Anybody familiar with the history of the Welsh language and the campaign to save it from dying out in recent years will have heard of the Welsh Not. For those unaware, it was a wooden sign which some schoolchildren in Wales were forced to wear around their necks if they were ever caught speaking Welsh. The board would be passed from child to child depending on who was last caught speaking Welsh, and the child left with it at the end of the day was punished.
It was part of a concerted effort in the early Victorian era to stamp out Welsh and drive it into extinction, but luckily attitudes changed toward the language in the 20th century and over the last 100 years or so there have been dedicated efforts to rescue it from the brink and repopularise it.
