Some further thoughts on "genteel". In defining this word the Oxford English Dictionary notes that "a few years before the middle of the 19th century the word was much ridiculed as being characteristic of those people who are possessed with a dread of being taken for 'common people' or who attach exaggerated importance to supposed marks of social superiority. In seriously laudatory use it may now be said to be a vulgarism: in educated language it has always a sarcastic or at least playful colouring".

The illustrative quotations in OED confirm this. Between the 1815 citation from Jane Austen's Emma - "They were of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel" - and Dickens declaring in 1867 "a small opinion of what the great genteel have done for us" - the connotations have become negative. Even as early as 1814 Scott had his tongue in his cheek when stating that "the magistrates have done the genteel thing (as Winifred Jenkins says.)" Winifred Jenkins (referred to in an earlier post) is a character in Smollett's great comic novel of 1771, Humphry Clinker. Though she never (I think) uses the word "genteel" she does aspire to gentility, noting that in Bath "to be sure, we have the very squintasense of satiety." At the end of the novel, having become Mrs Loyd, she declares that now she has been removed to a higher sphere "you'll excuse my being familiar with the lower servants of the family; but as I trust you'll behave respectful, and keep a proper distance, you may always depend upon the good will and protection of Yours W. Loyd." The interesting and somewhat counter-intuitive thing about Win is that she is redeemed, not by her gentility, but by her vulgarity. As in her comment on London: "O gracious! my poor Welsh brain has been spinning like a top ever since I came hither! And I have seen the Park, and the paleass of Saint Gimes's, and the King's and the queen's magisterial pursing, and the sweet young princes, and the hillyfents, and pye bald ass, and all the rest of the royal family."

By the time we get to Borrow, the connotations of "genteel" are sombre, rather than comic. It evidently irks him when, in the home territory of Goronwy Owen, he hears a girl at Pentraeth giving the preference to English over Welsh as "the most genteel." Borrow replies (with some asperity) "Gentility... will be the ruin of Welsh, as it has been of many other things." A very prophetic remark, given the decline in the fortunes of the language in the course of the following hundred years. What he puts his finger on is the way in which the gentility principle leads to linguistic and cultural capitulation, a dilution of national identity. And underlying the gentility principle is political and economic annexation by a powerful and dominant neighbour, a process with which the Irish and the Scots of Borrow's time were every bit as familiar as the Welsh.

While aspirational gentility may not have disappeared altogether from the cultural lexicon, it is encouraging to note that in Wales things have changed a good deal in the course of the last 50 years. In Wales today it is Welsh, as often as not, that is the language for upwardly mobile Winifred Jenkinses, and the challenges to the language are of a different kind.

However, English speakers need not feel marginalised, despite Bob Geldof's being reported in Saturday's Guardian as saying that "The lingua franca of the planet is not English - it's pop music." Pop music with English lyrics, for the most part. And if not standard British English, then English after a fashion.