Wow, diolch Iestyn, that’s really interesting - thank you very much for sharing it!
It kind of fits in with my theme of trying to figure out where my kids’ Welsh is going! (Although I guess everything these days is a bit more of a melting pot with so much TV and radio influence.) I wonder if that means that you were at some point making more of a conscious choice to adopt more local dialect-type language, for aesthetic / nationalistic reasons?
Edit: I listened to the programme again and I have to say that your way of speaking sounds completely standard of course, with a rather lovely southern flavour. (I’m trying to work out why I felt surprised by the accent the first time, in a voice that I know so well! Maybe I tend to notice Northern accents more than southern ones normally, as they are more different to how my kids speak. I was probably just surprised to notice a difference at all.)
I am now utterly confused as I had been convinced that you came from the valleys to the east. All due to dropped h’s and some of your vowels. I was very used to varients of Cymraeg Abertawe and, to me, you sounded much more like my relatives from Gwent, although, to be fair, they were monoglot English so I wasn’t really comparing like with like! I went off to learn gog-speak for personal reasons, but it doesn’t really come naturally, so I may start again where I left level 2 and follow you to the end, so to speak! I may still use ‘mae’n drrwg gen i’ and a few other bits of gog from way back when your dad was a baban bach!
That’s an interesting one. I think I must have consciously chosen “hoffi” over “lico / licio / leicio” at some stage - quite young, I think - and there are certain Gwenhywseg patterns that I know I adopted consciously, and went looking for in local speakers, but most of my Welsh is picked up subconsciously from the people I spoke Welsh with most, which is why I am slowly but surely morphing into a Ceredigion-ista now!
Oh yes - my Welsh and English accents were “from the same mother” - ie both very much Gwent / Eastern Morgannwg, and used to be closely linked to each other. Now both are developing in separate directions as I speak mostly Welsh with Ceredigion people, and mostly English with real-life English people. There are all sorts of English twangs in the kids’ English, because they have friends from London and other places in England that they speak English with, as well as the Americanisms that they pick up from the internet. The influence of the English language in this area would be really interesting if it weren’t so destructive to centuries, possibly millennia, of culture.
But that is a discussion for another thread, I think…
I’ve always found strange how in north Wales , Welsh speaking communities speak with Welsh accents , but generally when the Welsh language gets lost in a community then the communitie’s accent switches to an English one , whereas in south Wales , where Welsh has been long lost in a lot of communities , the accent is still a Welsh one.
Parts of Gower have an accent with quite a lot of North Devon in it due to lots of interchange during the period of lime trading. That having ended, I’d predict the accent would be just like Abertawe (Swansea) before long! I think I noticed more ‘Gower’ among those older than me (now deceased) and less in the next generation. As to gogledd Cymru, a sort of Welsh version of northern, I tended to think, with a very ‘choked’ sounding accent in places. I used to say I couldn’t talk gogledd Cymraeg without swallowing my epiglottis!
In Asda Swansea a fellow shopper asked me a question in English but with a Pwllheli type accent. Would it be normal to answer in Welsh? Not something I would normally do to a stranger.
If that happened to me @JohnYoung, before answering the actual question I’d probably go with something like “Oh, I love your accent - wyt ti’n siarad Cymraeg?”
A quick question about the goodbyes at the end of each challenge/ lesson. I am hearing something like ‘ta bo’. What does it mean exactly and what does it come from?
As for how distinctive Ceredigion Welsh is - yup, it’s very recognisable - although the same is true of most of the regional variations, but since Ceredigion is still very strongly Welsh speaking (particularly outside the major towns) it’s perhaps easier to notice…
I’ve very rarely come across this in the real world. Welsh speakers I know, which transcend generations, are happy with Welsh and don’t tend to mind ti or chi. I use chi with Emma’s Taid because her Mum does and I use it with her mum because she uses it with her dad. Emma doesn’t use chi with either of them.
It is general now for even very young junior nursss and auxiliaries to use Christian names. Patients are a captive audience for this. When admitted, I expressed lack of delight. So I became Miss. Particularly helpful hard-working staff I asked to call me by my name (the equivalent of using ‘ti’) I found the young staff positiely receptive to this.
Can someone tell me exactly what ‘o mam bach’ means. In the context I have heard it, it sounds like a sort of ‘oh my god’ type remark, but just wanted to know exactly what it is please
