There was a story a few years ago about an american fire department deciding to honour some of their members who had Irish ancestry with Irish Gaelic signage and words for their liveries and they used Scottish Gaelic by mistake. Apparently it had quite different meanings - maybe a bit of Welsh - Breton, Gwin Coch sort of confusion.
Just going back to the original video in this thread. The last man speaking in the film (2.03 in) was my partners grandfather who spoke Welsh, his children were actively discouraged from learning Welsh so grew up only speaking English, and now itâs going full circle with us and our children, his great-grandchildren, learning Welsh and using it in the home whenever we can. My partnerâs said a few times that she would have loved the chance to speak some Welsh to him were he still alive.
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My heart aches for her, Rich, and all like her!
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200 families in Croesoswallt? Oswestry? Where can I see these detailed stats? What about the areas in SW Herefordshire or West of Clun?
Not just the town, but the surrounding area (which includes Llanymynech and Selattyn right on the border).
You can query the Census data here: QS204EW (Main language (detailed)) - Nomis - Official Census and Labour Market Statistics
For English local authority wards, you can select Welsh as a main language.
I canât reproduce the 200 figure, which I got from elsewhere and looks suspiciously rounded.
For Clun, incidentally, I got one single individual first language Welsh speaker - almost certainly not a local.
To save you the trouble, here are the results of my quick query of the mid-boder wards:
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Theyâre mutually intelligible, apparently.
Although also a Gaelic language, Manx is quite different from them, though (its orthography is half Welsh, half English! because the vocab was collated and written down by linguists from Cymru and England).
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ystadegau da Rob ⌠only issue with the data as a useful tool is âWhat is your main languageââŚmany Welsh speakers in England would not put Welsh as main for obvious reasons
If there was âDo you speak any languages - Welshâ column ⌠I am sure it will be significantly higher
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But then you have to define what constitutes âspeakingâ a language. I can speak French enough to get by in France; I can read books aimed at children around the age of 9 with little difficulty, but if I were asked on a census for languages I spoke, I wouldnât put French because Iâm not fluent. And thatâs the problem with people self-certifying their ability: some will be happy to put that they speak Welsh simply because they can ask for a coffi, and others wouldnât be happy putting it despite being able to understand most of a news broadcast.
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The most shocking thing is that some first language speakers would question their own ability because they couldnât deliver a Sunday sermon or win and eisteddfod chair.
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I know a 1st language Welsh speaker from Pen y Groes , who lives near me. I told her that I was learning not long after I had started and her reply really puzzled and shocked me. She said " I wish I could speak Welsh . I feel bad for not being able to speak it after living here all my life "
Bare in mind that this person is as Welsh as Welsh can be and speaks it with her family all the time .
I looked at her puzzled and told her that she speaks Welsh all the time and is completely fluent and her reply to me was , " We donât speak Welsh we just speak slang "
I found it quite astounding that she doesnât class herself as a Welsh speaker and when I questioned her further she said that she doesnât understand news bulletins in Welsh as they use âposh Welshâ and that she would have to use subtitles to watch certain programmes on s4c .
She obviously doesnât think of her and her family and friendâs Welsh as being âproperâ enough
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Itâs an interesting point though.
Are there distinct strata of Welsh speaking / Welsh speakers?
And they run in parallel to, but do not speak to each other?
I wonder what @garethrking makes of all this?
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Iâm sure there are different strata of English speakers. Iâm in Somerset, and some of the older generation (not so much now, but certainly a couple of decades ago) would talk in a colloquial language that was almost impenetrable to the younger generation. Itâs not inconceivable that such speakers might have difficulty with the English used on BBC news bulletins (if any of them owned the technology to actually access them!)
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I long ago got used to native speakers dissing their own ability to speak Welsh and dutifully admiring the tartified Welsh promoted by their âbettersâ (predominantly second-language speakers).
And I long ago stopped caring. 
