I read on the BBC news website this morning (here) that Thomas Cook travel agents are in trouble for alleged racism. The reason? They requested that Welsh speaking staff in their - Good luck to anybody who speaks Welsh. It’s a lovely language and it’s an important part of the Welsh heritage (but nothing to do with my English heritage so I don’t feel any personal connection with it).
- In a work environment, it’s practical to require that the dominant language is spoken by everybody. If not, things go wrong. It’s completely practical.
- When in
- I can’t find any solid statistics for what proportion of Welsh people speak Welsh as their first language, but it seems to be about 10% from a quick look at various surveys online. I also suspect that a lot of people would claim is to be their first language for patriotic reasons but truly it isn’t. In the
If the office in question is made up of Welsh speakers, then requiring them to speak English as the official office language would be an outrage. But somebody must have complained to Thomas Cook’s HR department here. That suggests that there’s a certain amount of nastiness behind the use of a language that others don’t speak. Welsh deserves more than to be used as a code language for work place bitching.
8 comments:
You obviously don't know much about the Welsh language and it's position in Wales, so why bother to comment? You just seem like an opinionated prat.c
Perhaps not, but I know that its in that context doesn't have an apostrophe, unlike you.
Opinionated perhaps but prat, no. I honestly believe that this brings a culture into disrepute. I lived for years in the Czech Republic, where people accepted that it was pragmatically necessary for one language to be used where that one language was a common denominator.
It's nothing to do with culture, it's business reality.
By the way, nice touch with the "anonymous". Funny how people are always anonymous when they hurl insults. Spineless.
I heard this ridiculous story on the radio. What "race", pray, are the Welsh.
Anne Robinson was right. Put the whole country into Room 101. Closely followed by Liverpool.
Welsh is an accent for whinging in. People who make a fuss about this kind of thing haven't got enough to do. So they complain to the Parasites Department, A.K.A. Human Resources, who have to justify their existence by pandering to this nonsense.
Of course they should speak English when talking about work stuff. Otherwise it is a deliberate attempt to exclude people who don't speak Welsh.
This also applies to speakers of Urdu and other soi disant victim groups. Especially the French.
Or is MancBoomerang entitled to speak Polari? Would we both be entitled to exclude poncy Southerners by talking in Lancashire dialect.
Sod off, Taffy.
I accept being Welsh is a race. I also very much accept that Welsh should be kept alive, eg by having bilingual schools. Like BBITS though, I do find it immensely tiresome how if anybody fails to give 100% support to using Welsh all the time, it's seen as an attack, in a tiresome victim complex.Is it racist that internationally pilots all have to speak English? As a qualified pilot, I would certainly say no. That just illustrates the same point.
In Slovakia there is a 10% ethnic Hungarian minority. This was caused when Hungary lost a war and the borders were redrawn. It was not caused by invasion or immigration. The ethnic Hungarian inhabitants are entirely innocent (except for allowing their rulers to join the wrong side) in this matter but they do not have the luxury of having Hungarian as an official language in Slovakia. Indeed, last year an Hungarian girl was allegedly beaten and had an earring torn from her ear for speaking Hungarian on her mobile 'phone. (Appropriate but rarely used apostrophe.) In response the Slovak police performed what some have called the fastest investigation in Slovak history and determined that the attack did not happen and she beat herself up. She is currently being prosecuted for wasting police time. It is horrific that someone might be beaten for speaking their native language in a place where their ancestors have always lived. Do our native minorities have to put up with this in the UK?
Of course it is right that our native Welsh, Scots, Manx, Irish and Cornish can speak their mother tongues and I am happy that I can get S4C on satellite TV, if only to annoy my Slovak wife, but Mancboomerang is right to say that, practically, English will often have to be the common denominator. For a business to be effective, communication needs to work well.
The treatment of ethnic Hungarians by a minority of Slovaks is an unedifying spectacle and the story you recount here is a particularly unpleasant illustration of the "Murcia" side of Slovakia. I really don't think this sort of prejudice happens in the UK. Well, I hope not.
Thanks for the story and thanks for the apostrophe in 'phone. Despite being something of a grammar stickler (a journalist friend calls me the Hyphen Fairy), I've rather allowed that to fall into disuse. I shall use it more, if only to irritate others.
Damn, I meant Meciar, not Murcia. A bit of a Freudian slip as I'm currently in Spain and struggling to make sense of blogger controls in Spanish. Blogger switches to the local language wherever you are, which is a bit weird. OK in Spanish but it was tough in Korea.
This guy is English, hence a "tooch din seis..."
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