Market day in the bustling south-west Wales town of Carmarthen and the shops, cafes and streets were humming with chatter.
This week the language those conversations were being held in was pertinent, after the revelation that the number of residents across the country able to speak Welsh had dropped to the lowest proportion ever recorded in a census. Carmarthenshire had experienced the most rapid decline.
“I was shocked, saddened, disappointed,” said Brieg Dafydd, the owner of the Welsh-language bookstore in Carmarthen’s covered market. “There have been times when Welsh hasn’t been seen as cool but there’s a real interest in it now. We saw it in the World Cup when the Welsh football team wanted to be identified as Cymru and we see it here in the shop. We’re busier than ever.”
Tracey Jones, the Welsh-speaking owner of the market’s card shop, said she sold more greetings cards in Welsh than English. “We’ve got to do something about it if we don’t want the language to die,” she said.
Both shopkeepers had ideas of what may lie behind the trend – and what to do. Dafydd said more non-Welsh speakers were moving in, squeezing locals out, and believes the pandemic affected children’s Welsh learning. “We’ve got to be stronger, prouder of our language,” he said.
Jones said her children had moved to England to study. “They may stay there, meet English partners and bring children up in English. Perhaps we all need to relax and have fun with the language. There’s a feeling you have to speak it properly, but I think you should be allowed to go for it.”
According to the 2021 census, an estimated 538,000 people in Wales are able to speak Welsh – 17.8% of the population, a decrease of 1.2 percentage points since the 2011 census. The most troubling drop was in children, with this put down to the challenges posed by Covid.
There were glimmers of good news. The number of young adults who can speak Welsh was up and there were increases in Welsh speakers in some places, including Cardiff.
But the figures for Carmarthenshire, traditionally a language stronghold, were, in the words of the county council, “alarming”. It is now home to 72,838 Welsh speakers or 39.9% of the total population, down by 4%.
Over coffee in Y Sied Goffi in Carmarthen, Toni Schiavone, a prominent member of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society), said there were no glib answers. “It’s a complicated situation,” he said.
But he insisted it was a “national disgrace” that so many young people left schools in Wales not able to speak the language confidently – and some were denied job opportunities because they were not proficient in Welsh.
About 20% of Welsh secondary pupils study in Welsh-medium or bilingual schools. In English-medium schools pupils also study Welsh, but campaigners such as Schiavone are deeply concerned about the quality of its teaching. “The 80% is being let down,” said Schiavone. “Welsh is part of the heritage of everybody in Wales, nobody should be deprived of it.”
Wynfford James, another member of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, who went to jail in the 1970s after being convicted of a conspiracy to damage a transmitter as part of a campaign for a Welsh television channel, called for more focus on economic development – making sure there are good jobs to keep Welsh speakers in the area.
The Welsh government, which has a target of reaching 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050, reels off a string of initiatives, including setting up a national centre for learning Welsh and introducing radical measure to tackle the second homes crisis in language heartland areas. James said he approved of many of the initiatives but they were piecemeal: “There needs to be a coordinated approach.”
One organisation that Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg applauds is Dyfed-Powys police. Its chief constable, Richard Lewis, has just returned to his native Carmarthenshire and has set the force the target of being completely bilingual.
“As a police service one of the fundamental requirements is the ability to communicate with our communities,” Lewis said. “We have a legal but also a moral requirement to provide our service in Welsh.”
Almost everyone you chat to in Carmarthen has an interesting or poignant story about their experience of the language.
Matt Davies, the owner of the Tangled Parrot record shop, said people had accused him of not being “a proper Welsh person” (though he is South Glamorgan born and bred) because he could not speak the language.
But his interest was sparked by Welsh-language rock stars such as David R Edwards, the frontman of the iconic Welsh band Datblygu. “I wanted to understand his lyrics better. Now I love learning Welsh,” he said.
In the Lighthouse boutique, Giuseppina Saccone, 64, the daughter of an Italian prisoner of war held in Wales, said her first language was Italian but she loved learning Welsh. “It’s got a lilt to it, a kindness.”
Outside, three generations of Welsh speakers were to be found – Janet Thomas, her daughter Cerys Thomas, 21, and Cerys’s nine-week-old son, Guto Siôn.
“We were pushed so much to speak Welsh at school that we resisted it,” said Cerys. “We wanted to speak English. But I see the value of Welsh now and my son will definitely speak it. He and his generation will keep it going.”
