I saw a very well written article in Nation Cymru about a recent Twitter storm. I wouldn’t normally share these things here but it makes a really valuable point and it happens to be written by Mr Voice of The North, @aran.
Here’s the link:
The main reason I am sharing this is that I’ve been one of the very vocal learners who berate those who criticise the language. I’ve learn from how angry it makes me to engage in those types of conversations that it isn’t personally worth it. Also, the article makes the excellent point that presenting a friendly and welcoming voice will be far more valuable in many situations.
I hope you enjoy the read (and I hope it’s OK to have posted @aran?)
I had quite a long conversation with him in private messages, and he’s clearly genuinely sincere about wanting to learn, if he can figure out a way to fit it into his schedule… but he’s also human, and has been a bit hurt by some of the stuff that’s been thrown at him, which is why I wanted people to shut up! I think if everyone’s nice to him, he’ll end up learning a bit - but if people pile on, I wouldn’t be surprised if he loses his enthusiasm for it…
Apart from the storm around Jeremy Vine…this ‘they all switched to Welsh when I walked into the pub’ is super weird!
Now I’m curious:
Did you really often hear it?
So does many people really believe it?
Is it a myth among a non-Welsh-speaking Welsh people or throughout Britain?
It’s a myth held throughout Britain. My Dad went to Bangor University in the 70s, one of his cousins (from London) still tells this story about when he went to visit.
However, countering this with aggression doesn’t help dispel the myth that Y Fro Gymraeg is an unfriendly place for non Welsh speakers.
I think it’s a myth that may well have been founded on true experiences. I’ve witnessed on a few occasions people who can speak Welsh getting a “different” level of welcomeness and nicities than people who don’t … and I’m saying this coming from the side of the Welsh speaker.
Definitely! I think a lot of it comes from a misunderstanding of the bilingual nature of an awful lot of Welsh conversations too. So they probably did hear some English almost immediately followed by Welsh - an apparent switch to the unaccustomed.
There’s a whole lot of stuff going on here that I think would benefit from an ‘around the table’ conversation rather than on the forum. It’s a massive subject I believe. I’ve seen a lot of tension and unwarranted nastiness from both sides.
Sure, I wasn’t questioning this part - it’s just I was curious about the sort of “background story” because I had never heard it and seems really strange to me.
For example, it was even more so in the past but even now if you walk in a bar or a shop in many small towns and villages in Italy, it often happens to hear people speaking local dialects among themselves.
In many occasion I didn’t understand a word, but I never thought that they might have switched to the dialect when I walked in so that I would not understand.
And I never heard anyone who had the same experience claiming so!
Of course I’m not saying that nobodyever used dialect to make fun of strangers, or to be unfriendly or discriminate them on purpose.
Actually I’m pretty sure it does happen, but that I would never say that all dialect-speaking people from Calabria or Piemonte do that - as in the myth of Welsh speakers from the North or the West (or wherever) switch to Welsh every time an English speaker walks in!
There’s a community effect with the language - humans are pretty much set up to make snap judgements about who is familiar and who isn’t - and something that makes you seem more ‘familiar’ can lead to apparently warmer welcoming or co-operation.
I had to explain this to a friend once - we were going on the Porthmadog to Blaenau train to get people to fill in questionnaires for a project - and the ticket office hadn’t been told in advance. He got there a bit before I did, and when I arrived he was sitting and waiting, having been told that they didn’t know anything about it. I had a chat in Welsh with the same person he’d spoken to, and explained who it was for and what it was all about, and who’d agreed it (possibly in more detail than he’d done) and that we really needed to be on the next train, and it was all okay.
He was really angry - saw it as deliberate anti-English racism - and I had to explain that it almost certainly wasn’t, but just a side-effect of presuming that they probably knew someone who knew me - that on the fine balance of uncertainty about whether or not we were legit, the language gave an extra sense of localness and safety - plus having a second person pitch up with the same story probably had a cumulative effect.
Plus, of course, all the complicated ways in which people do or don’t like it each other.
But the core underlying truth about the whole ‘walked into a pub’ thing - as we all know - is that you just wouldn’t have a group where everyone spoke Welsh sitting and talking English to each other. Bits here and there, of course - and lots of code-switching if some of them were less confident in their Welsh, or more used to speaking English - but a bunch of first language Welsh speakers sitting in a pub speaking only English to each other? Nah, no wê.
