Cymraeg i Bawb?

The recent Cymraeg i Bawb? inquiry held by the Senedd Cymru heard repeated testimony on a growing concern in Welsh language policy: that while many students gain the ability to speak Welsh, they don’t go on to use it outside or after school. As one witness, eminent researcher Bernadette O’Rourke, put it, Wales’ education system may be producing ‘potential’ speakers, but not necessarily ‘new’ speakers. 

A potential speaker is someone who can speak a language. As such, they’ve received instruction, have a degree of competency, and may even identify with the language, but they don’t regularly use it in their everyday lives. The term highlights a kind of linguistic passivity: an ability that exists but remains dormant. In contrast, a new speaker is someone who not only acquires a language outside of the home but also uses it actively. The terms here draws from sociolinguistic research across minority language contexts, particularly in Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Ireland, where education systems have produced large numbers of second-language speakers, many of whom go on to become active users of the language in adulthood. The gap between potential and new speakers, then, is not about fluency or grammatical correctness; it’s about activation. That is, the moment when language knowledge becomes part of a speaker’s life. And this, crucially, is where Wales appears to be struggling.

Why Doesn't Competence Lead to Use?

It’s tempting to assume that once someone has learnt a language, they’ll use it. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Many young people in Wales leave school with competence in the language but rarely speak it in adulthood; or if they do, it’s in highly limited ways. In testimony to the Cymraeg i Bawb? inquiry, scholars and practitioners warned that too many students emerge from school with “competence without context”. They may be able to speak, understand, read, and write in Welsh, and even feel emotionally connected to it, but when they step into adult life — whether in workplaces, relationships, or further education — Welsh is often absented. There is no easy place to use it, no expectation to speak it, and few social rewards for doing so. This reality is arguably softened by policy optimism: the belief that education alone can reverse language shift, a view that may be unrealistic but often essential to maintaining revitalisation momentum. But as experts like Bernadette O’Rourke, Rhian Hodges, and David Elias argued at the inquiry, education is not a self-sufficient engine of revitalisation. Without broader societal support, during and following education, including community spaces, workplace norms, and cultural visibility, the language learned in school risks fading into disuse.

English-medium Learners: An Overlooked Majority?

Much of the debate around Welsh-medium education rightly focuses on its successes and limitations in producing confident speakers. But it’s also worth asking: what about students in English-medium schools? These schools, where Welsh is typically taught as a second language, are the kind most students in Wales attend. When it comes to their effectiveness in creating potential Welsh speakers, there appears to be no single answer. Some learners leave with only basic Welsh and little motivation to continue. Others, however, emerge with a surprising degree of proficiency and emotional investment. I’ve met young people from English-medium backgrounds who speak Welsh with friends, follow Welsh TikTok creators, or even choose to study part of their college courses in Welsh. I count myself, arguably, among them. I attended an English-medium school and, like many, left with the ability to speak some Welsh but without the confidence or context to use it meaningfully. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I began to return to the language and slowly build a more active relationship with it. That experience has shaped how I think about potential speakers, and why it’s vital to recognise that Welsh language journeys are not always linear. They can, and do, pause, restart, and evolve across a lifetime.

Such cases are often treated as outliers, but they raise important questions. Are English-medium schools also producing potential Welsh speakers? If so, how many? And what happens to those individuals after they leave school? Unlike their Welsh-medium counterparts, these students often receive less policy attention, have fewer structured pathways to continue using Welsh, and may be more vulnerable to loss of confidence or disconnection. This variability is partly the result of two long-standing issues. First, it has never been entirely clear what English-medium education is supposed to achieve in terms of Welsh language development: is the goal basic competence, bilingualism, or the creation of new speakers? Without a clearly defined policy aim, schools are left to interpret this loosely or not at all. Second, the quality of Welsh language provision in English-medium schools is highly uneven. Some schools offer committed, innovative teaching that inspires learners; others struggle with staffing, timetabling, or institutional will. The result is fragmented and unpredictable outcomes. Whereas Welsh-medium or dual-stream schools typically offer a clearer trajectory into post-educational Welsh use, English-medium pathways are more variable, and remain significantly under-researched. While my current doctoral research does not focus on English-medium students specifically, these questions highlight an important area for future investigation. Understanding how and why some students from these settings go on to develop meaningful relationships with Welsh, despite limited structural support, could offer valuable insights for policy and pedagogy alike.

