Ah, the Welsh language.
It’s been a while since it was mired in a tired, boring and clichéd discussion masquerading as controversy. But here we are again.
Over the past few days a language first spoken thousands of years ago and still proudly spoken by hundreds of thousands of people today has come in for some criticism. Once again.
Maybe we should all give up? Stop speaking it, burn the initiatives and the infrastructure in place to keep the language alive and admit defeat. Let’s all speak English all of the time. Then will they be happy? If we do what they say, will they finally leave us alone?
By they I mean those who attack. Those who come for the Welsh language for no apparent reason other than to back up and prove a level of ignorance that is already plainly evident.
The latest marksman to fire shots at my first language is an English journalist who lives in France. Writing for The Critic - a political and cultural magazine first published in 2019 and with a readership of fewer than 20,000 people - Jonathan Meades penned a column over the weekend bearing the title ‘Tacsi for a moribund language’ (see what he did there?).
In the column, Meades, for whatever reason, calls the Welsh Government’s ambition to encourage more people to speak Welsh as a “totalitarian project”. He then questions why there are plans afoot to open dozens of Welsh-medium nursery groups.
I mean, the Welsh Government, trying to inspire young people to speak Welsh, in Wales?! Oh, the nerve of those fools. Why are they doing that? I don’t know. Maybe for the same reasons that the UK Government open English-medium nurseries in England. What exactly is the difference?
Oh but you see, most people who can speak Welsh can also speak English, so it would be easier and cheaper (especially for those who don’t live in Wales, seldom come here and shouldn’t really care) if we all became more English. No more talking Welsh, just English, so we can truly become a United Kingdom. Is that what he wants? It would appear so.
“Despite the folly of Brexit, English, thanks to America, remains the global lingua franca,” types Meades from his desk nowhere near Wales. “An approximation of it is spoken and partially understood by billions. Welsh is spoken by a few hundred thousand people, less than a fifth of Wales’s population (THIS IS INACCURATE). Yet the government intends to make ‘Welsh and English equal’.”
Again, a government striving for inclusivity and equality? How very dare they.
Read more: The Welsh language is a beautiful thing - not fodder for a tedious debate
“Imagine the lot of a child brought up monoglot Welsh by parents who, likely as not, were anglophone and possess the sinister fervour of the converted - more Welsh than the Welsh,” continues Meades from his desk nowhere near Wales.
“This child is condemned by a linguistic straitjacket to a lifetime in Caernarvon or Blaenau Ffestiniog.”
Firstly, it’s Caernarfon, which he probably knows but threw a ‘v’ in there as if to provide more unneeded evidence of ignorance, and secondly, I can think of worse places to spend a lifetime than in Blaenau Ffestiniog.
But seriously, I am always fascinated by the ire formed by the language that manifests itself in those who cannot speak it. Why do they care? Meades ends his column with a bizarre point about a Welsh ice cream company that was established by people of Italian heritage.
“Which is not to say that they have forgotten where their forebears came from a century ago any more than the many people of increasingly distant Italian origin in Wales and the west of Scotland have,” concludes Meades from his desk nowhere near Wales. “Or the Irish in Kilburn, the Poles in Ealing, the Portuguese in Lambeth. Or the Welsh themselves in Maida Vale.
“But such people do not cling to a familial past, they are not shackled by communitarianism. With every generation they change and adapt and look forward. They have no fear of the mongrelism which is the very lifeblood of the human race. Marry out!”
Speaking of ‘clinging to the past’, it appears that some will not be happy until the whole world does what a certain breed of entitled, arrogant English person wants. And as for the ‘Marry out!’ sign-off, at best it’s a dig at us, Welsh speakers, for being ignorant and insular, when we are the ones speaking different languages.
At worst it’s an offensive and cheap gag relating to inbreeding. Either way it leaves me angry. Or does it?
The temptation is to be angry because someone has dared to criticise something I hold dear. It’s like someone having a pop at your child when they’ve never met them. I suspect that due to The Critic’s struggle at building an audience - the magazine has just under 15,000 followers on Twitter; for context, Elis James, the Welsh-speaking comedian who retweeted the article, has more than 110,000 followers - the intention is clearly to rile. Create shock, attract criticism, reel in that social media engagement. That old chestnut.
Has it worked? You bet. The Critic posted the article on Twitter and it drew nearly 300 comments and more than 200 retweets. The next article it tweeted later the same day drew zero comments and one retweet.
As Elis James said in sharing the article, “I suppose I shouldn’t give this the oxygen of publicity”. But he did and he was right to, because it creates debate and it reignites a passion.
Despite giving the article oxygen, Elis James was right to highlight its content
You see, when people criticise the Welsh language or the use of it, those who speak it fight, sometimes with each other (more on that later). It proves, if anything, that the language is more alive now than it has been for years. The passion that people have for it has always been there, but in years gone by perhaps that passion was hidden, or muted at least. Social media has given people a voice. A Welsh voice. And if you’re going to come at us then you better be ready for us to defend the thing we love.
So thank you, Jonathan Meades, not just for letting us know what The Critic is, but for reminding a lot of us of the importance of the Welsh language and the strength of feeling that drives it.
