A brief note on BiLingo
We were going to let this one slide, given that BiLingo appears to be a coughed up left over of gogwatch, and we’ve largely done that one to death already. However BiLingo have managed to garner much more attention than their parent site gogwatch ever did, so perhaps some attention is warranted. Plenty of other Welsh political bloggers have covered the details of this story already, but to summarise, BiLingo appeared as a front for alleged concerns from parents in Ceredigion. Accusations were made which essentially suggested that child abuse was rife in the region, as punishment for not speaking the Welsh language. This was quickly jumped upon and promoted by the Telegraph and Mail. As the story developed though, the allegations suddenly vanished from the website – perhaps the owner of BiLingo got more than ‘he’ bargained for with the coverage, and suddenly considered the legal implications of what many presume to be the unfounded allegations of a single individual. Regardless of the legitimacy of the comments, they were made, heard, and now a temporary hoohah has broken out regarding the Welsh language.
Now, it’s somewhat difficult to be specifically critical of the BiLingo website, simply by virtue of the fact that it’s owner seems to be redesigning it on an hourly basis, as the legal ramifications of their accusations appears to dawn on them. But the current (as of Friday afternoon) webpage argues that for BiLingo, ‘the main issue seems to be the lack of choice’. This certainly has echoes with the old gogwatch pages, after all, they never wanted to get rid of Welsh did they…no, of course not, what they advocated was choice. Maybe a cursory glance at the BiLingo twitter feed will enlighten us further.
Excellent to see so much coverage of our website today. Join us on our glorious march out of the dark ages – we say ONE world ONE language.
This is the very first tweet from the BiLingo feed. One language they call for…one language. So BiLingo, your concept of choice actually boils down to offering no choice at all, how very gogwatch of you.
We’re standing on the shoulders of giants @gogwatch
This would seem to indicate that whether BiLingo claims to be connected to gogwatch or not, they certainly see themselves as being in similar company.
Bilingo – a campaign for language human rights and justice for the silenced
and yet, lines like this, that espouse the merits of human rights, are simply direct echoes of that which gogwatch relied upon as a central theme to their complaints. Not gogwatch, but something that sounds exactly like it.
Welsh is a wonderful language, but why should we use it to punish children? Their only young once #cymru
@mark4ceredigion will you join our campaign? We want representation at Westminster to stop the pro welsh madness