Stories, Shame, and Structural Gaps 

My interest in this issue began during my master’s research, which explored the barriers to continued engagement with Welsh after school among English-medium educated young people. That thesis suggests that even those with positive attitudes toward Welsh often struggled to maintain a meaningful connection to the language after leaving school. The findings highlighted a deeper fragility: Welsh learned in the classroom rarely carried over into adult life. Those of my participants who did maintain some connection to the language after school, did so for extrinsic reasons, like going on to teach Welsh themselves or pursuing employment opportunities where the language was valued.

I remember one participant who had gone on to study Welsh at A level, despite attending an English-medium school. They told me that after leaving school, their opportunities to use Welsh quickly shrank. At work, they rarely heard it spoken, and when the chance to use it did arise, their confidence had eroded to such an extent that they no longer felt it was worth the effort. Their descriptions to me were filled with embarrassment and self-blame, despite my efforts to reassure them that their experience was common and not a personal failure. What struck me most was how familiar those feelings were. I’ve felt that same embarrassment about my own Welsh; for not knowing certain words, for getting stuck mid-sentence, for not sounding fluent enough. It’s a shame, made heavier by the sense that you should be able to speak, but somehow can’t. And yet, as I’ve come to understand through research and experience, these feelings are not the result of personal inadequacy, they are the outcome of wider structures that fail to support Welsh speakers once they leave school.

One of the challenges in discussing this issue is how often it relies on anecdotal evidence. We hear stories about someone who was fluent but never speaks it now; or someone who rediscovered their Welsh identity years later; or someone who wanted to use Welsh but felt too self-conscious. These stories resonate, as they should. But they also reflect a deeper problem: we simply don’t have enough robust research on what happens to young people’s Welsh after they leave school. Without regular, systematic tracking of how language practices change after age 16, we’re forced to rely on the personal, the fragmentary, the emotional. And while these accounts are powerful, they cannot substitute for evidence.

This is the gap my thesis aims to address. I explore how young people in southwest Wales experience the transition from compulsory education into adulthood, and what happens to their relationship with the Welsh language along the way. The goal is not just to identify who speaks Welsh, but to understand why they do or don’t, and how that choice is shaped by confidence, opportunity, identity, habit, and more. I begin with an exploratory qualitative study, drawing on interviews with young ‘potential’ speakers aged 15 to 22. These interviews seek to uncover the lived realities of post-school Welsh use: how often young people speak the language, in what contexts, with whom, and how they feel about doing so. They also explore key sociolinguistic factors including access to Welsh-speaking spaces, attitudes toward Welsh, language insecurity, perceived proficiency, shifting self-identification, memory of prior learning, emotional associations with the language, and exposure to Welsh in work, education, and digital media.

From this qualitative foundation, I then hope to examine how these factors interact. By mapping these relationships, my research aims to provide a more detailed, evidence-based understanding of the trajectories taken by potential speakers: what enables some to activate their Welsh, and what causes others to let it fade. Crucially, I believe that only by first building, or drawing upon, rich, exploratory qualitative work can we develop robust, meaningful quantitative research in this area. Without first listening to how people describe their own language journeys, we risk designing tools that measure the wrong things, overlook key variables, or miss the emotional and social dynamics that shape language behaviour in the real world.

Rethinking the Metaphor 

To turn to the metaphor that heads this post: while the image of “jumping the gap” between potential and active speaker is useful, it has its limitations. It suggests a single, decisive leap; a clear before-and-after. In reality, our relationship with language is often far more complex. For many, the path to using Welsh is not linear. It may ‘ebb and flow’ across different life stages, reawaken at unexpected moments, or return after years of disuse. The idea of a ‘gap’ risks implying that failure to use Welsh immediately after school marks the end of the line. As if one either leaps across or falls in, never to return. But this isn’t true. Language journeys are ongoing, recursive, and deeply personal. If we want revitalisation efforts to succeed, we must create the conditions not only for a leap, but for return, renewal, and reengagement, however many times that might be.