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Sociolinguistic debates about the fate of the Welsh language have since at least the mid-20th century posited the relationship between language and political economy as a central factor in the death or rebirth of the Welsh language since the Industrial Revolution. Such studies have been concerned primarily with empirical head counts of actual speakers and the movements of populations and distributions of languages as determined by political economic independent variables. This article argues that the relationship between language and political economy was also crucially and consequentially construed in the 19th century in terms of “imagined” exemplary speakers of Welsh. In the imagined voice of the Welsh slate quarrier, Welsh elites of the 19th century found a “modern” Welsh-speaking figure who participated in industry while remaining Welsh, both linguistically and culturally, thereby associating the Welsh language itself with the desirable properties of modernity, particularly industrial productivity, and this allowed it to be imagined as a language at home in modernity.The research for this paper was made possible by a Reed College faculty grant and the friendship and generosity of Dylan Morgan and his family. Versions of this material have been presented at the AAA in San Francisco and Bard College, and I would like to thank my fellow participants and audiences there for their helpful comments. I would like to thank Richard Bauman, Mario Bick, Steve Coleman, Elizabeth Duquette, David Garrett, Alex Hrycak, and Rupert Stasch for comments and encouragement, as well as Jane Hill and the anonymous reviewers provided by Language in Society. Errors are my own.
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