do all Scottish, Irish and Welsh speak English?

">> Ohh, right! So THAT'S why America doesn't have the Union Jack on its flag....hmm, interesting... <<

Hawaii does though."

Yeah...I've never understood that...Are they part of the UK?...NOOO! They're part of the US! It's only complicating things for those who have a tiny brain capacity (like me!!)!

"If Scotland is going to provoke a larger neighbour, as they were wont to do, then people 700 years later cannot complain about brutality and oppression, even though the common Scot suffered no better nor worse under such armies than the common people did in England. Remember too that Longshanks was a Frenchie Norman SOB whose forebears had decimated the north of England which dared rebel against him (not forgetting that the Northumbrians had to deal too with constant incursions from Scotland that you'll never see Hollywood memoralise in film). Whatever we think of the trans-Tweed conflicts of the dark ages, how we may or may not view it as foreign oppression or evil domination by others, foreign armies or not: people were being screwed by the man at the top."

Aj-- I'm sorry, I did leave out the fact that Scotland wasn't the only one suffering. Adam was assaulting William Wallace, and I was just trying to defend the man.(And not that I needed to. I'm sure a resident of Scotland would have soon spoke up had I not.) Once again, sorry. =(

"Don't believe everything that Mel Gibson tells you."

After I watched Braveheart, I was soon researching William Wallace to see what was true, and what wasn't. I know can Hollywood exaggerate greatly, and knew Braveheart was probably the same case (And it is! Many things different...).

"Yeah...I've never understood that...Are they part of the UK?...NOOO! They're part of the US!"

So?

Hawaii has a British Union flag in the top left had corner of its flag.

Remember, Americans, that Hawaii only became an American state as recently as 1959. For centuries it was an independent state, a country in its own right.

It used to have it own monarchy - in 1810, the Hawaiian Islands were united for the first time under a single ruler who would become known as King Kamehameha the Great. He established the House of Kamehameha, a dynasty that ruled over the kingdom until 1872. Its other monarchs were Kamehameha II, Kamehameha III, Kamehameha IV, Kamehameha V, Lunalilo, Kalakaua and Liliʻuokalani. Its monarchy was overthrown in 1893 and the country then became a republic.

The reason why it has a British flag in its flag is because LONG before it became an American state it was a British protectorate. The Hawaii flag is older than nearly all the other flags of the American states (as it was an independent country in its own before most US states were even born)



Design
The canton of Ka Hae Hawaiʻi is the Union Flag, prominent over the top quarter closest to the flag mast. The field of the flag is composed of eight horizontal stripes symbolizing the eight major inhabited islands. The color of the stripes, from the top down, follows the sequence: white, red, blue, white, red, blue, white, red. They represent the islands of Hawaiʻi, Oʻahu, Kauaʻi, Kahoʻolawe, Lānaʻi, Maui, Molokaʻi and Niʻihau.

y saeson sy,n dal i malu cachu, i love the way the english call hawaian islands a protectorate insteed of colonial rule, who exactly did they need protecting from? probally the ocean or their way of life which the english crown thought it knew best- utter bollocks!

I have met some elderly people (70+) in the Arran Islands (Gaeltacht) who have little or no English. This ain't cause for celebration though, since it doesn't seem to be by choice. These people didn't do so well at reading in primary school, so this inhibited their grasp of English. Added to this the facts that Irish was the main language of their schooling, and that they left school at 12 years of age: the lack of choice is clear. Lack of English only furthered their social and economic marginalisation.

My uncle, David Price, was a native-Welsh-speaker who came from Aberistwyth in Cardiganshire. He heard English for the first time when he went to school at the age of five. To my knowledge, there are no more native Welsh-speakers in Aberystwyth for a while now.

Re diminuition of Welsh and Irish languages:
Thre may be far more to Brennus' point than is realised by other contributors.

Census figures are not trustworthy on the subject. For instance, in Ireland in the 2006 census, people were asked if they spoke Irish daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, not at all. Some people who have the 'cúpla focal" as Ben puts it, could honestly say they use Irish daily, but their Irish is so weak as to make such a statement invaluable.

It is because Irish is seen as being more 'cool', that people are more inclined to inflate or over-estimate their own abilities when it comes to questionaires.

