop and increase its usage.

There was a stink and there still is over the placement of Gaelic on the railway station name signs, which was done by the franchisee as part of a station refit programme so no extra money was spent. Often when it comes to minority languages, the UK is not an exception, the complaints are often more of the 'I don't speak it, so I don't want to see or hear it.'

[Mark Hewitt]

Often when it comes to minority languages, the UK is not an exception, the complaints are often more of the 'I don't speak it, so I don't want to see or hear it.'

Yes, although personally I think the inclusion of other languages is only a positive thing. It's great in a foreign holiday resort hearing all kinds of languages around you. But we (as humans) tend to prefer our own kind.

[Viator]

However, is the one size fits all plan the best approach and wouldn't a system like the one in Finland be better?

The Finnish system was looked at for Scotland and rejected. It is tokenism, and where there are two official language the recommendations internationally are the one size, consistent approach.

By "the Finnish system" I take it you are referring to the quadripartite

-- Language 1 monolingual
-- Language 2 monolingual
-- Language 1+2 bilingual
-- Language 2+1 bilingual

system?

With regard to the choice and use of fonts, however, Finland (unlike Scotland) is totally in line with the recommendation to use one font at one size and weight (and with the same choice of colours) regardless of language.

[exiled]

However, is the one size fits all plan the best approach and wouldn't a system like the one in Finland be better?

The Finnish system was looked at for Scotland and rejected. It is tokenism, and where there are two official language the recommendations internationally are the one size, consistent approach.

By "the Finnish system" I take it you are referring to the quadripartite

-- Language 1 monolingual
-- Language 2 monolingual
-- Language 1+2 bilingual
-- Language 2+1 bilingual

system?

With regard to the choice and use of fonts, however, Finland (unlike Scotland) is totally in line with the recommendation to use one font at one size and weight (and with the same choice of colours) regardless of language.

Yup, and then of course you have Belgium....

[A9NWIL]

I get the impression a lot of Welsh is a politically correct box ticking exercise that applies to all regardless of situation or relevance

I can understand why the vast resources ploughed into the language have been met with an apathethic reaction by most

Indeed the BBC picks up on the language decline here
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-wales-3 ... h-speakers

I think it should be more targeted and distinctive. There's no reason for everything to be bilingual and it should be promoted in areas where it is relevent to the local population. They need to realise Chepstow and Caernarfon are different places with different needs. Gaelic seems to be much better targeted in this regard.

Getting back to roads, I would like to see bilingual signs, but using a different font or colour. Most of the supplimentary text could be English only (particaully in English prirority areas) which would reduce massive amounts of signage clutter. These things are for safety after all, and English is the universally understood language.

If reducing sign clutter is what you want then:

http://www.metric.org.uk/sites/default/ ... igns10.jpg

[Owain]

My dislike of the usage of the same font applies more to supermarkets than to roads, as implied above. This is because in a supermarket I'm looking for something that is unlikely to be as recognisable in Welsh as a place name.

Nearly all of the supermarkets I use (in the Swansea Valley) -- Tesco, Co-op etc. -- get around that by having the Welsh in the same font but much bigger lettering! Thus:

Cig
Meat

So, if you don't recognize any of the Welsh words, just concentrate on the smaller writing...

In all seriousness, I think that would be better than having two identical fonts that are the same size:

1) the brain seems to train itself to look for certain things in certain contexts (e.g. speed cameras!), so non-Welsh speakers like me would soon get used to ignoring the big stuff and focusing on the small

2) it might even help non-speakers like me to become more familiar with the terms in Welsh, so that after time we would think nothing of looking for Coffi in the big text than Coffee in the small

Everybody wins!

[Mark Hewitt]

Having both in the same font, colour and size is probably the worst system you could come up with, especially if they swap repeatedly between top and bottom.

As said we train ourselves to look for certain things, so in Scotland it could be the green/yellow text instead of the black/white but having both in the same size decreases legibility.

Airports are a good example of this where the signage is usually uniform in having each language in a chosen colour.

[Bryn666]

Agreed, regardless of the politics of it, the Scottish system has the right idea.

Even in Britanny different typefaces are used.

[Owain]

Airports are a good example of this where the signage is usually uniform in having each language in a chosen colour.

Quite - Italian airports have Italian in BIG ORANGE FONT over the top of English, in small white font. The distinction is clear, and you get used to looking for the one you understand*.

*There was a time when I didn't understand the Italian, and was dependent upon the English.

[Mark Hewitt]

Airports are a good example of this where the signage is usually uniform in having each language in a chosen colour.

Quite - Italian airports have Italian in BIG ORANGE FONT over the top of English, in small white font. The distinction is clear, and you get used to looking for the one you understand*.

*There was a time when I didn't understand the Italian, and was dependent upon the English.

