According to the 2001 Census, there has been a substantial increase in the numbers of Welsh speakers aged 5Á15 years, especially in south-east Wales. It is generally accepted that this increase can be largely attributed to the success of Welsh-medium education. Indeed, Welsh-medium education has long been seen as an effective language planning tool and language transmission sphere to transmit the Welsh language in Wales. The aim of this paper is to look at the main parental incentives for choosing Welsh-medium education in the Rhymni valley, Caerffili County. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used to gather information from parents from the 'meithrin' stage (Welsh-medium nursery) and from the primary and secondary school sectors. The main parental incentives in the Rhymni Valley were seen to be cultural, educational, economic and personal reasons and integrative rather than instrumental incentives that came to the forefront. Past studies have tended to emphasise economic reasons, but the findings of this present project indicate that cultural reasons were more predominant factors for parents in the Rhymni valley.

This paper teases out the meeting points between macro and micro language planning in Wales and how this impacts upon community language use in real terms. The paper draws upon data gathered from an evaluation of the Welsh Government's strategy towards the maintenance and promotion of the Welsh language on a community level in Wales. Conducting this research provides an insight into how the community acts as a language planning crossroads where a plethora of factors contribute to language use within this sphere. Key findings report that many opportunities exist to use the Welsh language at macro and micro language planning levels within the communities, including opportunities provided via Welsh Government programmes. However, gaps in community provision exist and linguistic community interaction often occurred within daily, micro activities such as shopping and accessing services rather than within formally organised community activities at a macro level. Furthermore, evidence of existing complex language norms and ideologies play a part in the negotiation of language use within these communities. Such findings are key in informing the Welsh Government's most recent Welsh Language draft strategy which outlines their vision to create 'one million Welsh speakers by 2050' (Welsh Government, 2017, p.1).

The Welsh-medium education system has long been seen as an effective tool of Welsh language production in Wales. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of Welsh medium education in one south Wales Valley, ‘Cwm Rhymni / RhymniValley’. The main reasoning behind the primary research is to focus on the reasons why non-Welsh speaking parents chose Welsh medium education for their children. The research focuses on education but recognises the over lapping nature of the main language transmission spheres within Welsh language planning, i.e. family, community and workplace. This study adopts a mainly qualitative research strategy by administering 60 unstructured interviews to parents who chose Welsh medium nursery, primary and secondary schools for their children. However, as a secondary methodological tool, a semi-structured questionnaire was given out prior to the interviews and the interview sample was then drawn from these. Moreover, Welsh language resurgence within Anglicized areas of South Wales is a fairly unexplored field, this study is hoped to be a catalyst for many more future studies in this field and attempts to address the existing lacunae.

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This longitudinal research provides further insights into their continuing language journeys, and indicates there has been a sustained reduction in this group's use of Welsh by 2016/2017 due to factors relating to fluency, confidence and a lack of opportunities to use Welsh. However, the results indicate that new speakers play an important role in influencing family language transmission and in increasing language awareness within the workplace. This paper calls for further longitudinal research on new Welsh speakers' language journeys so that this group may be appropriately supported as they make a crucial contribution to language revitalisation in Wales.