Sociolinguistic aspects of children’s Welsh

This chapter examines the acquisition of Welsh in its social and cultural context, with a particular focus on how Welsh being a minority language influences how children speak it. The primary perspective taken will be sociolinguistic, i.e. variation in children’s Welsh, where it occurs and what factors govern it. The chapter consists of an overview of relevant Welsh social history and a discussion of the current demographic and political situation of Welsh. There follows a review of literature on the linguistic effects of language contact between English as the dominant language on Welsh in the speech of children as well as adults, including discussions of code-switching and diachronic grammatical change. Next the chapter turns to examining the social factors that have been found to affect children’s acquisition of Welsh, especially language exposure and how this can vary considerably from child to child. Following this is a section which reviews one of the main methodological approaches that has been used to collect data in Welsh linguistics, namely corpus data, and considers some of the benefits and challenges that such a method provides for researching child language as well as directing readers to relevant corpora and making some recommendations on considerations for future corpora of children’s Welsh. The chapter concludes with ideas for future research directions in this field which the reader may find useful.