Page 5 | “Do you speak Welsh as a hobby?”

Mumminmum · 02/02/2019 08:57

@headstone
I thought there were around 60 languages spocken in China , so perhaps it’s ignorant to assume they all speak Mandarin or Cantonese.

As far as I understand Mandarin and/or Cantonese are the mutual languages that they all learn just like people in the other European countries are learning French or/and German or/and English in school.

underneaththeash · 02/02/2019 09:02

I too genuinely had no idea how many people spoke Welsh as a first language and my own father was born and lived in Merthyr for the first 10 years of his life. My grandparents were not allowed to speak Welsh at school (it obviously wasn't taught either).

We'd often holiday in Wales as children and of course then (30 years ago) all the signs were still in English, only very occasionally you'd hear Welsh spoken by children in a school group.

It wasn't until my niece went to Uni and had some teaching in Welsh that I looked it up and realised how widespread Welsh language teaching was.

WellErrr · 02/02/2019 09:03

Did you just stick a pin in a map and decide “I’m going there”?

Not hard to find out, at all.

Nope, I met a welsh man and we got married.

And that’s the point, isn’t it? It might not be hard to find out, but if Wales and the Welsh language is not on your radar at all, why would you suddenly wake up one day and think ‘hmm, I’m going to research Welsh as a living language today.’ You can’t blame people or call them racist for not knowing about the Welsh language, if they’ve never come across it.

I have been openly mocked for learning Welsh. All of my attempts are shut down and then I'm mocked for being and speaking English. I can't win.

This has been my experience too. Moving to where I live now was a huge eye-opener; I’d never experienced real racism before. It’s not much fun.
And it IS racism. I have found it really shocking.

WellErrr · 02/02/2019 09:05

The casual racism on this thread is not really surprising

Where?

PoutySprout · 02/02/2019 09:07

Nope, I met a welsh man and we got married.

Without asking him a single question about where he lived?

WellErrr · 02/02/2019 09:13

Without asking him a single question about where he lived?

Well obviously, once I met a welsh speaker I then became aware that welsh was a living language. Until this point I did not. That is the point I was making.

Do feel free to continue splitting hairs.

MorelloKisses · 02/02/2019 09:18

Surely it must be accepted that it isn’t simply ignorance, but also a slcomplex history of the language usage.

On this thread we have heard multiple accounts of Welsh people who can only speak Welsh, many who cannot speak Welsh at all or only at very basic or even ‘long forgotten’. There seems to be some families where learning (and speaking?) Welsh has skipped generations - likely due to political reasons. Also areas of Wales where Welsh is more or less prevalent (and I assume therefore some places where Welsh is the norm and some where English is...?)

With all this in mind, it hardly seems that surprising that people who don’t have a connection to Wales don’t really understand the current living status of the language.

Attacking this as ‘racism’ seems unfair.

superstealth · 02/02/2019 09:21

Same here WellErrr

Until I met DH I had no idea there were swathes of Wales where children are brought up speaking no English.

MonaChopsis · 02/02/2019 09:23

Much like @superstealth and @WellErrr, I live in a Welsh speaking area but am not Welsh (though nor am I English!) My DD goes to a Welsh medium primary school, where speaking English is a punishable offence. They have a list on the board of all the children who have been heard speaking English, and every time you are heard you lose a minute of 'amser aur' (gold time or free play time) on Fridays. This counts even if you have said "Be ydy 'xxxx' yn Cymraeg", ie asked for a translation, you will be punished for saying xxxx in English.

I have learnt Welsh and while I'm not 100% fluent I get by pretty well in conversation. There are kids in DD's class that only speak Welsh at home and at school. Between 4-7 they seem to have picked up fluent conversational English from being exposed in other arenas (out and about, TV etc). I don't know any adults who can't converse in English though I know many who prefer not to (ie it's their second language and they are fluent but not comfortably so).

Bumblebee39 · 02/02/2019 09:30

I'm British not English. I didn't know it was an issue that people didn't understand

SerenDippitty · 02/02/2019 10:20

I’ve never met a Welsh speaker who couldn’t speak or understand English. Given that only 20% of the population of Wales speak Welsh, and the prevalence of English language media,. that some people still manage to reach adulthood only able to speak Welsh is astonishing.

ChickiePeaPie · 02/02/2019 10:30

I think some people just mistakenly lump Welsh and the Gaelics in with Latin because they're old languages that they've never heard anyone speak.

Speaking of smaller area languages, I'm going to google Cornish. No clue how prevalent that is currently! Would be v interested to hear from MNers who speak it...

Consolidatedyourloins · 02/02/2019 10:37

We got put to sit near a friend of his and her acquaintance. For background, this girl openly admitted that the only time she had left London for Wales was to visit her friend’s holiday cottage in West Wales. She is very bright too, and studied... languages.

FFS get a grip OP. She studies languages so probably meant to ask if he was learning his mother tongue as a hobby.

English is my second language, but I can no longer read or write my mother tongue, I would LOVE to study it as a hobby.

You say 'we got put to sit' in your OP, which is terrible English. Can you therefore not understand that sometimes people say things but they don't come out the right way?

this girl openly admitted that the only time she had left London for Wales was to visit her friend’s holiday cottage in West Wales.

Hardly a crime, is it? I've only been to Wales for holidays, I have no family or work connections there.

FlightStrike · 02/02/2019 10:53

There are a large amount of people here asking for compassion for the girl who asked the daft question because she had no reasonable way of knowing. That would be fair if it didn't clearly state in the original post that she asked this question after a conversation regarding the Welsh-speaking friend's upbringing which specifically addressed the fact he came from a Welsh-speaking family.

