Future Cymraeg

Welsh
1

We’re about to start emailing ex and current learners to let them know about all the stuff coming down the pipes for the Welsh course - the biggest set of improvements in the last fifteen years - the highlights are the new approach to listening, and an approximate tripling in the size of the course (but there’s other stuff coming as well!) :slight_smile:

After doing a lot of data cleansing, we’re left with about 55k email addresses - and that made me realise something.

I reached a kind of burnout with the forum a few years back, and I don’t think dividing things between Slack (which seemed very fun and new at the time) and the forum was a good thing for the community - my bad.

But seeing the size of that email list got me thinking that there was an opportunity to do something differently - to regenerate the community and to make a positive contribution to the future of the language - but without it needing to centre me (I’m really not a big fan of heirarchies, and I think that was part of why I got to burnout before).

Back in my activist days, we would have gnawed off our right arms for an email list of 55k people who care about the future of the language - we used to find it difficult to reach more than a couple of thousand people. And SSi has been sitting here with a list that large, doing nothing with it. Makes me feel a bit ashamed, actually.

So here’s what I’m thinking now.

We’re going to recommit to the idea of a weekly email. It’s not going to focus on ‘what’s on’ kind of stuff (although I’m sure we can have a thread on the forum where people can announce whatever they’ve got happening, and that can get a regular link from the email).

It’s going to focus on ‘what can we do together - to help people learn, and to help build a strong, sustainable future for the language’.

I think the first step should be to start talking about how we communicate - it’s important that it’s not just me mouthing off on a soapbox once a week - we need to be talking to each other, talking with each other (and then sharing those conversations via the email). I think the forum is probably the best place for that, but we can think about and talk about and test alternatives.

I think we probably need a name as a group - I’m just sticking ‘Future Cymraeg’ in the sand to start with, it would be great if we could come up with something better - it should be about bringing people together who care about the language, and the future of the language, even if they don’t speak it confidently (or even at all!) at the moment. I think there’s been a gap (on a national basis) in terms of input from people who care about the language without speaking it (or without speaking it all the time).

If you’re interested in getting involved (oh, I hope there are some people who are interested in getting involved!) the two first things you can do are:

a) say hello :slight_smile: and

b) have a bit of a think about what we can do to create a community around this issue - what would make it interesting, what would make it fun, what would make it effective - and where we should have those initial conversations.

Who’s in? :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

Sounds amazing, count me in :+1:

1 Like
3

Whoo-hoo, welcome aboard Charlie! Now there are two of us we’ll need a T-shirt :wink:

2 Likes
4

a) hello :slightly_smiling_face:

b) After gaining much of my Welsh and all of my confidence through SSiW I am out there speaking it in the wild. Well, sort of. For four years I have been going to an anglicised village in North Wales and speaking English to the woman who owns the shop, then one day she was nattering away in Welsh to the woman in front of me. If 55k learners knew of places/shops with a willing Welsh speaker then it is easier to start the conversation. So, would a ‘quality mark’ for shops that have an offer that promotes starting each conversation in Welsh work such as a standard sign on the door, non-Welsh speaking learners able to respond by saying a short Welsh sentence, free SSiW courses for staff in shops that sign up, a rule that Welsh speaking staff speak to kids from Welsh schools in Welsh even if they reply in English etc. I just feel something is needed to get Welsh conversations of all levels going on out in the wild. Umm, not sure I have explained this very well or even if it is on topic (I have probably even mentioned this somewhere else in this Forum in the past).

3 Likes
5

Any movement that cares about the future of Cymraeg has my backing and I’d be happy to play a part.
Off the top of my head, there are a few issues facing the language that we may be able to do something about:

