Mae Toni Schiavone o Gymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg yn amlinellu ymgyrch y mudiad i newid y system gynllunio er mwyn cryfhau’r Gymraeg ar lefel gymunedol.
Ym mis Mawrth eleni cyhoeddodd Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg ei hymateb i “Ddrafft Bil Cynllunio” Llywodraeth Cymru. Nid yw’r drafft yma yn cyfeirio o gwbl at y Gymraeg. Os na newidir y drafft yma ni fydd modd gwrthod na chaniatau datblygiad oherwydd yr effaith ar y Gymraeg. Yn sgîl cynnal nifer o gyfarfodydd gyda Gweinidogion, Aelodau Cynulliad o bob plaid, swyddogion cynllunio a chynghorwyr rydym wedi penderfynu bod angen dangos i’n gwleidyddion beth sydd yn bosib. Felly ym mis Mawrth cyhoeddodd y Gymdeithas “Bil Eiddo a Chynllunio er Budd Cymunedau (Cymru).”
Dogfen ddrafft yw hon ac rydym wrthi’n cynnal cyfarfodydd ymgynghorol led-led Cymru i gael ‘barn y bobl’ ar yr hyn rydym yn argymell. Ochr yn ochr gyda’r gwaith “cyfansoddiadol” yma mae’r ymgyrchu yn parhau o ganlyniad i fethiant llwyr Llywodraeth Cymru i ymateb yn ystyrlon i’r dirywiad yn y nifer o gymunedau lle mae’r Gymraeg yn brif iaith. Beth yw pwrpas cynnal cynadleddau a chyhoeddi adroddiadau oni weithredir ar yr argymhellion?
Heb os nac onibai rydym wedi rhoi digon o gyfle i’r Llywodraeth i ddangos eu bod o ddifri. Fodd bynnag, yr hyn a chawsom yw datganiadau tila yn ail-adrodd yr hyn sydd eisoes ar y gweill ac sydd yn hollol annigonol – ac yn arbennig felly ym maes cynllunio. Nid oes pwrpas i Nodyn Cynghorol Technegol (TAN) 20, sef y canllaw cynllunio ar y Gymraeg, os nad oes modd gweithredu ar yr argymhellion ac os nad oes grym statudol wrth gefn yr argymhellion.
Er mwyn atal y lleihad yn y nifer o gymunedau Cymraeg a symud at sicrhau mwy o gymunedau lle y gall pobl fyw yn Gymraeg rhaid cael trefn cynllunio sydd yn cydnabod y Gymraeg fel rhan annatod o’n hamgylchedd byw. Fel y nodir yn ein “Bil Eiddo a Chynllunio,” rhaid diwygio Adran 70 o Ddeddf Cynllunio Gwlad a Thref 1990 i nodi rheidrwydd ar geisiadau cynllunio sy’n berthnasol i dir yng Nghymru gynnwys yr angen i ddiogelu statws swyddogol y Gymraeg a diogelu a hyrwyddo’r defnydd o’r Gymraeg fel iaith gymunedol.
Dylai’r Gymraeg fod yn ystyriaeth berthnasol ym maes cynllunio ym mhob rhan o Gymru. Mewn rhai ardaloedd yng Nghymru dylai’r Gymraeg allu fod yn brif ystyriaeth mewn penderfyniadau cynllunio. Fel rhan o’r ymgyrch i ddiwygio’r drefn cynllunio yng Nghymru ac i hyrwyddo’r “Bil Eiddo a Chynllunio” byddwn yn galw ar bobl yn Nghymru i gefnogi’r 5 egwyddor creiddiol i’r Bil, sef:
- Datgan mai pwrpas y system gynllunio yw rheoli tir mewn ffordd sy’n gynaliadwy’n amgylcheddol, yn taclo tlodi ac yn hybu’r Gymraeg
- Asesu anghenion lleol fel man cychwyn a sylfaen pendant i gynlluniau datblygu, yn hytrach na thargedau tai sy’n seiliedig ar amcanestyniadau poblogaeth cenedlaethol
- Sicrhau bod effaith datblygiadau ar y Gymraeg yn cael ei asesu
- Rhoi grym cyfreithiol i gynghorwyr ystyried y Gymraeg wrth dderbyn neu wrthod cynlluniau, drwy wneud y Gymraeg yn ystyriaeth berthnasol statudol
- Sefydlu Tribiwnlys Cynllunio i Gymru, y mae cymunedau yn gallu apelio iddo
Mae’r galwadau hyn eisoes wedi derbyn cefnogaeth nifer o fudiadau ac unigolion blaenllaw megis Cyfeillion y Ddaear a’r Eisteddfod Genedlaethol. Gallai unigolion ddatgan eu cefnogaeth i’n galwadau drwy fynd i http://cymdeithas.org/galwadcynllunio
Ymhellach rydym yn galw ar awdurdodau lleol yn mhob rhan o Gymru i gyhoeddi “Cynllun Gweithredu Cymraeg”, neu “Adroddiad Pwnc ar y Gymraeg”. Nid les angen caniatad Llywodraeth Cymru i wneud hyn – mae gan yr awdurdodau lleol y grym eisoes i gynnal dadansoddiad o sefyllfa’r Gymraeg fel iaith cymunedol ac i argymell camau i ddiogelu ac i ddatblygu’r Gymraeg.
