ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the nineteenth century almost all of the Welsh spoke Welsh. However, as early as 1891, the first year in which the census of population supplied information on the Welsh language, only 54 per cent of the people of Wales could speak their native tongue. In 1901 this figure fell to 50 per cent, and the proportion of monoglot Welsh speakers was estimated at a mere 15 per cent. Since then there has been a steady decline in the proportion of Welsh speakers, from 37 per cent in 1931 to less than 20 per cent in 1981. Moreover, the monoglot Welsh speaker has virtually disappeared - though the most recent census did identify a number of adult Welsh monoglots in the centre of Cardiff, but as I know one of them has a degree in English from Cambridge, I’m a little suspicious of the validity of such statistics.