I’m no stranger to a bit of online controversy surrounding ‘siarad Cymraeg’ myself. Last year, whilst bored at half-time during a football international between Wales and Czech Republic, I opined that pundit John Hartson used too many English words in his summary of the Welsh performance on S4C. I said, flippantly, “can’t they get a Welsh speaker?”
I had no idea that this would create such a febrile reaction. Genuinely. I’m not one for a Twitter row. Life’s too short to be checking your notifications every 30 seconds, but check them I did. Hartson himself was alerted to the tweet and it was even referenced four days later on S4C when the former Celtic and Wales striker resumed punditry duties for another fixture against Estonia.
In the 48 hours after my tweet I was implored by several people to apologise. People I know and like tweeted or endorsed criticism of me and even unfollowed me. I was asked to discuss the issue on BBC radio and one man even said he would stop buying the Carmarthen Journal (my local paper) and urged everyone he knew to do likewise.
What the hell had I done? I had suggested that S4C should insist on a certain standard of Welsh, as it is the only Welsh-language broadcaster. Others (everyone, as it seemed at the time!) disagreed and said that “a little bit of Welsh is better than no Welsh”. Of course it is, came my retort. Down the pub, in the office, in the shop. But on S4C?
I refused to apologise because I stood, and indeed I stand, by what I said. What I regret is implying that Hartson is not a Welsh speaker in the second part of the tweet. Sarcasm is difficult to convey on social media. It’s true that I was criticising his Welsh, but at least it was Welsh. He is a Welsh speaker.
It created debate, drew criticism, and got people talking about the Welsh language again, which was all fine by me. When Hartson took the pundit’s chair again for the second fixture that week - following the furore - I couldn’t help but notice that his Welsh was better. Was he stung by my suggestion that his Welsh was poor? I don’t know. Did it therefore turn out to be a positive? I don’t know.
This tweet angered a lot of people and I fully accept the opinions of those who disagreed with me
The whole issue did, however, come back into the forefront of my mind this weekend when reading of the furore (that word again) that arose from Jeremy Bowen’s Radio 4 two-part documentary entitled This Union: Being Welsh, in which he said: “As a non-Welsh speaking Welshman I sometimes get the impression that some people might think they’re a bit more Welsh than me.” Bowen also said that the Welsh Government’s determination to boost the language “risks devaluing” his identity as a Welsh person.
This ‘take’ created some level of uproar on social media. BBC newsreader Huw Edwards, who is a Welsh speaker, said Bowen’s view belonged in “1970s Cardiff”, and questioned whether Bowen would prefer it if people stopped speaking Welsh in order to make him feel better.
As expected, the matter created debate, with people throwing in from both sides. One man on Twitter said that “Bowen was right,” adding: “I too went to the same school, same time. We were not encouraged to learn Welsh (I regret I could do nothing about it), my grandfather spoke Welsh but kept it a secret to his deathbed (Welsh Not). I am Welsh but some may disagree because I don’t speak Welsh.”
One woman even said “sadly I’ve been told I’m ‘basically English’ for not speaking Welsh by fluent speakers”.
But one man, who described himself as a “1970’s Cardiff boy”, said that he was “raised in an English speaking household with English speaking education - struggled with Welsh at school but never has the language, or efforts to promote it, devalued my identity as a proud Cymro”.
So is there such a thing as ‘more Welsh’ or ‘less Welsh’? Am I, someone who speaks the language, more Welsh than my neighbour who doesn't? Or are they more Welsh than me because they’ve lived here longer? Am I less Welsh because my knowledge of Owain Glyndŵr is weaker than theirs?
The answer to all of the above should be no. Bowen, in his radio programme, is both right and wrong. He’s right, I suspect, when he says that he at times is made to feel ‘less Welsh’ by others. I have at times heard people described as ‘Cymro iawn’, that is, they speak Welsh, implying that if they did not they would merely be ‘partly Welsh’. That attitude is wrong, but that’s not to say it doesn’t exist.
Bowen is wrong, however, when he talks about his identity as a Welsh person being at risk by plans to boost the Welsh language. There are, according to the Welsh Government’s Annual Population Survey, more than 883,000 people in Wales who can speak Welsh (Meades claimed it was only 500,000 and that even that was exaggerated; he seems to know an awful lot about a language he wants to see killed off and thrown off a cliff).
The point is: around 29% of the Welsh population speak Welsh, according to the survey figures noted above. That does not mean that 71% of the men, women and children in this nation are not Welsh. Some, who perhaps were born elsewhere, might feel partly Welsh. Conversely, they could feel as Welsh as Dafydd Iwan.
If we get to 2050 and a million people in Wales speak Welsh, I for one will rejoice, as should everyone, whether they are one of those million people or not. Even if we arrived at the stage where 99.9% of people speak Welsh, but the 0.1% that doesn’t still considers themselves to be Welsh and proud - who is anyone to question them?
Being Welsh is something you feel. There are no qualifications needed. You should learn Welsh, you should speak Welsh.
This is Wales and I would love it if everyone spoke the language. If I lived in France (like our new friend Jonathan Meades) I would like to think that I would speak French. But if you can’t speak Welsh, or simply don’t want to, carry on. But carry on being Welsh.
What do you think about this story? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
