The revival of Welsh is not without parallel in Europe — Basque has thrived in a similar fashion. But the language has attained a level of cultural cachet despite the authorities’ apathy or even hostility to it. It was only in 1988 that Margaret Thatcher’s government made Welsh a compulsory language up until the age of 14 in Welsh schools. Welsh-language films have been nominated for Oscars and rock acts sing in Welsh. What is emerging is a distinct identity: modern, multicultural, independent, outward-looking, connected to other small nations. All of which helps to explain why Netflix’s decision to buy the Welsh-language drama Dal Y Mellt is so significant.
Dal Y Mellt (it translates as Catch the Lightning) is a six-part series about a diamond heist made by the Welsh-language channel S4C and based on Iwan “Iwcs” Roberts’s 2019 novel of the same name. The series is funny, quirky, subversive, occasionally violent, at times a little too tricksy for its own good. It is also in Welsh – or, rather, mostly in Welsh. Welsh speakers use lots of bits of English too, happily switching between the two in the same sentence, and so do the characters in Dal Y Mellt. This is not classical Eisteddfod Welsh; this is, since Roberts is a north Walian, Welsh as spoken in Wrexham and north-east Wales. Welsh is a living, evolving language, and north, south and west Walians speak slightly different versions. Welsh, like Wales itself, is not a museum.
On Monday, it is exactly 100 years since the BBC began broadcasting in Wales. Despite Britain having elected a Welsh-speaking prime minister, David Lloyd George, a century ago, the BBC overlooked just one thing in the provision of a service for Wales: the existence of Cymraeg, the Welsh language. It was not until the late 1930s that the BBC succumbed to pressure and started to take Wales’s bilingualism seriously. Welsh nationalists have always realised that broadcasting in Welsh was crucial to keeping the language alive. They fought hard to bring S4C into being in 1982, and advocates such as the longtime Plaid Cymru president Gwynfor Evans, who threatened to go on hunger strike if promises to introduce a Welsh-language station were not honoured, would be gratified by its current success and confidence. An injection of new finance and change of personnel last year have encouraged programming aimed at modern, diverse, questioning audiences. In May, the station will unveil Anfamol (Unmotherly, described as a Welsh Fleabag), by the playwright Rhiannon Boyle.
Estimates of the number of Welsh speakers in Wales vary from a fifth of the population of 3 million to a third, depending on how you define “speaker”. There is a huge gap between being fluent and knowing the words of Yma o Hyd, the anthem of the Welsh football team. Language has in the past been a source of friction between English-speaking and Welsh-speaking Wales, exacerbating geographical, social and economic divisions. Left-behind English-speaking Wales backed Brexit; aspirational Welsh-speaking Wales, which saw the EU umbrella as protection from English dominance, opposed it. Proponents of Welsh now have to bridge that divide, and programmes such as Dal Y Mellt, which speak to young, urban, plugged-in viewers exposed to Welsh, English and a host of other languages in a cosmopolitan city such as Cardiff, offer a way forward – to a language that is not insular, defensive and exclusive but which attempts to speak to the world.