Undoubtedly, Gaeilscoileanna are burgeoining, but this again, is not a reliable indicator of language usage. A good friend of mine who attended Gaeilscoil till he was 18, only barely passed 'Irish' as a subject in twelfth grade. Another acquaintence who left Gaeilscoil at 13, has forgotten almost everything, and said that English was the play-ground language. Gaeilscoileanna are a product of parents' desires, not of their children's wants.

Before print, languages as we know them, did not exist. Styles of speech shifted every few miles along a gradient - e.g., in Frnace at the time of the French Revolution, there more than 200 dialects of French, such as Provencal and Languedocc. Ille de Francais became the dominant dialect. In spain, one form of Castellano became dominant, but Catalan and Galician are considered by their speakers to be separate languages. Nationalism largely defined what became a language, what became a dialect, and what became extinct.

Scottish Gaelic comes from the Irish (Dál Riata) invasions of Scotland in the 6th and 7th Centuries AD. Before this, Scotland spoke British/Welsh, Early English in Edinburgh C7-), and probably a 'Pictish' language in the remoter parts.

People from the Donegal Gaeltacht can often understand people from the Western Isles, as if their respective languages were dialects. However, people from Mayo or Galway Gaeltachts would find it difficult or not impossible to understand fluent Scottish Gaelic.

Raidió na Gaeltachta and TG4 are better than nothing, but have also caused some damage to Irish. Irish language media has had the effect of eroding local dialects - albeit by improving intelligibility between Gaeltachtanna. An enormous vocabulary and store of idioms have been lost and are disappearing still. The Education System including Gaelscoileanna seem to be contributing to the homogenisation.

Brennus is also correct imo. with regard to Irish (and Scotts Gallic) being difficult to learn. Neither English nor Romance languages for example,
a). have such complex genitive cases or declentions
b). have such a complex masc/fem noun differentiation - have real effect on pronunciation.
c). have such a metaphorical or figurative mode of communication - it's no coincidence that many famed writers come from Ireland: they've either borrowed blatantly from the natural poetry of Gaeilge, or they've reproduced the Gaelic idioms extant in Hiberno-English.

Irish verb structures are not easier than English or Italian for instance, even leaving out the sound-changes at the beginning of each verb depending on the context - (dependent, interrogative etc.)

On the matter of Welsh dialects:

Some speakers I've heard on BBC Radio Cymru seem to have a Cork lilt. Ogham stones are unique to Munster and Wales from the Fifth CenturyAD, and there were Irish Kings in Wales up until theh coming of the Normans in the Eleventh Century. This may have left a mark on the Welsh language.

However, it may be that there are very few variations with regard to dialect - I've only a few words of Welsh meself. If Welsh is so homogenous, there seems to be a good reason why.

Historian Adrian Hastings demonstrates the power of the Bible in forging languages. "The Cconstruction OF Nationhood".
(ethnicity, religion and nationalism).
Adrian Hastings. (1997, Cambridge University Press)

Henry VIII tried to ban Cymraeg/Welsh, but what saved Welsh, and put it in a stronger position than Irish, was the Bible. The protestant tradition of direct access to the word of god through vernacular literature goes as far back as Wycliffe's English Bible at least.

Thus, widespread Cymraeg literacy by a mostly Protestant population, probably put more standardising pressures on spoken Welsh.

Irish Gaelic on the other hand was spoken mostly by a poor, illiterate Roman Catholic peasantry after the Seventeenth Century, and previous to this, Gaelic literature had a highly styalised form which bore a mild resemblence to the many dialects.

The Catholic Church only encouraged Priests to be literate, and in the gatekeeping language of Latin, at that.

With the most vulnerable proportion of the population being Gaelic-speakers, the language acquired a nasty stigma, not helped by the 'modernist' imperialist attitudes prevailing in Victorian times, which equated English with civilization. This was doubly compounded by the frequent famines in Gaelic-speaking areas and a Spencerian philosophy of surivial of the fittest - which pre-dates Darwin btw.

The Catholic church had agreed to preech sermons in English in 1798, in return for the opening of Maynooth Seminary - the first Seminary in Ireland since before the Penal Laws of the Seventeenth Century (although Henry VIII had really got rid of most of them when he dispanded all monasteries in his realm in the 1530s.

Insum, an estimated 98% spoke Irish in 1800, but by 1900, around 2% of Ireland's population spoke the language. Since independence in 1921, the Irish language has received much funding, collected by a few; but in reality, it has received little real support or help. I'll leave it to another time to go into the solutions, but they are not rocket-science - although common-sense is something Irish governments have never been familiar with - through corruption or incompetence.

