Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales

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It didn’t pass me by that both men do not live in Wales, but I do; over the past 20 years, I have watched young people becoming the lifeblood of the language. This is clear from the rising popularity of Welsh-language schools and in cross-party, non-nationalist independence campaigns such as YesCymru, which is dominated by younger voices, speaking in English and Welsh.

Issa’s collection My Body Can House Two Hearts was published in 2019. She also contributed to Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales and The Mab, a retelling of the Mabinogi stories for children, both published this year. The possessive adjectives precede the noun they qualify, which is often followed by the corresponding form of the personal pronoun, e.g. fy mara i "my bread", dy fara di "your bread", ei fara fe "his bread", etc. The corresponding pronoun is often dropped in the spoken language, fy mara (my bread), dy fara (your bread), ei fara (his bread) and ei bara (her bread). Adjectives normally follow the noun they qualify, while a few, such as hen, pob, annwyl, and holl ("old", "every", "dear", "whole") precede it. For the most part, adjectives are uninflected, though there are a few with distinct masculine/feminine or singular/plural forms. After feminine singular nouns, adjectives receive the soft mutation. Third-person masculine singular forms o and fo are heard in parts of mid- and north Wales, while e and fe are heard in parts of mid-, west and south Wales. The definite article, which precedes the words it modifies and whose usage differs little from that of English, has the forms y, yr, and ’r. The rules governing their usage are:

Colours in Welsh

Wyt ti wedi ei weld e/fe/o/fo heddiw? Have you seen him today? Alla i ddim dod o hyd i fy allweddi i/fi. I can't find my keys. I bought this book while on a short holiday in Aberystwyth after reading one of the volumes in Malcolm Pryce's sublime Aberystwyth Noir series. Person 2: Felly rwyf am ddewis dau ddwr, os gwelwch yn dda. (So I want to choose two waters, please.) FelinFach Home All about Wales Welsh National Anthem Calon Lân Useful Welsh Words Welsh for Good Morning Welsh for Good Afternoon Welsh for Good Night Welsh for Hello Welsh for Thank You I have a theory that the triple harp is seen by many as a symbol of Wales, its plight mirroring that of Wales and the Welsh language in the last century. Many influential players today came to the instrument as adults with a passion for Welsh history, and saw learning it as the ultimate manifestation of their interests. It is viewed as a kind of historical artefact, hailing from a better time when everyone in Wales spoke Welsh (and was born in Wales), when every young person was passionate about their native culture, and when rich landowners made their servants work in national dress in the name of preserving the tradition.

While the singular demonstrative pronouns this and that have separate forms for masculine and feminine, there is only a single plural form in each case ( these, those). This is consistent with a general principle in Welsh that gender is not marked in the plural. The latter forms are also often used for intangible, figurative, or general ideas (though cf. also the use of 'hi' discussed above).

One of my formative experiences in folk music was attending an annual week-long course for young people at an outdoor education centre in north Wales. Before I arrived the first time, harp in tow, I was very much under the impression that I was the only young Welsh folk musician left in Wales. So what I found came as a bit of a rude awakening. There were about 50 other teenagers filling every corner of the centre with jigs and reels, singing folk songs in improvised four-part harmony until 3am. I spent most of my first visit hiding on the top bunk in my room, but over the years I began to feel more and more at home in this noisy, frenetic community of passionate young musicians. The defensiveness and anxiety that interpretations of the past can generate shows how emotional history can be, and how Welsh and British identity are sometimes trapped by their pasts. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, a magical mist of forgetfulness has been cast on the Britons and Saxons to ensure neither remembers the wrongs and atrocities committed by each against the other. This ensures old grievances do not fester and the two peoples can live side by side. It is a powerful parable about the dangers of remembering, but also people’s desire to do just that. Might I suggest that a touch of swaggering romance is just what we need right now,” writes Mike Parker, setting out his vision of Wales as “a deeply ordinary country” where diverse pluralism thrives. Musician, Cerys Hafana, writes of how tradition in Wales can be a stifling force. But she refuses to accept that. “My definition of folk music: music that can, and will, be changed.” Grug Muse sees a future of transformation through decentralisation in Wales and describes a small-scale but heartening revitalisation in Dyffryn Natlle. “A theme is developing.” For years, Joe Dunthorne struggled to define his sense of being Welsh until he gathered with others to watch a rugby game in the London Welsh Centre. “In their imperfect Welshness, I sense that I am among my people. These are the Welsh-ish.” Whereas Hanan Issa has her own vision. “Perhaps Wales and Welshness belongs to all those who care for her and the people who call her home.” The majority of words, it appears, takes the plural ending -au. Here are some examples. And keep an eye on those sound changes! agoriad (key, opening) Issa is of mixed heritage, and said that “sitting with one foot on either shore of different heritages really does make you have a greater, deeper understanding of different views, different ways of living and different languages”. She grew up surrounded by people speaking different languages, including Arabic from her Iraqi family and Welsh from her grandparents.

I'm not Welsh, though my stepfather was and, according to my Ancestry DNA analysis, I am 5% Welsh, whatever that means. However I am trying to learn Welsh for no other reason than that is fascinatingly different in structure from other European languages I have studied. Russian: валли́ец (ru) m ( vallíjec ), валли́йка (ru) f ( vallíjka ), валли́йцы (ru) pl ( vallíjcy ), уэ́льсцы (ru) pl ( uélʹscy ) The mutation ts → j reflects a change heard in modern words borrowed from English. Borrowed words like tsips (chips) can often be heard in Wales and the mutated form jips is also common. Dw i'n mynd i gael tsips (I'm going to get chips); Mae gen i jips (I have chips). Despite this the 'ts' → 'j' mutation is not usually included in the classic list of Welsh mutations and is rarely taught in formal classes. Nevertheless, it is a part of the colloquial language and is used by native, first-language speakers. Word-final -f is rarely heard in Welsh. Thus verbal forms in -af will be pronounced as if they ended in /a/ and they may be written thus in lower registers.

Basic words and phrases in Welsh

Nouns following adjectives (N.B. most adjectives follow the noun); i.e. hen ddyn 'old man' (from dyn 'man'). The Welsh masculine-feminine gender distinction is reflected in the pronouns. There is, consequently, no word corresponding to English "it", and the choice of e/o (south and north Welsh respectively) or hi depends on the grammatical gender of the antecedent. The idiosyncratic cultures of Liverpool and Manchester, just 30 miles apart, are so widely understood, I don’t see why it should be so hard to grasp that a country of 8,000 square miles might have some regional variation in accent. Of course, given the common and pointless use of Wales’s landmass as a unit of measurement, I should say, rather than it being a country of 8,000 square miles, that it’s four times the size of Iceberg A-68, formerly of the Larsen C ice shelf, or that it’s equivalent to two million rugby pitches. Ah, rugby. We love rugby, us Welsh. All of us. Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool and has been living in west Wales for a quarter of a century. Author of many works of fiction, memoir, travelogue, and poetry, his words are translated into twenty languages and he has won the Wales Book of the Year twice, most recently in 2020, for Broken Ghost.