Language reproduction: reflections on

'Ethno-linguistic vitality' and empowerment The basic analysis of the distribution of the Welsh language at the 1991 census has been set out by Aitchison and Carter (1994), but underlying the changes noted is the crucial issue that faces minority, or lesser-used, languages: the means of transmission or reproduction. The process of reproduction is twofold, encompassing learning by adults and children and, vitally, by children as a mother tongue. Theoretical constructs that have attempted to generalize the process are usually of the type proposed by Giles et al (1977), who have outlined a taxonomy of the variables affecting ' ethno-linguistic vitality'. They propose three categories. The first, and most evident, is ' demography', which includes the numbers and proportions speaking the language and the direct demographic controls of those numbers, natural increase or decrease and migration. The second is ' status ', both social and economic, since the decision-making of families and individuals as to the acquisition and use of a language will largely depend on the perception of status. The third is ' institutional support ', both formal from government and informal from such sources as cultural activities. Most geographical analysis begins quite properly with the first variable, ' demography ', thereby establishing the facts of linguistic change that are then interpreted by reference to ' status ' and ' institutional support '. But to a large degree, all the elements that are gathered under the latter two headings can be collapsed into the one notion of ' empowerment ': an expression of the degree to which a minority language is invested, legally, economically and socially, with the necessary bases for an effective struggle against competing majority languages. Empowerment necessarily involves such things as control of agenda-setting in public discussions and access to opinion-forming sources as the means of promoting language interests. It is about that essential condition of empowerment that transmission revolves. If the example of the Welsh language be considered, then manifestly the whole purpose of the enactments of the first half of the sixteenth century, usually referred to under the heading of the Act of Union and the Act of Great Sessions (Davies 1993, 230-8), was that they were designed to disempower the Welsh language and turn it into a peasant patois that would inevitably atrophy. That this did not happen has