I am a Welsh-speaking person in a predominantly English-speaking part of Wales. People who have commented that the conflict over the Welsh language is most intense between non-Welsh speaking and Welsh speaking Welsh people are correct. I think this is because it matters to those groups, deeply. The Welsh speakers are genuinely concerned about the continuation of a huge aspect of their culture and way of life. The non-Welsh speakers genuinely feel they're being told that they're not "enough". It's upsetting and difficult and shouldn't be trivialised.

But I think it's also worth carefully considering whether reactions here are to the facts, as stated, in the original post, or influenced by pre-existing ideas, experiences and anxieties about knowledge and ignorance relating to Welsh and the reactions that provokes on both sides.

Again, per the original post, the woman in question had been informed that the OP's friend was raised in a Welsh speaking household when she made the comments. At that point, yes, it's fucking stupid, especially for a linguistics student, to ask if the language he spoke with his parents at home is a hobby.

WellErrr · 02/02/2019 11:07

Hardly a crime, is it? confused I've only been to Wales for holidays, I have no family or work connections there.

I have come across people who think that this IS a crime, actually, and that (specifically) English people ‘using’ the country just for enjoyment is wrong. An acquaintance was on tv saying it, I haven’t made it up.

Consolidatedyourloins · 02/02/2019 11:25

WellErre

That's incredible. What else are you supposed to do there if you don't have connections there?!

That's as bad as a Londoner saying every English person should visit London because it's the capital.

corythatwas · 02/02/2019 11:28

Several different strands here.

a) First, there is the not uncommon English attitude that other languages only exist like some quaint national costume that people wear for amusement.

*My dh 30 years later still cringes at the memory of his brother asking my brother if we actually spoke Swedish at home (he knew we were Swedes, living in Sweden, yet it seemed such a quaint concept to him)

*Boris trying to put the fear of God into the Swedish ambassador by speculating that they might have to speak German if it wasn't for the English (no doubt the man is totally unfazed by such a prospect, he will have learnt German at school, as well as English)

people assuring me in dead earnest that Dutch is dying out in the Netherlands because they all speak English (funny how when you go to the Netherlands, they're speaking Dutch all around you)

b) Secondly, there is the very specific (and of no doubt colonial) hatred of Celtic languages; the feeling that Welsh and Gaelic not only are dying out, but should be dying out, because they are something people only do to annoy the English and they should know their place. That is something I never get as a Swede, but you see it all over social media directed against the Welsh.

SerenDippitty · 02/02/2019 11:29

I have come across people who think that this IS a crime, actually, and that (specifically) English people ‘using’ the country just for enjoyment is wrong. An acquaintance was on tv saying it, I haven’t made it up.

Were they talking about holidaymakers specifically, or people who have bought holiday homes?

Consolidatedyourloins · 02/02/2019 11:39

a) First, there is the not uncommon English attitude that other languages only exist like some quaint national costume that people wear for amusement.

Or maybe it's a fatalistic acceptance of the hegemony of the English language?

Linguists predict 50-90% of the world's 6,000 languages will be extinct in the next century, including my mother tongue.

I love my mother tongue and don't want it to die out but I'm not going to blame it on an English person asking if I still speak my mother tongue.

PregnantSea · 02/02/2019 11:56

I'm going to sound very prejudice here, and I apologise in advance because there are always those who break the mold, but in my experience people who were raised in London and have never left tend to be incredibly sheltered and I'll informed about the rest of the UK. I've been asked if they have taxis in Manchester. Seriously.

Not Welsh myself but DH is Welsh and I have a lot of Welsh friends and I agree that what this girl said was stupid and offensive. She probably didn't mean it to be though - if it's happening outside of her London bubble then it's not real to her 🤷

JenniferJareau · 02/02/2019 11:59

I have been openly mocked for learning Welsh. All of my attempts are shut down and then I'm mocked for being and speaking English. I can't win.

This happened to my Mum in the 70's. Learnt the language but couldn't get a decent job in her profession as it was always 'But you're not really Welsh, are you*.

I got told as a child to 'Fuck off home' so often when living in 70's Wales it got boring (I was born in England). Apparently at 7 years old I was 'taking their jobs' all the 'fucking English coming here'. I know they were only parroting what they heard at home but it was truly awful to have to be on the receiving end of.

Luckily things are very different now.

SerenDippitty · 02/02/2019 12:02

Some people still have a very stereotypical view of the Welsh

metro.co.uk/2018/11/27/crisps-withdrawn-from-sale-for-being-offensive-to-welsh-people-8182303/

corythatwas · 02/02/2019 12:03

The predictions of linguists are not always correct. My PhD professor was a linguist. He told me in all seriousness that Welsh would be dead in 20 years time. There are more Welsh speakers now than there were when he made the prediction.

The truth is that we don't know what the hegemony of the English language will do in the long run. 200 years ago, people would have laughed themselves silly at the thought: it seemed so obvious that the only language fit for international communication was French.

When languages die out otoh it is usually for political/social reasons, often combined with a small and/or impoverished population. Such situations can be reversed- look at Hebrew, which was officially dead, or Welsh, which was supposedly dying.

And even from that situation there is a BIG leap to expecting that prosperous countries not subject to oppression will abandon their own national language simply because they have to learn English at school.

Consolidatedyourloins · 02/02/2019 12:03

I've been asked if they have taxis in Manchester. Seriously. hmm

And I've been asked by a cousin in Yorkshire if they need a passport to travel to London.

Being sheltered is not a London trait.

ilovewelshrarebit123 · 02/02/2019 12:05

My DD is a fluent Welsh speaker, she goes to a Welsh speaking school.

I've lost count of the times ignorant people have said to us 'it's a dying language' it's just plain rude to say that about someone's language!