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Welsh Language Modern Literature
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Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages

iguanamon
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Message 1 of 3

19 March 2014 at 5:59pm | IP Logged

This article from The Irish Times came to me today via twitter: The (Welsh) language question; Ireland is not the only country with two languages.

When I lived in Liverpool, I would sometimes hear Welsh spoken there and loved the sound and rhythm. The article talks about the modern Welsh literature scene. What struck me is the vibrancy of Welsh literature is due in large part to support from the Welsh Assembly. This is so important for literature written in a minority language like Welsh where a "bestseller" is defined as 10,000 sales. Excerpt:

Pól Ó Muirí- The Irish Times wrote:

...The Donegal writer Seosamh Mac Grianna (1900-1990) – a native of the same county as the Minister of State for the Gaeltacht, Dinny McGinley, as it happens – had a great love for literature and travel and Wales and its Welsh-speaking areas held a special place in his writing. He once opined that the greatest difference between the two countries was that the Irish had fought for freedom and had, more or less, lost their language but that Wales had kept its language despite not having lifted arms for 500 years. ...Whatever about the language politics, I suspect that Mac Grianna would have recognised his homeland in Angharad Price’s novel, The Life of Rebecca Jones (MacLehose Press, £10.00). A native speaker of Welsh and a lecturer at Bangor University, Price (42) tells the story of a family in the Welsh “Gaeltacht”. Her experiences would chime, I suspect, with many on this side of the Irish Sea. In a happy coincidence her novel has just been published in paperback.

I interviewed Price for this newspaper quite a while ago and published her views in Tuarascáil, our then weekly Wednesday Irish-language column. Nevertheless, it seems apt, given the ongoing debate, to re-publish what she says for an English-speaking audience in Ireland and to give them an insight into the experiences of Welsh speakers in Britain – an experience that might better inform – and indeed temper – the language ‘debate’.

Price’s experience was that: “Like the majority of children in the county of Gwynedd, I was brought up with Welsh as a first language and learned English at school from the age of six. Most of life was conducted through Welsh, though English was always on the periphery with Sesame Street , Enid Blyton, the local piano teacher. The same goes for my children, though they are more thoroughly bilingual than I was. Due to many reasons, local and global, English is more “there” than it used to be. But normal life is still lived in Welsh: school, football, tv, trips to the barber, shopping at Tesco...."For me the world “speaks Welsh”, even though I delight in languages and have picked up several on the way. Some people claim that writing in Welsh is a political act. It would be pretentious on my part if I made that kind of claim. If anything, choosing to write in English would be a political act – though not, of course, in the same way.”

Mac Grianna once lamented that he should write in English in order to get one of his novels printed. Happily for Price there is “a healthy appetite for literature in Welsh. The Welsh novel is enjoying a golden period, partly due to increased support for publishers from the Welsh Assembly. The range is quite astonishing, covering everything, from noir to science fiction and from thrillers to romantic historical sagas; there are Marxist and postmodernist novels in Welsh, as well as novels getting new life from the older realist tradition. An average novel in Welsh will sell a few thousand copies, but “bestselling” novels can sell anything up to 10,000. That’s a large portion of the reading public.”

Edited by iguanamon on 20 March 2014 at 1:04am
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Cabaire
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Message 2 of 3

19 March 2014 at 10:37pm | IP Logged

Does anyone knows whether these books which are published nowadays are still written in Literary Welsh (the written register close to the traditional Bible translation) or have shifted to Colloquial Welsh (the modern spoken dialects, i.e. texts that reflect clearly the dialect of the speaker (south / north).
I mean, does one need to learn both registers in order to read (well, what is called diglossia) and be prepared for a lot of regional variation or do they cling in the written form to the tradition?
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montmorency
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Message 3 of 3

20 March 2014 at 12:54am | IP Logged

Cabaire wrote:

Does anyone knows whether these books which are published nowadays are
still written in Literary Welsh (the written register close to the traditional Bible
translation) or have shifted to Colloquial Welsh (the modern spoken dialects, i.e.
texts that reflect clearly the dialect of the speaker (south / north).
I mean, does one need to learn both registers in order to read (well, what is called
diglossia) and be prepared for a lot of regional variation or do they cling in the
written form to the tradition?

This is a question I've looked at somewhat for my own reasons in the last 6 months or
so.

I think there are a lot of modern novels being written now which include a lot of
colloquial spoken Welsh, especially if they contain a lot of dialogue.
I've been slowly collecting a few of these, although my focus isn't on reading at the
moment. Bethan Gwanas is one name that comes to mind. But I'm pretty sure there are
quite a few other authors producing that kind of language.

The Welsh version of Harry Potter (only book 1 is available, that I know of), which
happens to be in the northern dialect (which is what I'm learning), contains a fair
amount of dialogue, and structures that I recognise. According to one reviewer on
Amazon, it has some "literary" structures, but don't know enough to recognise them yet.
It's not a big deal for me, as I'm not reading it for the structures, but mainly for
the vocabulary. Well, I'm not really reading it yet, but I dip into it from time to
time.

The north vs south thing isn't that much of a big deal really, and (I think) even less
so in the written language.

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