It took a global pandemic, but I finally learned Welsh

There is a painting that hangs on the wall in my partner’s family home. A collection of houses sits in the valley, sheltering underneath a vast mountain. The landscape feels wet and cold somehow, etched in greens and browns. You can almost feel the mulch spreading beneath your boots, the wind whistling through bare trees in the distance.

Above the landscape sits a poem: Hon (“This”) by the Welsh poet T. H, Parry-Williams.

“What do I care about Wales? It is just fluke and accident
That I live within her confines. She is no more on a map

Than a small patch of land in the back end of beyond…”

There are voices and images all over the place.

I’m beginning to feel a little faint. And I say to you
It’s as if a light-headedness is coming over me.

And I hear Wales’ claws beating on my chest.
God help me, I cannot escape from this.”

The author at Maen Llia, Brecon Beacons

Wattstown Colliery in the Rhondda valley, Wales

Wattstown Colliery, Rhondda, by The JR James Archive, University of Sheffield

Llyn Idwal mountain in Snowdonia, North West Wales

Llyn Idwal, Snowdonia. Credit: Elissar Haidar

Wales has long sat on the edge of my life. At some point decades ago, my father’s uncle split from his East London roots and settled in South Wales before spawning a frankly unbelievable amount of children. Now, my father jokes, I must be related to half the Rhondda Valley. On my mother's side, my aunt married a farmer in Snowdonia and now lives with their children on the Llŷn peninsula, an area so self-consciously Welsh it was, until recently, thought never to have been conquered by Roman invaders.

In short, Wales has always been in my life, but only on the periphery. I knew I had a great deal of family there, but I had never met most of them and I rarely visited the country growing up.

That all changed when I met my partner of three years in London. A fluent Welsh speaker who grew up in the Cynon Valley, close to Merthyr Tydfil, she was far prouder of her roots than I had ever been of mine. The very first night we met we bonded over Cool Cymru icon Cerys Matthews, whose music we both loved. She taught me some basic Welsh but I struggled with the pronunciation and the seemingly endless array of mutations. Needless to say, my Welsh skills remained basic at best for some time.

Fast forward to 2020 and we find ourselves hurtling headfirst into a global pandemic. When Prime Minister Boris Johnson begins to make noises about a national ‘lockdown’, whatever that means, we are lucky enough to have somewhere to go, away from London. We decide, almost overnight, to retreat to her family home and work it out from there. We thought we would be in Wales for a few weeks at most, while the government got a grip on the situation.

That was in early March 2020. We haven’t yet left, and it’s unclear whether we ever will.

Moving here, I fell in love with Wales. It’s time to fall in love with the language too. So I set myself the challenge of learning the language in just three weeks – to coincide with St. David’s Day, the national celebration of Welsh culture. In order to experience the language as most people likely would, I choose the free version of Duolingo, reportedly the world's most downloaded education app.

Duelling Duo

Welsh is relatively new to Duolingo; the company approached course designer Richard Morse after he and campaigner Kathy Robbin wrote a letter to the Guardian in support of such a course. It was launched on Dydd Santes Dwynwen, the Welsh equivalent of St. Valentine’s Day, in 2016 and steadily grew from there. Now Welsh is Duolingo’s fastest growing language in the UK, above Hindi, Japanese, and French. It has more active learners than Scots Gallic.

Duolingo’s UK country manager Colin Watkins says lockdown, and the need to keep school children engaged at home, was the cause of that growth.

“We think it was teachers in Wales encouraging students to learn via the platform, but we can’t say definitively,” he said.

Another factor is what Colin sees as a 'change in attitudes to language learning in the UK.' With the growth of phenomena like brain training, more people are looking to learn a language as an intellectual test, rather than for purely practical reasons like travel or work, he suggested.

'Welsh, Finnish, High Valyrian [a fictional language from Game of Thrones] are languages people don't need but they enjoy the challenge,' he said.

The app’s appearance is inviting, with a mixture of clean white and bright primary colours, while a range of diverse characters guide you through the various challenges. An encouraging alarm sounds with every correct answer, and a recorded voice speaks each phrase out loud, which helps with pronunciation.

When you are introduced with a new word, you can tap on that word to get some helpful clues. The format of questions vary, including multiple choice questions, word-by-word answers, and full typed passages. For some questions you can have the passage spoken aloud, both at normal speed and slower too.

A series of cheerful animations play at various points throughout each level. One sees a young child bouncing across your screen alongside the app’s mascot, an owl named Duo. At other times, the enthusiastic child is replaced by a surly teenage girl with violet hair. Where the child bounces, she is pushed along the screen reluctantly. Nonetheless, Duolingo appropriates video game tropes - XP, gems - which results in a sense that almost all its characters seem to be having a great deal of fun.

