Speech bubbles

Drew

There is no conventional reason for me to learn Welsh. I’m from Northern California and I have no Welsh ancestry as far as I know. HOWEVER, I’m a huge language nerd and a bit of an Anglophile… well all things ...

Dawn Jones

My grandmother spoke Welsh, wore the ‘Welsh Not’ and didn’t pass it on to my mother. My son, daughter and granddaughter speak Welsh. I want and need to speak Welsh to my family. It is very ...

Rufus

I wanted to learn a language for fun. I tried out a bunch of languages and always kept coming back to Welsh. I think partly because it was the one I was most connected to – my mum is Welsh and learned some in school ...

Jasper

My boyfriend, 20 years old, moved from Wales to the United States as a preteen. He’s trying to reconnect to Welsh language and Welsh culture and I’m happily following along with ...

Robert Gee

I love trying to understand and get to know different cultures and the only way to do that is through the language. My wife’s mother was from South Wales but was only taught English, as her father, a head teacher, ...

Huw

Huw Jones

I was born on the original VE day (8/5/45) in a coal and steel “valleys” town to a Welsh speaking Llangadog mother and an English speaking Ebbw Vale father. When I was about 2, the family moved to the North East of ...

Ceris Hughes

I was raised in Wrecsam by Welsh-speaking grandparents, originally from Aberffraw. They spoke Welsh with each other, but only English with the children (this was decades ago when Welsh was regarded as being backwards ...

Elaine McClarence

My story is simple. My grandparents were Welsh speakers but my mother was punished at school for speaking welsh so they stopped talking to her in her own language. When I was growing up I could learn Latin, French and ...

Lysander

I want to do my bit to keep the language alive. My mother (b 1921) could not speak English until she was 9. Her father died of TB and she went to Howells School Denbigh on something like an “orphan scholarship” ...

Peter M

I was brought up in the industrial valley town of Ebbw Vale in the 1960s and 1970s. The only Welsh I ever heard was on programmes like Y Dydd, Newyddion etc on BBC Wales and HTV Wales, long before S4C. Welsh was seen as ...