I understand exactly what you’re saying and agree in the main. I’m in no way saying that the pub myth is in any way true but …
during one of the examples I alluded to there was definitely no “apparently” at all. My sister-in-law and I were ordering a meal from the chippy in Aberdaron and although I didn’t get any better service or extras it was quite obvious that I was spoken to better and more politely. This was nothing to do with a language barrier because smiles are universal.
My point is that it wouldn’t take much for someone to see that as favouritism and thus discrimination and possibly be offended by that.
True (although it could equally just have been the beard).
I think it’s natural that language is one part of how we decide who we feel warmly towards and who we don’t - it’s such an integral part of identity, after all - and, of course, for many Welsh speakers who would rather not have to speak English, it’s just a pleasant relief to be able to use Welsh…
Take us, for example. We’ve made an active choice to raise our children in a community where Welsh is the community language - and it’s the language we choose to live through - and it’s surprising how easy it is for that to fall apart. If I meet people around here, friendly people who I like but who don’t speak Welsh - I’m likely not to try and make them part of our social circle, because we already have to switch into English a lot, and it feels a lot like watching the language as a living, community language just slipping through our fingers…
Yes, this all seems obvious to bilingual folk, especially to us who know about the danger our language has been in and seeing the threats coming from our monolingual neighbours. Which brings us full circle and in support of your article … we need to not retaliate against our attackers, it doesn’t help our plight. Maybe they just don’t understand why we speak Welsh and why we are so protective of it. After all, we all speak english, right?
I think this really is a big part of the story. I had the Gruntius experience and, oddly enough, in the NT car park in Aberdaron. I’d forgotten my card and although my wife started to explain, it all changed when I fessed up in Welsh. I felt quite pleased with myself for about 3 seconds and then thought something like this:
“My point is that it wouldn’t take much for someone to see that as favouritism and thus discrimination and possibly be offended by that.”
My next thought was how many times have I thickened my native West Riding accent for the same effect? Loads.
Language in its broadest sense is a big signaller of trust (and mistrust) it would seem. Sometimes it may be best just to tell people what’s going on and try to include them that way, Like, I’d guess, many people on here, I’ve been asked agressively why I speak Welsh but I’ve always had a good response when I’ve taken the trouble to explain properly and not fob someone off. Of course, there’s always going to be a hardcore element of ‘everyone speaks english’. No idea what you’d do about that.
It’s all been an interesting coversation over the past couple of days; one of parallel.cymru’s contributors has aslo been in contact with him, and Jeremy has published an article on parallel.cymru- on the front page at the moment. @aran; it’s all fully linked to your excellent and thoughtful Nation article. Jeremy has been very sincere and put a lot of time into reaching out to the community; full credit there; I don’t recall a Twitterstorm where one of the participants has been as involved in trying to resolve it as this, and for someone of his profile it’s highly commendable.
All good and great but many too often it ends exactly here and mostly this is only the excuse that it is not neccessary to do more - to learn Welsh in this case. I believe if he’d really, really want to learn the language, he’d start IMMEDIATELLY. There are many ways to start including the way I did - just started to learn some phrases first because I was challenged that it’s not possible to learn Welsh and then, because I really wanted to learn, I went on.
With all due respect to both - Jeremy and you - from your mouth to the Jeremies ear then which hopefully will empower him enough to really be eager to learn the language.
has an interesting analysis of the idea of people speaking English and switching to Welsh (I found it linked from the parallel.cymru article). The author wonders why the idea seems so widespread, and gives some ideas as to why this is. The embedded video is funny
Well, I’ve thought about all this thing from twitter and around Jeremy Vine and started to remember that now already two or even more years in a row this comes up exactly around Christmas or New year and somewhere behind in my memory it clings that always Jeremy Vine is the disputed person … would need to do some research if this really is exactly so but it’s interesting though. At least in 2017 I remember it was the issue and if I remember correctly the much more the same story came to the view. Maybe it’s time that all - English and Welsh people - start to change the attitude toward one another and such stories wouldn’t repeat year after year.
