Cymru has a golden opportunity with a language it could promote to tourists, schools, the workforce and the home. It needs to be valued and people need to see it as a worhtwhile cause to learn It needs some real clout and patriotism to get the nation behind it. But it can not be forced, it must be embraced by way of a love for our nation. It is a crying shame that it still lingers in the lower divisions when it should be champion tongue of these islands.
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Penalty of having big, feisty neighbour which, for some strange reason has always lacked the confidence to let its colonies speak their own languages! 
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Okay, this thread has navigated tricky waters well so farā¦ letās not slip off into āblame next doorā stuff now.
Remember, SSiW is all about the positivesā¦ 
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āMy folks lived near Brecon in 1963-1987ā - Yes indeed by that time Brecon wasnt very Welsh speaking at allā¦I meant more the villages to the west before 1940s like Pontsenni (sennybridge)ā¦and brecon itself pre WW1ā¦ancient history really now
Apologies.
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What for? You were making a valid point about change. I just helped to date it!! 
What a shame you couldnāt come just a tiny bit further west to Llandysul! Lots of Welsh spoken around here 
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Or to Llandeilo. When we visited back in October we heard and spoke to lots of Welsh speakers.
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Not related to the topic but can anybody explain the language working here.
Dwiām mynd = I am going - There isnāt any softening.
So why Pan dwiān ddiflas = I am bored = There is a softening?
In ssiw there appears no softening after dwiānā¦
But in the childrenās book Lliwiau Hapus these softenings appear more than once,
Diolch yn fawr
Mynd is a verb, diflas is an adjective. Verbs donāt soften after yn, lots of other things do.
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OK - that looks like it fits the pattern. Much appreciated
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You might be looking for this thread
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I have a map from the mid 1800s showing that Brecon was an English bubble within a Welsh-speaking area that stretched all the way east to Talgarth and the Black Mountains.
Two things were at work, I think. Firstly Brecon was and is a garrison town with a significant population of English soldiers, and secondly it was and is the biggest market town for many miles around. Right down the eastern side of Wales it was often the case that English speakers would travel across the border to trade at markets and the Welsh found early on that they needed to speak English to both service these customers and avoid getting ripped off - legal niceties were invariably conducted in English and you didnāt want to find that your ignorance of the thin language had landed you at the wrong end of an unfair contract.
Going further back to the middle ages, most of the towns in this area, like Brecon and Builth, were actually established by the crown and/or the marcher lords as English trading islands in a Welsh sea, the Welsh themselves being considered to be untrustworthy in trade.
By the way, thereās loads of Welsh in and around Llanymddyfri, though itās not always visible to visitors.
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Beautifully explained!!!
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Itās also worth considering how much you can miss the wood for the trees in Wales. Itās best not to judge based on initial language used. In Aberteifi (very Welsh area) I often asked (whilst on bootcamp and unable to use English) if the person behind the counter spoke Welsh. From then I was off. However, I could have easily felt as you did in Llanymddyfri. I could have obliviously sailed through town without knowing.
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I was coming back from Gatwick with my wife & grown-up family on Saturday, and we stopped at a large motorway service station (name forgotten) on the M25. Large place with lots of different food outlets. We went off to get our respective beverages and food, and met up again at a table in the middle. My son had been to a McDonalds, evidently with a self-service option (didnāt see it myself), which apparently offered a Welsh language option! I was impressed!
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Iām afraid not even that would induce me to eat soggy hamburgers!
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Yup. McDonalds offers several language options on its machines and one of them is Welsh. They were obviously smart enough to realise that a) they were going to need a Welsh option in at least a few of their UK ārestaurantsā and b) it would be cheapest and simplest to install the same set-up in all stores.
Iām still boycotting them since they stopped selling root beer in 1987*, though.
*This is a guess.
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Iām still boycotting them since, just after I left university, I briefly worked in a slaughterhouse. 'nuff said.
(and itās so easy to make homemade burgerās etc that I wouldnāt go now anyway, Welsh or no Welsh!)
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Oh, theyāve stopped selling that poison, have they? Maybe itās time for me to reconsider my boycottā¦
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But, on the food theme, weāve just made some coffee toffee by accident (was meant to be experimental coffee fudge)
Still, it tasted nice, so would that be āDw iān hoffi toffi coffiā?
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