My chat with someone who believed people only started speaking Welsh when he walked into the pub

Excellent article. When I saw half the headline in my inbox I though it was going to be about something else - "My chat with someone who believed people only started speaking Welsh IN SCHOOL". I suspect that there are many people who imagine that Welsh, like French, is purely a school subject and, because they do not live in a Welsh-speaking area, cannot imagine that it is the first, home, language of many children.

Where is that, Joanne?

We could do with a Welsh Language Development Agency similar to the WDA of yesteryear whose sole remit is to market the language to win over hearts and minds. Having one person sef 'Comisiynydd yr Iaith' (and his team) to essentially police anti-Welsh language sentiment in business and then promote it on the other is a big ask. Do Welsh Speakers ever ask themselves "If I didn't speak it, why would I want to? what would be the motivation?" To assume all people should speak or should wish to speak Welsh is exactly that an assumption. Positive news today that Duolingo and Welsh Language Learning Apps have seen an increase in use. Immersive language learning in Nant Gwrtheyrn and in Glanllyn and Llangrannog for school age children should be promoted for I fear that classroom based, exam centered learning is proving to be a passion killer for the language.

I honestly never know what to think about this kind of story. I don't know because I wasn't there. I feel the same about the reporting of English speakers banning Welsh language in shops.... I have lived long enough to observe how people behave and there are two sides to every story. You can't speculate about what people might be thinking. You have to ask. I have a brummie accent because that's where I spent my childhood. My father went to Birmingham for teaching work in the 60s. I moved back to Wales in the 80s in the vague hope that Wales might opt for independence and we could escape from Margaret Thatcher. I may have a brummie accent but my husband is the only monoglot English speaker in our house. In our wider family, we are 50/50 Welsh speakers. Referring to Joanne Davies' comment; I don't spend much time in pubs but from comparing experiences with other Welsh friends with Midlands accents; we have observed that some taxi drivers always assume that anyone with an urban English accent in Wales wants to hear about how much they dislike Muslims. That's not the same thing as two people having a conversation from a shared point of view. The taxi driver never assumes that their passenger might be Welsh and/or doesn't share their opinion. We can't generalise about taxi drivers. It also wouldn't be correct to think that everyone moving to Wales, from England, hates Muslims. I should also point out that, in response to my accent, I have had very respectable middle-class Welsh women ask me 'is it very black where you come from?'. One of them was a teacher in Newport Gwent, no less. So it might be wise to assume that racism is the potential flip side of any kind of nationlism, even Welsh Nationalism. I remember the pub trope from the 1970s. I would have been about 10 years old and we used to come to Wales on holiday. At that age, it was difficult to figure out how Nefyn was a different country, when there weren't people speaking a different language in Weston or Margate. The man who walks into a pub in this trope is usually a tourist. It's important to point that out. If he lives and works with the other drinkers, and hasn't realised that they sometimes speak Welsh, then he's obviously a bit thick. The narrative is different. Many tourists in Wales did not consider a holiday in Wales as a holiday 'abroad', in the 1970s. The joke in that trope is at the expense of people who also struggled with the concept that a few words of Spanish might be helpful for a holiday in Spain. They certainly shouldn't have been surprised that the locals in Spain spoke Spanish or that Welsh would be spoken in Wales. Invoking the 'Welsh Not' always makes me wary. This was applied by middle class Welsh teachers to their own people. I would argue that class hatred was the primary motivation. You can't dump the liability for the 'Welsh Not' on every English speaker when the responsibility clearly lies closer to home. You can't pick and choose your history in this way. I have another branch of my family tree going back to Rutland and children were similarly persecuted because of rural traditions around marriage. The dialect in Rutland is fairly dense. They probably had their knuckles rapped for talking funny and dropping their aiches, too. The suffering of children is exactly the same and you can't get any political mileage from that. I'm not convinced that there is a colonial attitude to overcome. If you are talking about English speakers in Wales, they aren't colonists. Most of them are Welsh. No matter how often people are told they 'should' learn Welsh, they will identify as Welsh with or without the language. The Welsh culture is different, even when expressed through the English language. I get sick of pointing out that the English speaking Welsh are not English. This is their country too. That's a bit of a blind spot for many nationalists. We need to promote the language without taking funding away from schools in some of the most deprived areas of the country which happen to be English speaking.

I hand lived in West Wales for 30 years and have never met a single anti Muslim English person in a pub here. This is pure racism on your part are you a friend of Mike Parker

Funny how this old chestnut hangs around like a bad smell. One monolingual told me that half the time they don't speak Welsh properly .. he could tell, you know. You can always tell. I speak English with a pronounced English accent, but understand Welsh perfectly. In five years living in Gwynedd I never once heard Welsh used as a means of exclusion. Never once in five years.