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It could just be that mistakenly, she doesnât acknowledge the true worth of her perfectly authentic and respectable dialect. The same thing happens âdown southâ. I think I mentioned elsewhere that a friend of mine feels that way about his brilliant Cwmtawe dialect 
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Thatâs very sad, isnât it? I met someone in Crymych once who I heard speaking Welsh with kitchen staff in a pub, but when I tried speaking to her she got embarrassed and said, âI donât speak Welsh properly and I donât speak English properly either. We all just speak a mixture around hereâ and then she replied in English even though I continued on in Welsh.
But itâs a common phenomenon. I had a friend from Mauritius who spoke French as her first language, but when she went to France felt that she spoke some kind of second rate language and actually preferred to speak English there!
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I think thatâs just a case of self-esteem - sheâd understand 95% without any problem, and the other 5% would stop being a problem if she watched regularly.
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But in that case there is a French-based Creole, which uses French words but with very different grammar. I donât know if that affects the âproper Frenchâ of the island, but I wouldnât be at all surprised if you had a whole linguistic/social spectrum with even people at/near the top of it being painfully aware of it not being pure French.
I saw an example quoted for West African Creole that went something like this:
The boys shouted [standard but spoken with a Cameroon accent]
Di boiz halad [âholleredâ]
Di boiz bin hala
Di boi-dem bin hala
Di man-pikin dem bin hala
Right at the top, itâs clearly perfectly good English with slight local flavour, but by the time you get to the bottom itâs clearly a different language. If you grow up speaking somewhere on that spectrum, but educated only in the language at the top of it then (1) you donât respect or understand how different they are, you just learn that you speak âbroken Englishâ and (2) you get used to being constantly told that youâve made grammatical mistakes.
Sorry. Bit of a hobby-horse - I donât know if it applies to your friend, although I suspect some of it does apply to Welsh-speakers comparing their speech with literary Welsh.
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Thatâs really interesting. One of the modules I enjoyed most when I was studying linguistics was looking into the development of pidgins and creoles.
What my friend said though was that she went to a âgood schoolâ where they were lead to believe they were speaking âproper Frenchâ. She was quite demoralised when she went to France, which was sad. After all, itâs not any kind of linguistic deficiency, just the status that gets afforded to one version of a language rather than another.
Yes, I think pidgins and creoles are fascinating â I just get ranty about them because Iâve taught Caribbean students who simply referred to themselves as speaking âBroken Englishâ. (Like @Sam84âs âWe just speak slangâ and your âdonât speak Welsh properlyâ.) It pains me to see people effectively putting themselves down linguistically; and from a pedagogical point of view, if you canât recognise that there are real differences between the two, it makes your attempts to turn your âBroken Englishâ into âproper Englishâ little better than guesswork. I had one student from Jamaica who just used to sprinkle his writing randomly with sâs, in the hope that some of them might be right: he said âDi boi goâ for both âthe boy goesâ and âthe boys goâ, but he knew that he was supposed to put at least one s somewhere to make it correct⌠(Mind you, Iâm reminded of discussions on here about the difficulty of trying to remember which kinds of relative clauses need a in âproperâ Welsh and which need y !)
At the same time, I think those Caribbean students who did have good standard English were actually the worst at making such a distinction â as far as they were concerned, it was all English, just some of it was really bad. (And if I can do it well, itâs just that these others who canât are stupid and ignorant.) They understood the whole spectrum, mind you, and were really surprised to find that native British English speakers just had absolutely no idea what something like âDi gyaal dem ben deh go dong dehâ meant (âThe girls were going down thereâ), but still they could not accept my assertion that it actually wasnât English. In the end I dug out some other, non-Atlantic English-lexified Pidgin for this one student: I showed her the opening sentences of the constitution of Vanuata (âRipablik blong VanuatuâŚâ) and she finally went, âOh yeah â I can see that there are English words there, but theyâre being used in such a different way that I donât understand them,â and thatâs when she finally conceded that maybe Patwa wasnât actually EnglishâŚ
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Slightly related, but kind of in the opposite direction:
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