Today we had some interesting discussions as a result of the extracts you read in class. We discovered that the Norman invasion of 1066 meant that French was the language of power at the time and everybody was expected to speak French; you could only have a high status role in society if you spoke French. Move on in history and in Tudor times we find that the Welsh were punished for speaking Welsh but today the language is protected and eveybody in Wales is encouraged to use it. We also heard the story of a Finnish student who went to Sweden and was told off at school for speaking and writing in Finnish and how this made her lose her confidence, she stopped talking and felt depressed and sad at school.
This lead to a number of stories about the words you have heard people use to describe somebody new to this country. We agreed that name calling or making negative comments about somebody who may not understand English that well or have only lived here for a short time is unacceptable. Many of you were keen to share more stories about this but we ran out of time. We felt that we have hit on another aspect of language that seems very important and we will continue this discussion tomorrow.
In the mean time, talk to your family about ‘identity’ and ‘heritage’ – what do we mean by these words and and why are they linked to language?