National Statistics Online - Welsh Language

COLLECTED BY

Organization: Internet Archive

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls. At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer. View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Collection: Wide Crawl started March 2011

Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi.

What’s in the data set:

Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011
Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011
Number of captures: 2,713,676,341
Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159
Number of hosts: 29,032,069

The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa’s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites.

However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed.

We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available “warts and all” for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content.

If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you’re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say “yes” to all requests, since we’re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered.

TIMESTAMPS

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110728133204/http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=447&Pos=6&ColRank=1&Rank=192

	UK Snapshot	Neighbourhood	Economy Page of instant figures	Census	About ONS	Jobs	28 July 2011

Home |



		Browse by theme

Wales: Its People

printer-friendly

Welsh Language
Welsh speakers increase to 21%

Focus on Wales

This is a graph showing Proportion of people aged 3 and over able to speak Welsh

Proportion of people aged 3 and over able to speak Welsh

Over a fifth (21 per cent) of the population of Wales said they could speak Welsh in the 2001 Census with similar proportions able to read (20 per cent) and write (18 per cent) Welsh. Sixteen per cent reported that they had all these skills. For the first time, the Census asked respondents about understanding Welsh; nearly a quarter (24 per cent) said they could.

A question on speaking Welsh has been included on every Census since 1891, when more than half (54 per cent) the population said they did. Since then, the proportion of people speaking Welsh has fallen appreciably until reaching an all time low (19 per cent) in 1981 and 1991.

Ability to speak, read and write Welsh: by age, April 2001

Ability to speak, read and write Welsh: by age, April 2001

The increase since 1991 in people able to speak Welsh is largely associated with children being taught the language in school. Two fifths (39 per cent) of children aged 10 to 15 were able to speak, read and write Welsh compared with 25 per cent of 16 to 19 year olds. The proportion of adults with these skills declined towards middle age (11 per cent of those aged 35 to 49) and then increased for older age groups (15 per cent of those aged 75 and over). This reflected the fact that the language was more widely used when older people were growing up.

In all age groups, women were more likely to have these Welsh language skills than men. This difference was most notable in the 10 to 15 and 16 to 19 year old age groups – in both cases the proportion of girls able to speak, read and write Welsh was seven percentage points higher than boys.

Unitary Authority areas in the north and west of the country had the highest proportion of people speaking, reading and writing Welsh. Gwynedd and the Isle of Anglesey were the only areas where more than half the population had all these skills (61 per cent and 51 per cent respectively). This regional pattern was still apparent after age and country of birth had been taken into account.

In the north, areas bordering England had lower than average rates of people able to speak, read and write Welsh. In part, this was because of the large proportion of people living in these areas who were not born in Wales. When looking at the Welsh-born population only, the proportions were much closer to the regional average.

Unitary Authority areas in the south east had lower than average proportions of people speaking, reading and writing Welsh, irrespective of their country of birth or age structure. Less than 7 per cent of the populations of Blaenau Gwent and Monmouth had these skills which were the lowest proportions in the country.

Those born in Wales were much more likely to have the full complement of Welsh language skills than those born outside the country (20 per cent compared with 7 per cent). However, those born outside Wales were more likely to have Welsh language skills if they lived in a Unitary Authority area where Welsh is widely used. For example 17 per cent of those born outside Wales who lived in Gwynedd, could speak, read and write Welsh.

Source:
Censuses, April 1891 to April 2001, Office for National Statistics.
(No Census was conducted in 1941 due to the Second World War.)

Notes:
Census question on speaking Welsh: Although the exact format of the question and the population base have changed over that time, it is possible to use previous Census data to show the broad trends in Welsh language usage.

All aged 3 and over.

Published on 8 January 2004 at 0:01 am

Accessibility|FAQs and Contact Us|Terms & Conditions|Privacy Statement
Link to us|Crown Copyright applies unless otherwise stated

View our page

Related Links

Welsh-born Living Elsewhere in the UK

Country of Birth

Welsh National Identity

'Welsh' on Census form

Health and Caring

Ethnicity and Religion

Living Standards

Fersiwn Cymraeg

Focus on Wales home

Download map of Wales

Article: Welsh language comparisons

External Links

Welsh Language Board

National Assembly for Wales

Suggested Links