Ee-aw-ee-aw

This is Rod Liddle, who writes for a London-based newspaper, being disrespectful about someone else's language. 

Dismissing other people's languages is not unique to England, of course. There was a long period when citizens of the USA thought it was funny to laugh at how Polish people, Jews and Italians spoke English. And I'm sure we all remember Manuel in Faulty Towers, who was the constant butt of John Cleese's ire for the way he failed to speak English.

But Rod isn't having a go at a foreign language. He's talking about one of the UK's native languages, Welsh. He's mocking how it's spoken in backward valleys, how daft it looks when it's written down,  how only weirdos like the 'Plaid Cymru' woman on Question Time actually speak it and how the bridge in question is only important because it helps people to get out of Wales.

I've been seeing these comments about Welsh in English newspapers for a generation now: about 20 years ago, one poor soul in Cornwall, not realising Cornish came from the same linguistic roots as Welsh, got himself in a real fankle in the Guardian demanding that Welsh be allowed to die. I've always wondered what happened to this man to make him so - well - angry about somebody else's language.

I've seen similar whinges about Gaelic in Scotland. Let it die is the common theme.

The terrible thing is that these demands to let languages die reveal something very important about the 'big' languages of this world: English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Punjabi and the rest do actually have the power to kill off lesser-used languages. It's happening all the time. There are quite a few languages where the total number of speakers is down to less than 600. By that standard, Welsh and Gaelic are in quite a healthy position.

So why 'preserve' lesser-used languages? If they die, it's not the words we lose, you see. We can preserve a record of the words in books, on CDs and in TV programmes. It's the way of life that will go: for example, how Native Americans lived, what their religions were, how they sounded when they sang together, what nursery rhymes they taught their children, what their folklore was. All of this adds up to a picture of how they lived and is an invaluable part of our picture of human life.

Imagine if we had a record of some sort of how our ancestors lived in Southern Africa or Orkney or in the caves of Patagonia 40,000 years ago. We would know who they were, not just vague impressions of their lives. So when we saw a handprint on a cave wall in the Dordogne or in Northern Spain, we wouldn't be surprised: we would know why our ancient ancestor felt it necessary to leave his (or her) mark.

If nothing else, having a load of languages adds to the gaiety of nations - general cheerfulness or amusement. That's the phrase Samuel Johnson wrote about the death of the great actor David Garrick, remarking that his death eclipsed the gaiety of nations and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure. Dr Johnson was in many ways a pig of a man but he got that right. And what was Garrick's weapon in his work? Language.

Let's savour it all.