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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1296

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

‘What about the signs and everything?’ Representing the place of Welsh in urban Wales through TV comedy drama

Authors: Davies, Bethan Lyn
Submitted by: Davies, Bethan Lyn (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)

The UK BBC TV cult series ‘Gavin and Stacey’ charts the ups and downs of the relationship between “an Essex boy and a Welsh girl” through 20 episodes of comedy drama. It draws its humour in part from the dislocation of each family/friendship group from their native habitat and their transplantation to the ‘unknown’. This provides opportunities for discourses  - from self and other – to emerge in relation to both being Welsh and the use of Welsh in Wales.

 Representations of Welshness in UK national television and radio drama are relatively rare. Representations of the Welsh language in these contexts are virtually unknown. Thus, these TV dramas – co-written by an “Essex boy” and a “Welsh girl” – provide an interesting discursive site for the analysis of language ideologies (Blommaert 1999; Schieffelin et al. 1998) given voice through both Welsh and English characters.

This paper will focus on the way that Welsh as a language is thematised in this drama both as a spoken language and as part of the linguistic landscape of urban south-east Wales. It is seen and spoken but is never given communicative status: Welsh is always presented as being ‘not understood’ – by the English and Welsh characters alike. Its existence in the linguistic landscape is presented as both an anachronism and a source of confusion.

This is in the context of a country whose government’s top-down language policy explicitly values Welsh and promotes its use. Iaith Pawb / Everyone’s Language states: “Our vision is a bold one […] a truly bilingual Wales […] where the presence of the two languages is a source of pride and strength to us all.” It is also often cited as an example of successful revitalisation due to the most recent census data reporting an increase in the number of speakers. However, Coupland (2010:78) suggests that this is more an ‘an aspirational political ideology of ‘true bilingualism’” rather than a true reflection of linguistic realities.

The analysis of the metadiscourses (Jaworski et al. 2004) of Welsh within ‘Gavin and Stacey’ will also be contextualised by drawing on the metadiscourses employed in lay debates about the position and status of Welsh from other media sources including the BBC Voices website (http://www.bbb.co.uk/voices) and UK newspaper reportage. These will be used to build a more complex view of the place of Welsh in Wales and in the UK as a whole.

References

Blommaert, Jan (ed.) (1999) Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Coupland, Nikolas (2010)Welsh linguistic landscapes ‘from above’ and ‘from below’. In Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds.) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum, pp. 77-101.

Jaworski, Adam, Coupland, Nikolas, and Galasínski, Dariusz (eds.) (2004) Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Schieffelin, Bambi, Woolard, Kathryn & Kroskrity, Paul (1998) Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.