Member-only story
I speak Welsh.
These days that means I speak a useless language that nobody thinks is cool, fashionable or worth saving. But the history of my country’s language is filled with times when it was not only not useful, but downright illegal.
The Welsh NOT
In the 18th and 19th Century, children at school were punished for speaking Welsh. English was considered the standard for education.
A piece of wood inscribed with the letters ‘WN’ would be hung around the child’s neck until they heard a classmate speak in Welsh. Whoever was left with it at the end of the day would be beaten.
For some areas of Wales, this persisted until the 1930s and 1940s.
Unfortunately, my country was not the only place to implement strict rules about language.
Hougenfuda — 方言札 Japan
Dialect Cards were present in several areas of Japan in the post-Meiji period as the government struggled to make everyone speak a standard form of Japanese. This eradicated local languages for Okinawa, Kyushu and later, Tohoku.