Calonogol iawn yw gweld yr hyn sydd wedi digwydd yn Sir Gâr gyda’r Cyngor yn mabwysiadu argymhellion y gweithgor ar y Gymraeg yn y sir. Dyma enghraifft o awdurdod sydd wedi dangos parodrwydd i gymryd canlyniadau’r cyfrifiad a’u cyfrifoldeb mewn perthynas â’r Gymraeg o ddifri. Ein gwaith nawr fel mudiad yw sicrhau bod amserlen yn cael ei rhoi yn ei lle er mwyn gweithredu’r argymhellion. Yn anffodus nid yw’r hyn a argymhellir gan Gyngor Sir Gâr ym maes tai a chynllunio am lwyddo oherwydd nad oes grym statudol i’r Gymraeg ym maes cynllunio. Fel y dywedodd Prif Swyddog Cynllunio Cymru, Rosemary Thomas, mewn cyfarfod a gynhaliwyd ychydig fisoedd yn ôl, nid oes hawl gwrthod datblygiad (neu yn wir caniatáu datblygiad) ar sail effaith ar y Gymraeg o fewn y drefn bresennol. Rhaid i hyn newid os yw’r Gymraeg i barhau fel iaith y gymuned. Rhaid cael Bil Cynllunio sydd yn berthnasol i Gymru ac i’r Gymraeg. Dyma frwydr S4C y byd cynllunio. Ni allwn ganiatau i’r sefyllfa bresennol barhau.
Mae cyfraniad Cymdeithas yr Iaith i hyfywedd y Gymraeg yn ystod yr ugeinfed ganrif yn un anhygoel; heb ei hymgyrchu diflino a pharhaus, a’i pharodrwydd i fod yn boen yn ystlys y sefydliad, mae’debyg na fyddai’r iaith lle mae hi heddiw. Ond gyda dyfodiad datganoli onid yw’n wir nad yw’r Gymdeithas wedi bod mor llwyddiannus ag ydy hi wedi bod? Mae Llywodraeth ‘Cymu’ yn anwybyddu popeth mae’r Gymdeithas yn ei ddweud ac yn ei wneud. Mae angen gweithredu mewn modd mwy uniongyrchol.
Da iawn Cymdeithas yr Iaith am godi’r pwnc pwysig hwn. Falch iawn bod y mudiad wedi cyhoeddi Bil Cynllunio amgen hefyd – oes dolen iddo fe?
Ben – yn ol yr hyn rwy’n deall, roedd y ddeddf iaith a gafodd ei basio rhyw 3/4 mlynedd nol yn adlewyrchu llawer o bolisiau Cymdeithas yr Iaith, felly mae’n debyg eu bod nhw’n gwneud yn dda iawn. Wrth gwrs, mae’n anodd gwneud cynnydd pan mae na Lywodraeth sy ddim yn blaenoriaethu’r Gymraeg.
Only of minority interest ……………….
No comment.
Mae’n anhygoel nad oedd unrhyw son am y Gymraeg yn y bil drafft, hyd yn oed yn sgil canlyniadau’r cyfrifiad. Rhaid i bethau newid yn sylweddol.
@Dai- Actually Welsh language policy is an issue effecting all aspects of Welsh life and something that everyone has an opinion on, which is evidenced by the fact that you bothered to leave the comment in the first place. Given the depth of the original comment I highly doubt that you would have been able to enlighten us in any case.
@Dafydd Tomos- ”Wrth gwrs, mae’n anodd gwneud cynnydd pan mae na Lywodraeth sy ddim yn blaenoriaethu’r Gymraeg”. Ie, yn union. Roedd y Ddeddf Iaith wedi’i phasio pan oedd Plaid mewn clymblaid, ac aelod Plaid yn weinidog. Ers i Lafur ennill 30 sedd gwthiwyd Plaid, a’r Gymraeg, i’r neilltu a dyma pam dyw’r Gymdeithas ddim wedi bod yn ddylanwadol- does dim diddordeb gan y Llywodraeth bellach a does neb yn gwrando arnyn nhw. Mae angen ysgwyd y sefydliad trwy ddulliau uniongyrchol a gorfodi’r Llywodraeth i gymryd sylw.
