Llook who's talking

Not that long ago, Welsh seemed like a doomed language. Now it's being used by hip-hoppers, bloggers, even Big Brother contestants such as Imogen and Glyn. Jude Rogers explains what went right

• Jude Rogers
• The Guardian, Thursday 22 June 2006

In Big Brother, there are no secrets. Everyone can hear you speak, and understand what you say. Except, it seems, if you are Imogen Thomas or Glyn Wise. There they were in the Big Brother house, speaking in strange lilting accents, when the disembodied voice of authority ticked them off for speaking in "code". They were not, of course. The former Miss Wales and her schoolboy friend were speaking Welsh, a tongue that once seemed to be in terminal decline but is now thriving again.

"Welsh is British!" Glyn told Y Brawd Mawr (that's Big Brother to you). His supporters hearheared, praising the language used regularly by 20% of the principality's population. The usual parade of politicians and nationalists banged their gongs for the language they call Cymraeg, and recalled the bad old days of the late 19th century, when children who spoke Welsh in schools had to wear a piece of wood called the "Welsh not" around their necks, and the one who wore it at the end of the day would get a thrashing from the teacher.

But Glyn and Imogen also roused some less traditional flag-wavers: young, confident Welsh speakers wanting to promote their first language warmly and welcomingly, while speaking English regularly too.

I just missed the great Welsh language revival of the 1990s. I turned 14 in 1992, the last year that the Welsh curriculum let Englishspeaking schoolgirls from Swansea drop Welsh language lessons in favour of French or German. The Welsh Language Act of 1993 changed all that. The country's mother tongue was given equal footing with English in the public sector, and soon after road signs began turning bilingual and the Welsh language became a compulsory subject in schools until the age of 16. Instead of withering on the vine like Cornish and the variants of Gaelic, Welsh budded, blossomed and bloomed. My younger brothers - 23 and 16 - grew up to be fluent in Welsh, and can roll their Rs much better than me.

Until the late 1980s, says Rhodri Llwyd Morgan, director of strategic development for the Welsh Language Board, the Welsh language was in sharp decline. The 1991 census showed the drop levelling, and the 2001 census the first rise in Welsh speakers in 100 years, from 508,000 to 582,000. The big increase of Welsh speaking was in the 5-24 age group. "Education made the change, obviously," says Morgan, "and S4C [Wales's bilingual version of Channel 4, which started in 1982] helped as well. But there's also been a huge change in attitudes among young Welsh people. They've reclaimed Welsh as their own. It's no longer the language of hearth, home and chapel - it's also the language of everyday conversation, of blogs and of music."

Until the 1990s, it seemed impossible for Wales to modernise, let alone become cool. Tourism still focused on the Dylan Thomas folklore - on the country's pub-and-chapel social history, its Christian non-conformism and its pagan Eisteddfods, full of group readings, folk dances and processions of bards in white cloaks and gold garlands. The tide turned when young Welsh musicians and actors came along and showed that you could enjoy this strange heritage while adding your own spin. Bands such as Catatonia, Super Furry Animals and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci recorded albums in both English and Welsh, while people such as Rhys Ifans, Charlotte Church and Ioan Gruffydd spoke loudly and proudly of their Welsh backgrounds. They were not embarrassed to sing folk tunes or talk about choirs and daffodils. They were simply prepared to think outside the "bocs".

Bethan Elfyn, herself a Welsh-speaker, started presenting the Welsh strand of Radio 1's Evening Session in 1999, which came along in response to the country's burgeoning scene. "I think strong characters like Cerys Matthews or Nicky Wire brought the Welsh collective personality out of its shell," she says. "As a nation we're fairly shy until we're more familiar with our surroundings, then we're the life and soul."

Today, youth culture in Wales is booming. Cardiff, home to the six-year-old Welsh Assembly, has a bustling music scene, encompassing Welshlanguage hip-hop, indie, metal and folk. More and more festivals are being held in Wales, from the Green Man in Brecon to the International Music Festival in Dolgellau. New record labels are popping up all the time, and music shows such as Bandit - S4C's weekly platform for the best new Welsh-language bands and artists - reach big audiences. "Thirty or 40 years ago, you'd have to up sticks to Liverpool or London to get successful," says one Welsh press officer. "Now, thanks to home recording technology and opportunities for gigs, you can just stay at home."

But can the Welsh language get too exclusive? Every time I go back to Wales, someone will insist on speaking to me in Welsh. After 10 years over the border, I have the vocabulary in spades but not the wherewithal to put the fragments together - and the people talking to me know this. More often than not, though, these offenders come from the older generation. "Young people are different these days," says Welsh primary school teacher and National Eisteddfod regular Rebecca Griffiths. "They're very proud to speak their own language and they want to preserve it, but hardly anyone turns up their noses at people who can't speak it. Welsh people spend half their time speaking English anyway."

Lots of people, she points out, speak Wenglish - a slangy mishmash of Welsh and English in which English words replace poor Welsh alternatives. My father's favourite phrase, "Pobeth yn all right?" ("Is everything all right?"), comes from this jumble of tongues. There are even Wenglish dictionaries.

Young Welsh people also have their own slang. "Gaib", which roughly translates as "extreme", is the latest faddy term to mean "drunk". It regularly pops out of characters' mouths on programmes such as S4C's long-running soap, Pobol Y Cwm (People of the Valley). The North Walian term "cont" (which translates as "mate", rather than anything more Anglo-Saxon) is catching on among teenagers and twentysomethings. And Huw Stephens's co-presenter Huw Evans has started using "Sdigwydd?" to mean "What's happening?" on Bandit. "He just invented it, really, and it's starting to catch on," says Stephens, who is also Elfyn's co-presenter on Radio 1. "That's how Welsh works these days. People are playing with language and sharing strange words. It's about having a laugh as much as it is about preserving the language. It helps that Welsh sounds so vibrant and lively."

But how does Welsh respond to English innovations? By changing letters slightly and awkwardly. Factory becomes ffactori, mobile phone y ffon mobil, and physiotherapy ffysiotherapi. This even happens to words that have long had Welsh equivalents. Teacher Nia Williams points out some classics: "snogio" meaning to snog, "licio" to like, "practiso" to practise and "ffag" for a cigarette.

There is a humour that arises when the most prosaic phrases gets translated. Catrin James, Welsh-speaking manager of Cardiff band the Automatic, points out her favourite. "I sit in the office every day hearing robotic voices coming out of lorries saying 'This vehicle is reversing' in Welsh - 'Mae'r cerbyd yn mynd yn ôl!' - and it just makes me laugh." What is clear across the board is that the new breed of Welsh speakers are not afraid to poke fun at themselves.

But that is not to say the campaign ends there, Stephens insists. "Welsh is still not really recognised as an official language of Wales" - something the Welsh Language Board says is more complicated because the UK does not have a modern constitution. The bands that have crossed over have all been bilingual, and those that sing in the language that comes naturally to them face an uphill struggle to succeed outside Wales. Only when people outside Wales start accepting Welsh as a modern, living language used by hundreds of thousands of people, will it travel any further. Then all you monoglots beyond Offa's Dyke will be able to wrap your tonsils around words like Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch and clear your spit into a hankie with the rest of us.

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