Volume: 6  Number: 1  Page: 64–72

Prestige Planning and the Welsh Language: Marketing, the Consumer-Citizen and Language Behaviour

Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost School of Welsh, Cardiff University, Wales, UK

This paper comprises a brief examination of the approach taken by the Welsh Language Board, as the principal language policy and planning body in Wales, with regard to aspects of prestige planning and the Welsh language. It describes how devolution and the recent, and first ever, national review by the Welsh Assembly Government of Welsh language policy provides the immediate context for the work of the Welsh Language Board. The key policy document resulting from that review, Iaith Pawb, is critically analysed and the relationship to it of prestige planning identified. The practice of prestige planning by the Welsh Language Board is discussed with regard to ideological concerns with notions of audience – citizens and consumers, addressing the discourses of neo-liberalism and post-colonialism along with the concept of the communitarian social state.

Keywords: Wales, Welsh language, devolution, citizens, consumers, neoliberalism

©2005 D. MacGiolla Chríost

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