Sir, Dr Nigel L. Carter seems to think that it is unnecessary to use the Welsh language because those who speak it are 'in relatively small numbers'. The word 'relatively' I presume means in comparison with English. There is a hint of English arrogance and contempt for the Welsh here, and a suggestion that small minorities don't matter and can be safely ignored. He also writes of 'national campaigns' where 'national' appears to mean 'English'.

During the past century there has been a growing awareness that Wales is a nation and that Welsh is its national language. Many English people regard this as dangerous nationalism while they are blind to the more extreme nationalism expressed in singing at the last night of the Proms: 'Wider still and wider let thy bounds be set. God who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet'. While singing these words most English people wave the Cross of St George, not the Union Jack, as they do on other flag waving occasions. This shows that they regard England, not Britain or the UK, as their nation.

In 1852 Mathew Arnold said that: 'It must always be the desire of a government to render its dominions, as far as possible homogenous... Sooner or later, the difference of language between Wales and England will probably be effaced... an event which is socially and politically desirable'.

There are many who still regard it as desirable, and do not realise that contempt for a language is at the same time contempt for the people whose language it is. The insistence that campaign literature for use in Wales must be in Welsh as well as English is largely a Welsh response to such English contempt. The 'health of the Welsh people' to which Dr Carter refers in his last sentence involves something more than regarding them as bodies with teeth in their mouths. And one part of that something more is the language which they have inherited and which many thousands of us still speak in spite of the efforts to force us to use only the English language.