Probably OT, but, quite a few years ago now, when I visited Zurich being in Switzerland I'd expected everything to be bilingual, and indeed most things were, but what I'd expected was German and French, what I got was German and English!

[Owain]

Probably OT, but, quite a few years ago now, when I visited Zurich being in Switzerland I'd expected everything to be bilingual, and indeed most things were, but what I'd expected was German and French, what I got was German and English!

English is the lingua franca, no matter how inappropriate that term might be!

[Mark Hewitt]

Probably OT, but, quite a few years ago now, when I visited Zurich being in Switzerland I'd expected everything to be bilingual, and indeed most things were, but what I'd expected was German and French, what I got was German and English!

English is the lingua franca, no matter how inappropriate that term might be!

Yes; and I've no doubt that the use of French in the German parts of Switzerland would carry with it political baggage, whereas English is much more neutral. La Linuga Pura?

[bothar]

Then you're back to the politics of it. Scotland wants to roll out Gaelic road signs even in non-gaelic regions not for any particular concern over those who may not be able to read the signs but as part of it's identity, it wants to say "We are not England, we are not the same", and I don't have any issue with that - the only question is just how much money is spent on that endeavour?

Directional signs are never really or the benefit of locals, who know perfectly well which road goes where.
This is one reason that bad signs are never changed, as no local is ever going to complain to their local councillor about it.

[exiled]

Probably OT, but, quite a few years ago now, when I visited Zurich being in Switzerland I'd expected everything to be bilingual, and indeed most things were, but what I'd expected was German and French, what I got was German and English!

English is the lingua franca, no matter how inappropriate that term might be!

Yes; and I've no doubt that the use of French in the German parts of Switzerland would carry with it political baggage, whereas English is much more neutral. La Linuga Pura?

Belgium is similar. It helps thae English had close ties to both Dutch and French.

[rhyds]

English is the universally understood language.

What you have to bear in mind is that Welsh and English are, by law, totally equal. I'm equally confident in both Welsh and English, but I wouldn't be happy at all if Welsh was left off signs, because roads signage, like official forms, are the government (either national or local) talking to you. I expect to be able to have that conversation in the language I want, which is usually Welsh. Just because I can understand English doesn't mean I always want to use it, and by and large I don't have to.

Or, to put it another way...

The Government are more than happy to ask for my taxes in Welsh, so they should bally well spend some of it on Welsh signage!

[exiled]

The Government are more than happy to ask for my taxes in Welsh, so they should bally well spend some of it on Welsh signage!

Me gusta.

[Ambosc79]

Probably OT, but, quite a few years ago now, when I visited Zurich being in Switzerland I'd expected everything to be bilingual, and indeed most things were, but what I'd expected was German and French, what I got was German and English!

English is the lingua franca, no matter how inappropriate that term might be!

I made that mistake in Zurich too- I only know a little German (and it's not Swiss German) so I assumed French was the next most understood language. No, it was English- hardly anyone speaks French there. In Basel however everyone could speak French, despite it being a German-speaking city; it's much closer to France and French Switzerland than Zurich is.

Belgium- well my favourite tale from there involved somebody who was French-speaking being buried in a Dutch area. The local authority wouldn't allow the epitaph to be written in French, his family wouldn't allow it to be in Dutch. A grave situation indeed. In the end they hit on one language acceptable to both sides- Latin

[Jim606]

I think it should be more targeted and distinctive. There's no reason for everything to be bilingual and it should be promoted in areas where it is relevant to the local population. They need to realise Chepstow and Caernarfon are different places with different needs. Gaelic seems to be much better targeted in this regard. Getting back to roads, I would like to see bilingual signs, but using a different font or colour. Most of the supplementary text could be English only (particularly in English priority areas) which would reduce massive amounts of signage clutter. These things are for safety after all, and English is the universally understood language.

This is the line I would take I'd made it specific to specific area. A targeted approach.

The plan is long term in Scotland to roll these signs out across the country. Then you're back to the politics of it. Scotland wants to roll out Gaelic road signs even in non-gaelic regions not for any particular concern over those who may not be able to read the signs but as part of it's identity, it wants to say "We are not England, we are not the same", and I don't have any issue with that - the only question is just how much money is spent on that endeavour?

The situation in Scotland is a bit different for several reasons. Firstly why the obsession with Gaelic signage in southern Scotland which is somewhere the language hasn't been spoken for generations. Surely, it would make more sense to have bilingual signage in lowland Scots?

This article from the Guardian provides an interesting overview / personal account of many of the current issues;
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ing-gaelic

Anyone who lives in a big British city got used long ago to the idea of English as one local language among many: the opening hours of the radiotherapy unit posted in Punjabi, Turkish, Somali and Bengali, the mobile callers on the bus who speak to fellow migrants from Tirana, Vilnius, Lagos and Kraków, or to their families who still live there. But the Welsh and Gaelic phrases on the passport are surprising. They don't answer to this present Britain. They exist in a more historical landscape, to redress old rural grievances rather than to express new metropolitan demands.

