As I’ve mentioned previously, in this year’s Welsh Election Study voter surveys we covered a lot of ground. The core business of the surveys was to understand whether people had voted; if so for whom they had voted; and to try to gather some understanding of why they had behaved in the way that they did in the National Assembly election. But across the three surveys we ran we also took the opportunity to explore many aspects of public attitudes in Wales. This was partly to see how such attitudes were related to party support; but also partly out of simple curiosity, and to take advantage of the opportunity of being able to ask about various matters in the context of high-quality surveys of the people of Wales.

One of the things that we decided to run a few questions on was attitudes to the Welsh language. This is an interesting and complex subject, about which there has been periodic public attitudes research in the past. (The Welsh Language Board commissioned opinion surveys at various points; my colleague in Cardiff University’s School of Welsh, Jeremy Evas, has helpfully drawn my attention to other research). The broad picture that appears to emerge from this work is one of widespread public support for Cymraeg in principle, although matters maybe get somewhat more complex when one gets into further detail.

We didn’t have the time and space in the Welsh Election Study to explore every possible aspect of this subject by any means; but we did find the space to try to unpack some aspects of public attitudes.

The format we chose was to offer three, quite pointed, statements to our surveys respondents, and ask them to indicate their level of agreement or disagreement with each one. The statements used were the following ones:

‘The Welsh language is a nuisance; Wales would be better off without it’

‘More should be done to preserve Welsh as a living language’

‘The Welsh language is in crisis and extreme measures are justified in order to preserve it’

These statements clearly suggest a variety of positions on the status of the language, and we would not expect many people, if any, to agree with all of them. The tables below show the levels of agreement and disagreement with each one. What overall picture do these results point to?

‘The Welsh language is a nuisance; Wales would be better off without it’

Response % Strongly agree 7 Agree 9 Neither agree nor disagree 18 Disagree 22 Strongly disagree 40 Don’t Know 4

Clearly, Cymraeg continues to be the subject of some disagreement within Wales. But that disagreement does not appear to be equally distributed across the Welsh population. Fewer than one in six of our sample indicated any level of agreement with our first statement, which expressed hostility to Cymraeg; not far short of two-thirds of our sample evince outright disagreement with this statement. So the balance of public opinion in Wales is very strongly weighted against the idea of the Welsh language being a ’nuisance’.

‘More should be done to preserve Welsh as a living language’

Response % Strongly agree 23 Agree 30 Neither agree nor disagree 24 Disagree 11 Strongly disagree 9 Don’t Know 4

By contrast, a clear, if modest, majority of our sample indicated support for the idea that more should be done to preserve Welsh as a living language. Of course this question was distinctly vague about what ‘more’ actually means. It would be quite possible to agree with this statement of principle while still failing to support many specific measures that were suggested to achieve the aim of strengthening the status of Cymraeg. But we again see an imbalance in public opinion in responses to this question, with only one in five of our sample indicating opposition to the proposition posed. Most people in Wales appear to support the Welsh language, at least in principle, and think that more should be done to support it.

‘The Welsh language is in crisis and extreme measures are justified in order to preserve it’

Response % Strongly agree 10 Agree 22 Neither agree nor disagree 28 Disagree 20 Strongly disagree 14 Don’t Know 7

This final statement suggested a more militant pro-Cymraeg stance; what is striking is that even on this position public opinion appears to be quite divided. Roughly one third of our sample supported this statement, one-third opposed it, and one third chose the neutral options. Frankly, this surprised me. Perhaps I am displaying my ignorance here as a native Sais, but to find virtually one-third of a representative sample agreeing with a statement that explicitly refers to ‘extreme measures’ is quite striking. This is clearly not the majority opinion, but the findings nonetheless offer a strong reminder that many people in Wales feel very strongly about supporting the future of Cymraeg.

In a follow-up piece next Monday (and as a Christmas present to you all!), I will explore the patterns of results on these three questions amongst Welsh speakers and non-speakers, and also among supporters of the different political parties.

Source for all figures in this post: 2016 Welsh Election Study, pre-election wave (administered 7-18 March 2016). Number of respondents = 3,272. Data gathered by YouGov via the internet, and weighted for representativeness of the adult population in Wales. The 2016 Welsh Election Study was funded by a research grant from the Economic and Social Research Council: grant ES/M011127/1.