  1. Welsh speakers speaking English to each other. There’s no easy answer to this but knowing where other Welsh speakers are is a good start and I know that Charlie has done excellent work, travelling across Wales and identifying shops and businesses where Welsh is spoken. This is really useful information, especially in areas where Welsh isn’t widely spoken and / or for speakers who aren’t confident starting a conversation in Welsh.
  2. Related to this is the idea that “Welsh is for chapel” - that there are certain places and times that it’s appropriate to use Welsh instead of using it everywhere, all the time, even if it’s just saying “Shwmae” at the start of a conversation. Joe Allen speaking Welsh in a press conference is a perfect example of this. We’re often so worried that the people around us might not be Welsh speakers that we don’t even try. I bet none of us do that with English.
  3. There is a huge Welsh diaspora and a smaller but still significant Welsh-speaking diaspora. As a nation, we could do a great deal more to mobilise this valuable resource and engage Welsh speakers and allies across the globe. I’m honestly not sure how we even start with this one but SSi probably has more direct access to the diaspora than most other organisations.
  4. People will use their Welsh more and be more motivated to learn it in the first place if they can use it to do fun and interesting things. There are some excellent Welsh language music festivals in Wales, which is probably one of the best ways to get younger people in particular using the language but what about outside of festival season? What do you usually do for fun? How can you do it in Welsh? Do you use Welsh on social media?

In short, the future of the language depends not just on people learning Welsh but speaking it. If we can give them the resources and confidence to use Welsh in ways that are meaningful to them, and in situations beyond the obvious, it will go a long way.

3 Likes
6

I’m interested. I try to use my Welsh as much as possible. I always use the cash machine at the bank and the self-service tills in the Co-op in Welsh. Our weekly Welsh chat group has also been going for many years now. It’s a great place to catch up with all the local gossip.

Re using Welsh online, I’ve found toot.wales on Mastodon to be a good way to use social media in Welsh. There are quite a few people, both learners and first language speakers on there posting in Welsh.

I have to admit that I’ve let my Welsh YouTube channel languish. I lost heart when YouTube added adverts before my videos. My channel is too small for YouTube to pay me anything and I have no control of the adverts they put on it. Anyway, I don’t know whether the channel is worth reviving, but a weekly email and more conversation here might give me some inspiration.

4 Likes
7

Welcome aboard, Peter, Ianto, Margaret! Lots of good thoughts here already, that’s a great sign.

Er, would you prefer Iuanto?! I’m not sure how well I’m going to do with remembering that, I can’t hear it in my head, if you know what I mean. But I can try!

Any ideas on how we should start trying to build a feeling of community? Maybe we should have some virtual fireside chats to get to know each other, something like that? What do you reckon?

1 Like
8

I’m very in.

I have been thinking a lot recently about what NCLW ought to be doing, but doesn’t, and one of those things is signposting resources. Almost every time someone posts on the Learn Welsh Reddit sub about wanting to know where to start, for eg, I have a list of links that I post. Even just doing that really helps people dip their toe in the water.

Another is about encouraging people to use their Welsh online. A lot of the old online forums died (Maes-E, anyone?), and places like Reddit’s Cymraeg and Learn Welsh subs are under-utilised. Facebook seems vibrant but most learner groups are about asking questions about the language (to which one can get some very confidently wrong answers) and groups for fluent people can be challenging for learners to engage with because the Welsh tends to be harder to understand. We need some sort of graded conversation, where the Welsh is at the right level for the participants.

A bit of mutual support for people producing learner materials would also be helpful. I don’t really see the different services as being in competition, tbh, but complementing each other and helping learners in different ways. Coming from the viewpoint of running both Clwb Malu Cachu and Ymestyn, I think there are a lot of opportunities for developing more resources for leaners, some free, some paid, but accessing the right people to help with that can be hard.

In short, I have a lot of ideas and would very much like to talk.

5 Likes
9

I completely agree with the points made above. I think getting people, whether they be learners or not, to use the language on a regular basis and with strangers, is key. I like the idea of identifying locations with a sticker or sign but I think things like this have been tried in the past without having widespread usage (like Hapus i Siarad). I guess its difficult if you’re a business owner who’s not confident with their Welsh or you’ve got a high turnover of staff, but theres got to be a way of incentivising this because it would be so useful.
Something I’ve been working on since the summer is a website for people to use to find and review places to use their Welsh, this is getting towards the end of its testing phase, hopefully that can be something to help.
I guess in my head there I’d love to see something like CAMRA with a crew of volunteers reviewing places and producing a “Good Welsh Guide” but that might be a bit ambitious.

