I’m not sure how many know the film Yu Ming is Ainm Dom – a forum search found only one comment from 2015 mentioning it.
It’s about a young Chinese boy who gets tired of his life as a shop assistant in (presumably) China and decides to leave the country. He spins a globe in the local library, closes his eyes, and puts his finger randomly on Ireland.
He gets an atlas and looks up Ireland to see that they speak Irish there, so that’s what he learns for six months. Then he travels to Dublin to find that nobody can understand his beginner’s Irish… because they’re all monolingual English speakers.
When I first came across it, is wasn’t available on YouTube, but now it’s there as
I wonder what would have happened if his spin had landed the finger on Wales?
Got off the plane in Cardiff – initially everything is fine as all the public signage is bilingual.
But then he gets to a hostel and asks for Oes gwely gyda chi i fi?, or at the pub, Dw i’n chwilio am waith.
Would he meet a similar reception to the one he got in Dublin? What do you think?
Would they even know that he’s speaking Welsh and not Chinese? How much “passive Welsh” is there around – do people really forget everything as soon as they leave school and don’t even, at least, recognise it as Welsh even if they say, “Sorry mate, I don’t speak Cymraeg”?
Though with luck, he might also be in earshot of an old, Welsh-speaking man who helps him eventually get a job in the Gaeltacht in Connemara… I mean Caernarvon!