The European charter for regional or minority languages calls them "autochthonous", which strictly means native, but now also carries the suggestion of a language that's been displaced in importance by a more popular newcomer. Within the United Kingdom, the charter also recognises Cornish, Scots (aka Lallans), Irish Gaelic and Ulster Scots. The charter, which the UK ratified in 2001, asks that all be encouraged to survive. Two of them, Scots and Ulster Scots (aka Ullans), would be contested as languages separate from English or each other, and some might argue that Ullans was invented for purely political reasons, as a Protestant counterweight to the Irish Gaelic that was recognised by Northern Ireland's peace agreement. But then most language lobbies are as much political as cultural: at their most powerful, they have helped break up polyglot empires and kingdoms, and redrawn the boundaries of nation states.

Scotland has a complicated and sometimes uncertain linguistic story that includes Norse and the Northumbrian variant of Old English in the east, as well as the Gaelic that arrived with Irish migrants in the south-west, all of them eventually replacing a form of Celtic or Brittonic language that still survives in contemporary Welsh.

For five or six hundred years Gaelic did well and expanded aggressively across most of Scotland, but it began to lose the competition with Scots-English as early as the 13th century, and then began its long retreat to the Highlands. By 1755, Gaelic speakers numbered only 23% of the Scottish population, which had shrunk by 1901 to 4.5% and 100 years later to 1.2%. Today about 60,000 people speak it, most of them concentrated in the Western Isles, and all of them bilingual in English. Multiply that figure by five to get the number of Cantonese speakers in the UK, by 10 to reach Punjabi, by 20 to those who use Bengali, Urdu and Sylheti. These are conservative estimates for the UK as a whole, and take no account of many other migrant languages, including those from eastern Europe; but even if the comparison is confined to Scotland, it looks likely that the number of citizens who speak South Asian languages at least equal those who speak Gaelic. And yet, unlike Gaelic and Welsh, none of them has the protection of parliamentary acts and an expanding bureaucracy, nor has any been rewarded by a publicly subsidised television channel of its own.

The Gaelic lobbyist has a reasonable argument. Whatever happens in Britain, these other languages will continue to thrive in their original homelands. They aren't in danger of extinction, whereas, in the words of John Angus Mackay, the chief executive of the Gaelic development board (Bòrd na Gàidhlig): "If Gaelic is to survive, it will only survive in Scotland." But cultural preservation comes at an expense. The Scottish Review, a brave and lively online magazine, recently calculated that the annual £17m cost of the Gaelic channel, BBC Alba, meant that almost 30% of BBC Scotland's programme budget was devoted to slightly more than 1% of the Scottish population. People grumble about the BBC Scotland's "Teuchter [Highland] mafia" – four of its eight senior managers are Gaelic speakers – but the resentment is generally muted. Successive Scottish governments, anxious to stress an independent national identity, have made Gaelic a key feature of difference to England, and many would agree with Mackay that to care for a language that emigration and industrial economics so nearly wiped out is the mark of a civilised country.

And so Scotland is being Gaelicised, superficially and quite literally by tokens. The new Gaelic signs are what one notices most. For several years I thought they were merely local events, each individually explicable by their presence in or near the present boundaries of Gaeldom, or where tourists might see them ("Alba", for instance, on the boards at the border). But the plan is national because Gaelic has been designated a national language. Dual-language station nameboards, for example: eventually every Scottish station will have one, no matter how little the place was touched by Gaelic at any time in its history.

[exiled]

The plan is long term in Scotland to roll these signs out across the country. Then you're back to the politics of it. Scotland wants to roll out Gaelic road signs even in non-gaelic regions not for any particular concern over those who may not be able to read the signs but as part of it's identity, it wants to say "We are not England, we are not the same", and I don't have any issue with that - the only question is just how much money is spent on that endeavour?

The situation in Scotland is a bit different for several reasons. Firstly why the obsession with Gaelic signage in southern Scotland which is somewhere the language hasn't been spoken for generations. Surely, it would make more sense to have bilingual signage in lowland Scots?

This article from the Guardian provides an interesting overview / personal account of many of the current issues;
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ing-gaelic

That article is a prime example of 'i don't speak it, I don't want to see it or hear it' wrapped up in the 'there are more people who speak x' bow. He is objecting to the name of the state being written in Gaelic and Welsh on his passport. Bilingual signs only work when they are used across the widest extent. Those complaints about Gaelic or Welsh cluttering up the signs, adding complexity are not complaints about that. They are complaints about the existence of Gaelic or Welsh.