Finally, I think the weakness of Scotts-Gallig was mostly caused by the mass-eviction of the crofters in the Ninteenth Century to make way for sheep for the lairds. Scottish Gaelic, unlike Irish, is mostly spoken by Protestants, and literacy should have ensured its survival. There may be an latent core-periphery divide between Scotts-English south and Highlander-North in terms of culture, but I don't know.

I'm doing an archaeology and atlas of Gaelic dialects - including Scottish Gaelic. The latter has much to offer in showing how Irish was spoken in parts of Ireland where Irish hasn't been heard for Centuries. A Highland Gadlig-speaking acquaintance once told me that she found it easier to understand Munster Irish than any of the other dialects...mmmm...

One last last thing - the future of minority languages such as Wlsh, Scottish & Irish Gaelic depends on the home - it could go either way, since many Gaeilgeoirí na Gaeltachta don't mind what language they speak, and English-speaking parents who would like their children to speak Irish, don't have the time or resources to make this a practical option.

I love that rascally old rogue Fluellen, from Shakespeare's "Henry V". What a caricature of a Welshman he is - or the Bard of Avon's interpretation of what a Welshman should be.....as likely as not to "nick that side of beef as soon as your back's turned"! That age old slur on the Welsh character. When Shakespeare named one of Henry's Army officers Fluellen he was obviously thinking of the well known Welsh name Llewellyn, but Shakespeare, being an Englishman, hadn't a ghost of a chance of getting his Sassenach tongue round that so Fluellen was his closest approximation. If you can't manage the Welsh LL then an F will do must have been the Bard's thinking.

"The reason why it has a British flag in its flag is because LONG before it became an American state it was a British protectorate."

I can't believe I'm saying this...but thank you, Adam! That question about the Hawaiian flag has been killing me for the longest time...

"Llewellyn, but Shakespeare, being an Englishman, hadn't a ghost of a chance of getting his Sassenach tongue round that so Fluellen was his closest approximation. If you can't manage the Welsh LL then an F will do must have been the Bard's thinking. "

In Welsh words and placenames with the double-L in them - and there are lots because "ll" is an actual letter in the Welsh alphabet - then the rules of pronounciation are quite simple. remember that Welsh, like most European languages, is easier in pronounciation than English is.

If the "ll" is at the beginning of the word, it is pronounced as "cl". If it's in the middle of the word, it's pronounced as "th" (the "th" sound that appears in "think") and "l" (as in "luck") joined together. So it's like "thl".

So Llangollen is pronounced as "Clangothlen", and Llanelli is pronounced as "Clanethly."

But sometimes "ll" is pronounced just as "th" in the middle of the word - the town of Pwllheli in Gwynedd is pronounced "perthelly". The county of Gwynedd is pronounced "Gwyneth."

A Shaoririseoir a chara,

Go raibh maith agat for bringing this back to topic. Amazingly I'm still looking in on this thread, :)

So far my data base of people in Ireland with limited English includes 28 cases of varying detail from the 70s until today, most of those being in the 90s or now. I know of at least one person of such description who has a mutual friend/aquaintance with myself. I very much appreciate it when someone is willing to tell me of someone they have met or know whom I might add to my slowly growing list.

On the subject of the census I agree that the questions asked pertaining to Irish are vague and ineffective at accurately measuring anything. I mean, even I speak Irish daily, if you count "slan a chara" and "Go raibh maith agat" as speaking Irish daily and I just am an American woman who cares very much for the language and doesn't know very much of it yet. If someone uses as little Irish as I manage to use in America then they shouldn't be added in to the frequent speakers category.

I'm sorry, adam, but your attempt at explaining the correct pronounciation of the letter "ll" is totally and utterly bonkers!
I am a welsh speaker, in fact , I would not speak English at all by choice, my three children speak welsh to each other , to us ,their family, school friends, we have a very active social life, all conducted through the medim of welsh. I am not unusual, there are many, many people that i know who live most of their life speaking welsh 90% of the time. My children can speak english as a second language, but our home is not bilingual, it is a welsh home.

"I am a welsh speaker, in fact , I would not speak English at all by choice"

So why are you speaking English?

Answer that, Boyo.

Come on.

"it is a welsh home."

That sounds exciting.