Why are you engaging with it then?

Brilliant post Diolch yn fawr Colin y garddwr Nos da X

Are u English per chance

Do some people just want to annoy....or genuinely have that low iq?

Wow..Diego .. you sound like a total nasty piece of work.... your imperialism is dying...does that make you sad?

"bending the facts"....are you that low iq that you think Welsh speakers only speak Welsh in front of English speakers...............gosh thats low IQ

My wife is a non Welsh speaker, my 10 year old grandson does speak Welsh. I only speak in Welsh to my grandson and he only speaks English to his grandmother. The conversation flips from Welsh to English seamlessly.

Call it a trope if you like, but I can categorically state that I was totally aware of this happening, to me, in a pub in Pembrey in 1974. I had just married a lovely young lady from the village. It was only when I asked the barman for a drink, in English with an English accent that there was initially silence and then people started to speak to each other in Welsh. In my case, after initially putting me off the place and the people, I started to learn more about the history of Wales and the language. When our daughter was in secondary school and I was a school governor, I was one that supported the idea of making Welsh a compulsory subject up to GCSE level. Although try as I might, I could not get any of my colleagues at work to help me to learn the language myself. Fortunately for me, I have now found Duolingo and started to learn it on my own in my retirement.

Replying mostly to Ann Corkett: yes, “a school subject….” : I have an anecdote that I’ve bored some sufferers with in the past, but here goes again. I was “good at French” in school, and got an A grade at O-level to prove that – but it was only when I went to France for a holiday job, the year after I left school, that I really “realised” viscerally that it was what everyone spoke, 24/7. And specifically, it was a three-year-old child who splashed subjunctives all over my ears. His dad, my boss at the holiday job, had just allocated me the morning’s task, of cleaning a chalet ready for the next week’s guests, and left me with a gentle reminder that we needed the place seriously clean. Little Pierre-Alain, 3 years alone, decided that staying to watch the new student was more interesting than following his dad on the rounds. And, like any three-year-old junior supervisor, he decided to repeat the orders to me. “Oui: souviens-toi, Davide, il faut que ce soit propre…” [“Yes: remember, Davide, this place must be clean…”] I listened, and a little explosion happened in my mind: this little kid had just chucked a subjunctive at me without even thinking about it. (And subjunctives were things that you only started doing at A-level, as they’d told me at school….) And from that day, readers, I use them in Welsh and in English – and in French when I can!

Mind you, taxi drivers are a bit like barbers, they generally agree with whatever their customers say ;)

I've spent about 2 weeks in Wales in all my life, but it was enough to find myself in a similar situation: people speaking Welsh in a pub, an Englishman walks in and complains about Welsh people speaking a language he/non-Welsh can't understand (I don't remember if he mentioned specifically people switching to or just speaking it, but I don't think it makes a big difference overall, does it?) In this case, things got funny when someone told him I'm Italian. So he turns towards me with stunned eyes and asks "why are you learning such a useless language?" "Because I like it". And at that point, there's not really much one can say, except joking one the waste of time. Or admitting he's just annoyed because he's just too lazy to do the effort to learn but he doesn't want to be cut off of conversations in what he considers "his" country. But if you don't push back, and just find a way to have a friendly chat instead...doesn't this have more chances to make these guys less hostile? Just an impression from an outsider.

I work as an examiner for WJEC marking GCSE and A-level. I love going to Cardiff every year, but think a bit of money might be saved by not sending everything in Welsh as well as English to English examiners who are almost certainly not going to be able to read it. As for the road signs, just use Welsh and learn place names in Welsh. Easier than trying to read 8 or more place names on road signs when you are driving

A good article. I'm sure people don't switch to spite someone else - it doesn't make sense. I think there may be another factor at work, and I've noticed it whenever a language I don't know is being used. My mind seems to automatically attempt to understand the language and latches on to sounds that seem to be words I understand. Eventually I realise I don't know the language at all. If someone is listening to a Welsh conversation and hears 'honey', 'barn', 'wedding' they might think that English is being spoken and that someone is proposing that they and their beloved get married in a barn. As the conversation rolls on it becomes apparent that the Welsh is being spoken and that the speakers appear to have 'switched'. The English speaker had simply latched on to hynny, barn, wedyn ... Is this a possible factor? Do other people find that this happens to them?

Many years ago, I'd been given the impression that this is what happened in Welsh shops, pubs etc. My then husband and I took our two sons on a holiday to mid Wales, staying near a lovely lake. When we first popped into a small shop, two women were talking in Welsh - far from switching from English to Welsh, on hearing we were speaking English, they changed to English themselves. All the talk of such unfriendly behaviour had been nonsense. I'm now learning Welsh, having moved here in 2016.