The other day, out shopping in Skipton, North Yorkshire, I came across a lady struggling to work out how to use the parking meter. We got chatting, and as she had a strong Welsh accent, I asked where she was from. “Cardiff”, she said, “Are you from the North?” (Wales? England?) Oh good, I thought, a chance to practise speaking Welsh. So, “Na, Sais dw i, ond dw i’n siarad bach o Gymraeg.” (No, I’m English, but I speak a bit of Welsh.) Straightaway came the reply, “No! I don’t speak Welsh. I’m from Cardiff. NOBODY FROM CARDIFF SPEAKS WELSH .”
Definitely not. The problem with Cardiff is that about only 5% of the people there speak it, so those who do may only speak it at home, and it is really hard to find someone in Cardiff “in the wild” to speak Welsh to. But if you know where to look, there are shops with Welsh speaking staff and other possibilities to practice Welsh.
Some areas of Cardiff are more Welsh than others. I don’t think I’ve ever heard people speaking Welsh in the main shopping area, but I have heard a chap speaking Welsh on the phone while walking across Pontcanna Fields. Also the staff in the Pierhead building in the Bay are happy to speak Welsh, and of course many people like my daughter and granddaughter speak Welsh, though not as a first language. But as Hendrik says, Cardiff is quite a large city, so the Welsh speakers are very diluted.
I used to live in Hamilton St, Canton, Cardiff and both my neighbours either side were Welsh-speaking, and there were others in the street as well. I regularly went to social events where the main language was Welsh.
I think that conversation was a case of someone with no contact at all with Welsh speakers making a personal judgement instead of looking into the facts.
Very interesting! Diolch yn fawr! I still have friends living in Canton and nearby Pontcanna, and I love to go back and visit them as often as I can. It’s definitely feeling more and more Welsh!
I mean, there are two Welsh medium high schools, numerous primary schools and a thriving University Welsh department in the capital, so I suspect ‘nobody’ doesn’t even work as a figurative expression.
Thanks, everyone. Interesting. Odd feeling, though, that this Englishman speaks more Welsh than many Welsh people do. I continue to wave the flag here in Yorkshire…
Having the Sennedd and BBC Cymru and S4C there has changed the demographic quite a bit over the past 20 years or so. Lots of Welsh speakers have moved there from all over Wales to take part in these newer industries, which means the idea of a ‘Southern’ Welsh a bit problematic.
I can’t believe I’ve found this - but I thought I remembered sending this screen shot to a friend - asking her which county had the most Welsh speakers - which she proceeded to get wrong many times!
I was doing a database project and you could choose any public data to join together - guess what I chose!
I did at the time - obviously Cardiff was a lot lower percentage-wise, so it was a trick question to my friend in a way. I was quite interested and I think I took some screenshots - I will scroll back and see - I found this one in my messages.
@rich Can you remember which year these figures are from? I’d heard there are more Welsh speakers in Carmarthenshire than Gwynedd and it would be great to know if it’s still true. And what is the source? Census figures?
It was census data - however (been thinking about this) - this was done at around about the same time as the new data was being announced - so it would have been the previous census data.
Yes, I seem to remember that.Camarthenshire has been overtaken in the latest figures…but I should be able to dig out the more recent figures at some point today as they are publicly available.
So, a) this was a little harder to find than I was expecting…and b) the way the figures for ‘Cardiff’ are classified must surely be different between the two - i.e. they cannot be Apples vs Apples. The ones below are from the 2021 census data.
If you go to the link I shared upthread, it comes from StatsWales, which has a section dedicated to Welsh language figures from the Census. You can download the stats from there in a technical form I don’t quite understand (it opens on my computer as an Excel file).
StatsWales (source of all sorts of useful information/data): Catalogue
Welsh speakers in Cardiff, “The problem with Cardiff is that and out only 5% of the people there speak it”. It’s actually a lot more, there are an increasing number of Welsh speakers in Cardiff, also according to what I’ve just got from statistics here are the figures, '16.2% of the population have one or more skills (ability to read write or understand Welsh)."
I wonder what the definition is of what counts as a Welsh speaker. Is it someone at the dw i’n hoffi coffi stage, happy that they understand the announcements at aldi which till is being opened next (it’s always in Welsh first) versus I speak it all day long and definitely prefer radio cymru over radio 4? I know first language Welsh speakers who tell me their Welsh isn’t very good and they don’t like speaking it in front of people they don’t know and particularly in situations where officialdom is involved - eg inside courts.
- but I thought I remembered sending this screen shot to a friend - asking her which county had the most Welsh speakers - which she proceeded to get wrong many times!
