The ‘Chip Shop W elsh’: Aspects of ‘ W elsh Speaking’ Identity in Contemporary Wales

Considerable research has explored the relationship between majority and minority language speaking communities in bilingual contexts. Comparatively little research, however, has explored relations within as opposed to between a language group in these contexts. Antecedent to a new order of social and cultural life in Wales, this article explores how two groups of W elsh speakers, one relatively privileged and one relatively marginalized, positioned themselves as they talked about ‘being W elsh speaking’. For all respondents the ability to speak W elsh was understood to confer sameness beyond linguistic competence on W elsh speakers. Claims to a strong W elsh‐speaking identity, however, were legitimized by drawing on different resources. Whilst the relatively privileged group identified themselves as ‘traditionally W elsh’ based on their linguistic and social practices, members of the more marginalized group were unable to define their own linguistic and social practices as ‘traditional’ for a W elsh speaker. In response they forged a distinctive social space for themselves by developing a class‐based communal W elsh identity. With reference to Bourdieu's work on the process of boundary construction and maintenance, this article makes a contribution to understanding ethnolinguistic diversity and how discourses about being W elsh speaking might be reproduced and negotiated in contemporary post‐diglossic Wales. It suggests that ethnolinguistic identity may become implicated in the process of classificatory struggle, with social groups emerging through a social space of hierarchical difference.