In the Welsh Government’s language policy, a predominant focus on increasing the number of Welsh speakers has crowded out concerns with social inclusion and wellbeing. This means a lack of attention to key unintended consequences that are revealed by a raft of recent studies – including unequal educational attainment and heightened social divisions. Meanwhile, a headline focus on creating a ‘bilingual Wales’ overlooks Wales’ unique potential for not just bilingualism but multilingualism – there are some promising policy signs here, which could be built upon to Wales’ advantage. To remedy all these issues, this paper proposes a novel ‘doughnut language policy’ model, borrowed from recent advances in economics, designed to balance a wider range of factors. The doughnut model would mean a very different structure of policy text, with equally weighted sections covering a range of factors other than language itself – understanding that these all contribute to linguistic vitality in different ways. Correspondingly, there is much potential for research funding to be diversified into these broader avenues for supporting bilingualism and multilingualism; and for encouraging teachers to embrace more fluidity and mixing of languages.

peerReviewed