But the app uses a freemium model, meaning the basic services are free but much more is unlocked by paying for a subscription. The result is that it bombards you with ads while you’re using it, and notifications when you aren’t. Getting through to the end of a challenge can seem like an endless tap-fest as you hack your way through the thick weeds of incentives and adverts.

As for the language,itself, you start with the basics. You learn to say good morning (bore da), goodbye (hwyl) and welcome (croeso) to characters that sound definitively Welsh: Morgan, Megan, and Owen. You get the sense that you’re diving into a language and culture that is uniquely Welsh, in a way that perhaps you wouldn’t with French or German.

For many Duolingo users, that’s exactly why they’re motivated to learn Welsh, according to Colin. Whereas other users choose to learn Korean because they like BTS, or they want to read Le Monde so they’re learning French, he said, in the case of Welsh, learners might want to connect with their heritage. That explains the 21% of Duolingo learners based in the USA, where many are keenly aware of their European, and particularly Celtic, roots.

Tourists welcome

To say the Welsh language is important to Welsh identity is truly an understatement. For many in Wales, its absence is a direct scar of English oppression, stemming in particular from the Blue Books report of 1847, which blamed the Welsh language for the supposed “ignorant, lazy, and immoral” nature of the people.

But thanks to a great revival effort over the last few decades, a tourist wouldn’t struggle to see the presence of the Welsh language in today’s Wales. It’s not just the fact that every street sign is written in both Welsh and English; it’s that every word spoken in Welsh is an act of proud defiance. To live in the country without knowing the language leaves you a mere tourist. To call Wales home without at least learning the basics feels wrong.

But campaigners are keen to stress that the language is open to outsiders too, not just those with Welsh ancestry. The National Centre for Learning Welsh gives the example of Rajesh David, a yoga teacher from Mumbai who fell in love with Wales on a visit 15 years ago. He moved to Lampeter, West Wales, and committed to learning the language so he could sing in Welsh, which he now does with his Indo-Celtic trio Tŷhai.

Another such outsider is Kate Bottley, an Anglican priest and television presenter who has recently taken to learning the language. Despite having ‘no links’ to Wales, she said she felt a sense of shame from not being able to speak the language of her fellow citizens in the UK.

‘I know more ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew than I do another home language,’ she said. ‘If I went to Wales, which is a couple of hours away from my house, I would not be able to say hello, or please, or thank you, or goodbye, in a home language, the language of people that I share a nation with.’

Although Kate initially chose to learn – like many Duolingo users – as an intellectual exercise, she also refers to a desire for solidarity with colleagues. Songs of Praise for example, which Kate often works on, is produced by a Welsh crew who often speak to each other in their more comfortable native tongue on set. When Kate arrives, they are forced to revert back to their shared lingua franca.

She said, ‘Why should they have to stop speaking to each other in their home language because an English speaker turned up? That's my arrogance, not their fault!’

But it’s not just that learning the language of our neighbours is an act of solidarity – it’s an act of self-reflection too. Kate references ‘hiraeth’, a Welsh word with no direct translation that one writer describes as ‘the subtle acknowledgment of an irretrievable loss – a unique blend of place, time and people that can never be recreated.’ Coming from Yorkshire, she said she understands the feeling of pride in not just location, but language and culture too – in ‘a way of doing things.’ Perhaps this language, as much the voice of songs and sermons as it is of functional daily life, can teach the English something about what we choose to take pride in.

Back to basics

Duolingo might be somewhat helpful, but there are limits to its usefulness, so I’m forced to rely on other formats for help. Television is one; while I was never about to begin watching the popular (and surreal) children’s show Sali Mali at the ripe old age of 23, I found watching Welsh language drama with subtitles helpful. One such show was Hinterland, a dark , hulking show that transports the kind of tired, broken, middle aged detective found in the likes of Wallander to rural West Wales. While predictable at times, it hits all the right scandi-noir notes and it’s just slow enough for beginners to keep up with.

For lighter days, I turned to Bois y Pizza, a charming travelogue that follows the boys behind beloved Cardiff pizza joint Ffwrnes as they journey to Italy to compete in the Campionate Mondiale delle Pizza. It’s fantastic fun watching them trying to perfect their craft without losing sight of why they’re in it in the first place. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

But for all the gimmicks, most of the time I reverted back to what I started this for in the first place; just me and my partner, walking together through a park, talking. Our sentences might be simple: “beth hoffech chi i ginio?” “Hoffwn selsig” (“What would you like for lunch?” “I would like sausages.”) But every so often, I would catch the spring sunshine dancing through the trees, falling in dappled spots onto the grass, where daffodils were just beginning to poke through the soil. In those moments, I could just about feel Wales’ claws beginning to beat on my chest.