Breu història de les mesures legislatives lingüístiques al Regne Unit

Resum

Since the conquest of Great Britain by Julius Caesar's Roman legions, Celtic languages, introduced in the British Isles between the fifth and third centuries B.C, have suffered a progressive retrogression, first when faced with Latin and more recently when confronted with French and English. English, from the Anglo-Saxon invasion in the fifth century A.D. onwards, kept on gaining ground to the disadvantage of Celtic languages. That language also managed to impose itself over French which was the official language of the island from the eleventh century until the fourteenth century. The first part of this article briefly describes the present situation of Celtic languages in the United Kingdom. Many of them could be considered dead languages. Only Irish and Welsh have an important number of speakers, even though it has been considerably diminished in our times. The author states that such a situation has been partly brought about by British linguistic legislations adopted throughout the centuries to promote the English language. In the second part the author enumerates those laws, measures and acts that from 1356 until 1969 served to impose the English Language as the official language, the language spoken in the courts of justice and during religious offices. At the same time, laws and acts were passed to ensure the confiscations of landed property from the hands of Englishmen who spoke Irish, as well as the exclusion of Welshmen from any public office. The Welsh language was pointed out is the main cause for the backwardness and immorality to be found in wales. In spite of the fact that it lost its official status for four centuries, the latter language has been the only one to experiment a certain reofficialization since 1942.