language
This is the first of what will be a monthly column by the writer,
John Barnie
December 2020
O'r rhewgell
I was born and grew up in Abergavenny and during my formative years the town, the Black Mountains, and the River Usk were home, no matter where else in the world I happened to be, but for the past thirty-five years I have lived in Comins Coch, a village one and a half miles out of Aberystwyth, off the road to Machynlleth.
My ‘patch’ today is the town, the sea cliffs as far as Borth, the dunes at Ynyslas, the woods at Penglais and Clarach, and the lanes winding up to Cefn Llwyd and the foothills of the Cambrians. (Not having a car, I define my space as the distance I can easily walk from the house.)
This approximately eight square miles is surprisingly varied, both culturally and in terms of its natural history. When, in 2010, I had the idea of writing a book of short poems about wild flowers with facing photographs, I armed myself with a digital camera and spent the spring and summer photographing all the flowers I could find, ending up with images of 200 species. Until I did this, I had no idea of how much diversity there was in the area.
Aberystwyth, too, is diverse, for a town about the size of Abergavenny. It is home to The National Library of Wales, and the University. It has six bookshops, two cinemas, one of the best Arts Centres in Wales—and that is to scratch the surface. After thirty-five years, I still feel in many ways an outsider, as I wasn’t born in Ceredigion, but I cannot now imagine living anywhere else.
Aberystwyth is also a bilingual town, and that makes it an interesting place to navigate linguistically and culturally, even if you have a limited command of Welsh, as I do.
In fact, it never occurred to me to learn the language until I moved to Denmark to work. That may sound paradoxical, or even just perverse, but learning Danish, and eventually marrying a Dane, made me understand how language changes your perceptions, how speaking another language changes ever so slightly who you are.
If Danish did that to me, I wondered what speaking Welsh might do, and I began to teach myself with the aid of Caradar’s Welsh Made Easy—not that easy, actually, but a very good grammar for its time.
Then we moved back to Wales, to Abergavenny, and three years later to Aberystwyth after I became assistant editor of Planet. That was the first time I really used Welsh, dealing with our printers, with Welsh-speaking contributors and publishers. It was a plunge in at the deep end.
Danish is my second language, and Welsh has remained my third, never as fluent as it should be, but good enough to hold basic conversations with neighbours, shopkeepers and acquaintances.
In Denmark there are many people I have never spoken English to, and the same has happened here with Welsh-speakers in Comins Coch, in shops, in the post office, at the bank. You eventually get to ‘know your way around’—meeting someone walking their dog in the lane, you see from afar who it is and adjust the language in advance. At the butcher’s, I know which butchers speaks Welsh (most of them) and which do not.
Ceredigion still has a high density of Welsh speakers, something in the region of 54%. In the town the percentage is lower, circa 39%, but Aberystwyth has always been lower than the surrounding countryside for historic reasons, and these days the University skews things even further because most of the students are from England. Nonetheless, there is a lot of Welsh around almost anywhere you go.
It is something of a puzzle why more English incomers don’t learn the language, not realising, it seems, that to be monolingual in Ceredigion is to remain permanently a settler, an outsider.
In Comins Coch there are two different worlds and the one understands little or nothing of the other. When we first came to live here, our neighbour on one side was a little old lady, an invalid, who rarely left the house.
To English people in the village she was just that, a little old lady. In fact, she had been a school librarian, was very well read, and had known a number of the leading Welsh-language writers of the post-War years, but this was invisible to English neighbours who wouldn’t have heard of the writers in any case.
I suppose Empire is to blame for the English being resolutely—even proudly—monoglot. In every country which the English conquered and colonised they imposed the English language until it became a world language, and is currently the lingua franca of politics, big business, and tourism.
That is bad luck for the English. It allows them to communicate (or so they think) anywhere, though the truth is that the vast majority of people in the world do not speak English—try it out in Szechuan. You can’t in fact have too many languages, and speaking only one is a handicap, even if you don’t realise it.
Cofiwch Dryweryn
The influx of monolingual incomers from England goes on apace, and in the thirty-five years I have lived here I have noticed it on the streets. Welsh persists, though, and won’t give up without a fight. Cofiwch Dryweryn—Remember Tryweryn—words written on a fragment of wall about five miles outside the town on the road to Aberaeron, vandalised now and then, and patiently restored. They recall the drowning of the Tryweryn Valley and the Welsh-speaking village of Capel Celyn in the 1950s to provide a reservoir for Liverpool.
But the words mean more than that. You can buy the slogan on an enamelled metal plate at shops in town, white on red—Cofiwch—and that’s what people will do while the language lives.
John Barnie is a poet and essayist. For many years he was editor of Planet. He also plays guitar and sings in the blues band ‘Hollow Log’. His latest book is a collection of poems, Sunglasses (Cinnamon, 2020).