Iuantos point about the diaspora is a good one too. I know the Welsh government is keen to use the diaspora for business reasons but the same could be true for language groups - its a big, ready and passionate resource for working through tasks and being a pressure group, and it’s completely underused. I’ve had some discussions with Menter Iaith over the summer and one thing they’ve admitted is that they don’t know how many Welsh speakers/learners there are outside of Wales, how many learners/discussion groups there are and where they are. To start with I think gathering this information here would be a good start as a lot of groups use the forum already. In the future it would be great to see things like Mentrau Iaith outside of Wales (though probably smaller scale), and for the census to investigate the usage of the language outside of Wales.. though again a bit ambitious to start with :wink:

3 Likes
10

Anthony is fine :wink:

Iuanto is a misspelling from my pre Welsh-speaking days that I’m kind of stuck with. I’ve used it for various things on the web over the years and changing usernames etc isn’t always that easy.

1 Like
11

Yes, I think this is a key point. There’s very little connection, as far as I can tell, between the umbrella organisations like Dysgu Cymraeg and Mentrau Iaith, campaigning groups like Cymdeithas, NGOs like Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities, the community groups like those running meet-ups, and service providers like SSiW and Ymestyn.

I am finding it very hard to connect with some of these organisations, which means it’s difficult to reach Welsh learning communities.

2 Likes
12

So is ‘Suw’, although it’s a typo from when I was working in publishing in the mid-90s. I decided it was easier to change how I spelt my name than admit that I had made a typo in a letter that had gone out to 60 or 70 people. :rofl:

3 Likes
13

I never knew that :joy:

Brilliant, delighted to have you aboard, Suw, and to see so many ideas! Charlie, I love the idea of a Good Welsh Guide - we’ve tried some things like that over the years but then always discovered that we don’t have the resources to get them to fly. Anthony, great, I can definitely remember that more easily (and I’ll try not to end up mashing it into Iantoney :wink: ).

Maes-E also suffered from a lack of resources, so it ended up being a heavy weight for the volunteers - I’ve often thought that it needs a concerted effort to get it going again, and that might be something we could put some resources into down the line - but for now, I feel as though Future Cymraeg (and/or better alternative names!) is the right place for me to focus.

Memories from my activism days tell me that we shouldn’t try to make everything happen all at once - it’s a marathon, not a sprint - which is why I’m mostly thinking about ‘how do we get to know each other as a core group’ at the moment. But when we get into actual projects, we’ve got good contacts with gov and with Global Welsh and would probably be able to get meetings with most other orgs.

Feels as if we’ve got a pretty terrific initial group here already, even before we start trying to use the email lists to build a bit more connective tissue :slight_smile: :heart:

14

I agree on the resources bit - running a community is a lot of work, and the busier it is the more work it is. And it’s thankless work, too.

I suppose if there’s an idea there, it’s how could we make existing online spaces more active? Eg, do people not post on r/cymraeg because they don’t know about it, or because they feel it’s too much like hard work, or something else?

I wonder, too, what the quick wins are? Where are the things that could be done quickly and easily, and which would be effective?

1 Like
15

Great lines of thinking here :flexed_biceps: :slight_smile:

I think there’s a core question in terms of social interaction - to what extent have FB and Twitter normalised English communication amongst Welsh speakers - and what would make people interested in engaging in a smaller community through the medium of Welsh.

It might be that a learners’ community would be a good starting point, in some ways - I remember the North American Festival of Wales in Washington a few years back, the sense that being a Welsh speaker was high status - so dramatically different from ordinary life in Wales. I wonder if it would be possible to recreate that sense online somehow.

4 Likes
16

I know a couple of people in the Manchester area who are Welsh learners/second language speakers. There’s also a chat group in Manchester and at least one Welsh chapel in Manchester with services in Welsh. But how one would find out about these things, other than by chance, I don’t know.

1 Like
17

I’ve never got involved with Reddit. I agree about the Facebook groups, by the way. It’s usually someone asking why Duolingo said they’d made a mistake. Or at least those are the ones I’ve seen.

I really do recommend Mastodon though. There are #DysguCymraeg and #Cymraeg hashtags so it’s easy to find people posting in Welsh or bilingually.

1 Like
18

I don’t agree with what I am about to write but it could be argued that it doesn’t matter if English is used in social media as long as Welsh speakers communicate in Welsh on a daily basis in other ways. Also, it may be more about being comfortable in speaking Welsh to others and we probably all know fluent Welsh speakers who would prefer to speak to us in English because, as they might say, their Welsh isn’t good enough.

19

@margarethall can I be nosy and ask what your YouTube channel was called?