Dw'i eisiau byw yn Gymraeg

Facebook reminded me this week that I went to Welsh Bootcamp three years ago.

Three years.

The last English-language status I wrote before bootcamp was about being nervous. I’d forgotten about that. I mean why wouldn't you just throw yourself into a holiday in the tiny seaside town of Tresaith with a dozen strangers who had all completed Cwrs 1 of the Say Something In Welsh online language lessons and who all had a perverse desire to speak only Welsh and definitely no English for a week and who were therefore, probably, a bit mad.

You guys, it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

There is nothing - nothing - like sitting in a tavern on the west coast of Cymru, drinking cwrw and watching the sun set and listening to a bar full of Cymry Cymraeg break into a folk song about, I believe, a small saucepan - because that is a thing Welsh-speaking Welsh-people actually do.

I got free hot chocolate because the bar tender was so impressed I’d come all the way from Australia and I spoke more Welsh than he did. (Showoff.)

We didn’t spend all our time in the tafarn, of course. Just most of it. The rest of the time we went about the Welsh countryside on excursions designed perfectly such that we would only encounter other Welsh-speakers: to the cheese factory and the wool museum; to learn about sailing in a cwrwgl and the history of some castle or other - I don’t remember the name of the castle but I do remember several of us looking at each other at that point and saying “wait, we understand the tour guide”; to eat pizza and listen to a Welsh folk duo from America in a tafarn; to partake in Welsh folk dancing and singing with a côr in, okay, fine, a tafarn.

I also experienced my first Noson Lawen on that trip. I didn’t really know what a Noson Lawen was, but when on Bootcamp, fake it until you make it. I got the gist that we all had to perform something, so I wrote and illustrated (I mean) a picture book called "Ble mae …?" ("Where is …?"), with each page dedicated to one of my fellow bootcampers. It was totally rubbish and a huge success, although I did pick up afterwards that reading a children’s book you’ve written in an afternoon was perhaps an unusual choice for a Noson Lawen - but whatever, I’m Australian, so. I wish I’d kept the book. I also remember the toffiest English bloke (who was actually lovely and drove a red Ferrari and had no clue most of the time and will never read this blog, I hope) got up to sing, and I was like "this guy" - and then he sung and I cried. He had the most beautiful voice.

My friend Elizabeth Corbett visited Wales recently to research her next book (about Owain Glyndwr’s wife - it sounds fascinating); and she was interviewed by the TV show Dal Ati. I watched the clip one day in the language centre in Kununurra and okay, I got teary-eyed (this is a bit of a theme, you guys), because three years after Bootcamp, with opportunities to speak Welsh few and far between, I still understood most of what they were saying.

Dw'i eisiau byw yn Gymraeg 

I’m not Welsh. There's no Welsh blood in my family. The redhair gets pretty good mileage in Cymru and I have friends I know mostly yn Gymraeg, but this is not my heritage; and yet nevertheless listening to and speaking a few words in Welsh reminds me of a time in my life and a part of my identity that makes me happy and that sometimes I forget about, and I would love to move to Wales for a few years and just live in a community of Welsh-speakers, who - like stubborn-ass mountain goats clinging to a vertical cliff - hang on.

But as I learnt on Bootcamp, spending even a week speaking only Welsh requires careful orchestration. In the Welshiest parts of Wales, Welsh-speakers still have to use English daily to interact with non-Welsh speakers. You cannot live solely in your Welsh-language identity.

There isn’t a single Indigenous group in Australia that has the numbers Welsh has. In many Aborignal Australian language communities, spending a day in language would be a dream. Most endangered Aboriginal Australian languages also don't have the same money, or political power, or resources, or time, and who knows what 'success' will look like for these communities. Maybe it’ll be a new generation of first language speakers. (I’m an aspirationalist, fight me.) Maybe it’ll be kids learning greetings and songs and animal names in school and knowing that a whole language exists in archives, somewhere, waiting for them when they’re ready to take it on. (In Kununurra, I got to see the language workers travel between daycare centres and schools each day to provide twenty-minute language lessons to kids age 3-7. Some of those kids are now as comfortable playing "Mr Potato Head" in Miriwoong as they are in English. It was really cool.) Maybe it’ll be Welcome to Country openings in language, and some bilingual signs.

Regardless. What I’ve seen in each of the three communities I’ve been to now is the same perverse stubborness of individuals to hang on to those parts of language and culture that allow us to inhabit identities that, despite the crushing press of English, we refuse to forget.