Watching the long and lingering death of the Welsh language is like watching that of an elderly relative, extremely painful and costly. Languages are born, they develop, mature and either die or mutate into another. Whatever the undoubted merits of the Welsh language in poetry and music, it has far too many irregularities and idiosyncracies for the modern world and insufficient support, even within its homeland. And with insufficient ‘qualified’ teachers plus the economic and migratory situations, there is little hope of halting this decline. No amount of planning regulations will alter any of this, indeed it will only prolong the agony and contribute to the economic woes of Wales. Time to look for an approach which can ‘save’ the language in a more meaningful sense, whatever that might be.
@ Colin Miles
“It has far too many irregularities and idionsyncracies for the modern world”
And what irregularities and idiosyncracies might they be?
Colin Miles is right. People should only be allowed to speak Welsh on Tuesdays in Leap Years.
RBJ – see my articles from 2 years ago.
Mutations belong to a bygone age when the spoken word was king. To modernise Welsh and make it fit for the modern world a linguistic genius is need to largely eliminate mutations, regularise plurals and gender, replace the ridiculously pendantic yeses and noes with ie and na, and then sort out the grammar – and somehow still make it recognisably Welsh. As for S4C, however well Pobol Cwm attempts to deal with modern issues, the constant binge drinking culture and recycling of relationship is not, I hope, a good reflection of Welsh culture and doesn’t compare well with something like Neighbours. And the sub-titles do not accurately represent the style of manner of what is said. Take away Pobol Cwm and what do you have left? Rugby, Iolo, Jonathan and the odd gems like Hinterland and the Choir. Hardly worth £100 a year.
My wife has just had her second knee replacement operation, privately paid for on the NHS otherwise she would have had to wait another year – a crazy situation. Her relatives moved to London to build the suburbs in the 20’s and 30’s and her parents moved back in the 50’s when there were still decent education and health services. Now there are neither. Where should our priorities lie?
@ Colin Miles
“see my articles from 2 years ago.”
I had expected to receive an intelligent response to my question. Instead it’s a regurgitation of the same rant containing the same mistakes.
I think the intellectual level at which you pitch your argument is best summarised by your belief that your wife’s knee operation was delayed by the fact that money is spent on other Government priorities.
Nuff said, I think.
Mutations create an unnecessary and artificial barrier between the written and spoken languages which don’t work in the modern age. Add in the phonetic myth and you have a receipe for disaster. A language can only be phonetic if eveyone hears and speaks every word in exactly the same way. In Welsh you also have the added complications of plurals, gender rules or lack of, etc. As my Welsh tutor used to joke “Colin, in Welsh the one rule is that there are no rules”. A brilliant inventive attitude for a small community or the rugby pitch but not for the wider world. The totally well-intentioned and admirable attempts to revive the language is having an increasingly negative, indeed disastrous effect on the economic and cultural health of the nation. Time to start fracking. Wales was at the forefront of the first industrial revolution and there is no reason, given sensible planning and other measures why it shouldn’t be at the centre of the next one. An interesting challenge given the fractured natured of the underlying geology.
And the joke is that the Welsh language promotion agenda is now increasingly being driven by Welsh learners and by people they often describe themselves as immigrants!
If we take away the people who actually make their crust off the back of the Welsh language, or have risen to dizzy heights in employment they arguably would not have achieved in a fully competitive recruitment process, then there doesn’t seem to be much of a demos left…
The way forward is choice – starting in education at age 3 with the removal of compulsory Welsh. Then let’s see where the numbers go and spend accordingly.
Colin, since you are in favour of simplifying Welsh (seemingly to make it more like English), I assume that you plan to do the same with Finnish and German (both of which have a highly complex case system)? After all, these languages are clearly not suited to the modern world, and are far too complex. Then there’s the difference between Hochdeutsch and Platdeutsch, why I hear that people from Upper and Lower Germany have to speak English to each other in order to make themselves understood… And lets not even mention Hungarian, which isn’t even related to these other languages! Far too different! Languages are just different, that’s part of what makes them interesting. Are we expected to believe that these languages I’ve listed, and others like them, are somehow not suitable for the modern world?
