Welsh Not : Elementary Education and the Anglicisation of Nineteenth-Century Wales

OPEN ACCESSTo read the PDF of Welsh Not: Elementary Education and the Anglicisation of Wales for free, follow the link belowWelsh Not: Elementary Education and the Anglicisation of WalesThis book is freely available on a Creative Commons licence thanks to the kind sponsorship of the libraries participating in the Jisc Open Access Community Framework OpenUP initiative. The Welsh Not was a wooden token given to children caught speaking�Welsh in nineteenth-century schools. It was often accompanied by�corporal punishment, and is widely thought to have been responsible�for the decline of the Welsh language. Despite having an iconic status�in popular understandings of Wales's history, there has never before�been a study of where, when and why the Welsh Not was used. This�book is an account of the different ways children were punished for�speaking Welsh in nineteenth-century schools and the consequences of�this for children, communities and the linguistic future of Wales. It�shows how the exclusion of Welsh was not only traumatic for pupils�but also hindered them in learning English - the very opposite of what�it was meant to achieve. Gradually, Welsh came to be used increasingly in Victorian schools, making them more humane places but also more�effective mechanisms in the anglicisation of Wales.