Mae Gŵr yn gwneud cyrri selsig i ginio heno

Husband is making sausage curry for dinner tonight. And I can write a whole sentence about it in Welsh.

Apparently, according to some, I am wasting my time learning 'pointless', 'incomprehensible', 'gibberish'. 'A dead language that sounds uncannily like someone with bad catarrh clearing his throat.'

The man who originally tweeted most of those comments was also derisory about the Celtic nations in general - leading to his dismissal from his job as PR chief for a national company, strangely enough based in Wales.

I'm not sure why others speaking or learning Welsh should cause such passion among non-speakers but it does. Of course that's not a new thing.

Following a period of risings and riots in the nineteenth century, in 1847 a report commissioned by the government in Westminster, was published, stating the poor standard of education in Wales as the cause, and blaming that in turn on the use of the Welsh language in the classroom. The report went even further and 'concluded that the Welsh language was the cause of stupidity, sexual promiscuity and unruly behaviour.'  

As it was the first and native language of the majority of people that seems a strange thing to blame, but the report was taken seriously, and it was widely accepted that the Welsh language was a problem and schools were encouraged to work towards its eradication.

Although the the speaking of Welsh wasn't forbidden by law it was highly frowned upon. Some schools - though perhaps not as many as some nationalists would have us think - introduced the Welsh Not. This was often a wooden board with the letters WN engraved on it. If a child was heard speaking Welsh in school he or she would have to wear or carry the Not around until someone else was heard using the language at which time the Welsh Not could be passed on. The child holding the board at the end of the day was punished.

No wonder the Welsh language is in decline. But the English are only partly to blame!

I grew up in Mumbles, which admittedly is one of the least Welsh areas of Wales. I can't remember how much Welsh we did in junior school but we must have done some. Welsh was certainly compulsory in the first year in grammar school after which you could opt to do German instead - which I did, finding Welsh impossibly hard.

As regular blog readers will know I only began learning at the start of lockdown last year, initially so I  could read to my grandchildren who were going to a Welsh language medium school. And now I'm addicted. I want to learn it; I want to be able to speak it; I want to be able to read the signs. If you've ever visited Wales you will have noticed that road signs, lots of adverts and any wording on the outside of Council buildings are in both Welsh and English - Welsh coming first causing much annoyance to some people. 

Final words to Professor Martin Johnes:

"The decline of Welsh was rooted not in what happened in classrooms but what happened in communities. The future of Welsh won’t be saved by education either. It relies on ensuring there are still communities where it is natural to  start a conversation with a stranger in Welsh. It relies on people elsewhere having other opportunities to use the Welsh they learned at school. It relies on being a living language outside the classroom.

"Indeed, it’s probably better, and certainly more sustainable, to have 500,000 people regularly speaking Welsh in their community than a million able to speak it but rarely doing so."

P.S. That million refers to the Welsh Assembly's stated aim of getting one million Welsh speakers by 2050.