On a related note, I work for a university, and spend by far the majority of my time working through Welsh, from teaching, to buying things in the shop, to speaking at research councils. Surely this is proof of the suitability of Welsh for all of these things, otherwise presumably I would have to stop in the middle of say, a meeting, and say ‘but I’ll have to drop into English now, because it’s impossible to discuss student recruitment in Welsh.’ Do you really think that that is what happens?
Furthermore, I’ve read your previous articles, and you say that despite years of learning, you can’t speak Welsh, which you blame on the grammar. As someone who can’t actually speak the language, are you the best qualified person to pronounce on its grammar? I would suspect, and please forgive me if this is wrong, but this opinion comes from near a decade of experience in the field, that actually the problem is that the only people you ever speak Welsh to are fellow learners, and Welsh teachers. This means that you won’t have had the opportunity to throw yourself into the language, and hear fluent speakers using it naturally in all walks of life. You’ve therefore fallen into the trap of being a ‘dysgwr parhaus’, learning Welsh for years without ever becoming fluent. You just need to make native speakers speak Welsh to you all the time, and broaden your speech community. It is possible; as I mentioned in a comment on on of your previous articles I did it, I’m Portsmouth Irish, and Welsh is my third language- and that happened despite the grammar.
Oh dear Colin, sounds like a trip to the naughty step might be in order. Feel free to take that spoon to help you stir some more.
If I can indulge in some sarcasm (all off topic of course) – in English, the apostophe’s always get me and I’ve never got to really quite understand split infinitives or double negatives – I haven’t never got them at all to be honest. I find punctuation marks to be artificial – my computer is the only thing I knows that truly understands the need to read commas and question marks out loud.
Personally I’d leave the language analysis to the experts – I find the rules in English far to complicated to get my head around and no-one seems to pay any attention to the rules when THEIR actually speakin – know what I mean. Apparently the first letter that’s likely to be lost from current English is going to be the X and then perhaps the Q. Who knows, if English goes through a few more evolutionary mutations, then perhaps it might actually start to look a little bit more like Welsh?.
Only in English would anyone change the spelling of words like erly, hed, lern, beleve, reson, seson etc, to longer versions by adding in extra superfluous A’s, just to make French translations a bit easier. That’s the beauty of language – it often defies logic. I’m not knocking these things – their beautiful in THEY’RE own way
Bring back the Welsh K, I say and give the English language back the Waht, the gost and the gerkin – those pesky Dutch printers played havoc with the English H’s and the cockneys and Aussies drop them without a thought.
Personally I don’t understand where the knockers are coming from – the word philistine doesn’t even come close. When Gildas compiled “On the ruin of Britain…”, he prophetically envisaged petty squabbles destroying the fabric of society, but I doubt he ever imagined a destructive cultural force founded on as much pettyness as this.
Managing the decline – a possible way forward
Mutations create an unnecessary and artificial barrier between the written and spoken languages which doesn’t work in the modern age. Add in the phonetic myth and have a recipe for disaster. A language can only be phonetic if everyone hears and speaks in exactly the same way. Then there are the plurals, gender rules of lack of, and so on. As my Welsh tutor used to joke, ‘Colin, in Welsh the only rule is that there are no rules’. An admirable attitude which works well in a small community or on the rugby pitch, but not in th wider modern world. There are no monoglot Welsh spakers and very few people actually use Welsh leaflets or web sites all of which act as an enormous drain on resources. If the welsh linguists like RBJ, Ben, David and others and the Welsh language board could turn their undoubted talents to Spanish, German, French, Italian and Mandarin translations then this could really be an excellent way to revive the Welsh economy.
The fact that any child can learn any language is meaningless if that language prevents the proper function of life in the modern world, especially if it is badly taught The Welsh language is ill-suited to the modern age and the sad fact is that there are never going to be welsh learners or speakers to halt the decline. The economic and migratory factors will always win out and no amount of detailed planning regulations (these aren’t detailed) will stem the flow. A Welsh not didn’t work and an English one has no hope. After 6 years of trying to learn the language I realised that not only was I wasting my time but that it was having a seriously adverse effect on the economic and educational aspects of Welsh life. Yes, please save the language but be sensible about it. It should be an asset not a burden. Different languages offer different world views and a monolinguistic one isn’t any more desirable than an artificial bi-lingual one. Look outwards not inwards.
Colin
Maybe you could compile a modern idiot’s guide to Welsh – the Colin miles way
Again, please, precisely how is Welsh ‘unsuited to the modern age’? What is it that you cannot do in Welsh? At what point to all Welsh speakers have to start speaking English because its impossible to discuss the thing they were talking about in Welsh?