Yourself, Teach Welsh

"Now then indeed to goodness look you" as the the Times of London might say, we have seen a  furore from the defenders of the Iaith and quite rightly so, the 'Tarian Twitterati'. I posted a couple of quixotic tweets myself but we have learnt from the cognoscenti that the best thing to do is ignore those who insult our 'Mam Iaith'. When they insult Cymraeg what they are actually saying is a version of 'Yer Mum' oft used by schoolchildren to attack or wind up their peers. We rise to the bait en masse in righteous indignation because we feel threatened. We personalise the attack because we speak Welsh. Cymraeg, even though it is our strength and shield is also our achilees heel. It is one of the things that we feel most passionate about, that the slightest twitch of criticism can send us into paroxysms of defensiveness. The psychology of Welsh Speaking is worth a study in itself because most of us are brought up in a soup of Saesneg and we regain the language in our own different ways. We have strata of standards of Welsh where inferiority complexes show themselves up to the light. "Mae fy Nghymraeg ddim yn digon da" "My Welsh isn't good enough" How often have we heard that or have we said it ourselves? You wouldn't dream of saying "My English isn't good enough" so why have you taken yourself into the Second Division of the Linguistic League with this lazy refrain. I don't actually care about the standard of my Welsh but I do care passionately about the language and its survival. Personally I don't think that competing against each other once a year at the Eisteddfod Genedlaethol is the most productive way of ensuring its survival as competition and indeed education is a turn off to a lot of people. Unfortunately the elders are expecting the yoof to embrace Welsh in their hundreds of thousands. The Welsh Assembly Government have set their target of 1 million Welsh speakers by 2050 after having a sibrwd in their ear by Cymdeithas yr Iaith and a very good thing too. There is nothing like a target and a deadline to get the blood flowing. Unfortunately many of us writing and speaking Wenglish will be dead by then so are we going to sit back in our rocking chairs and let the banks and supermarkets take the strain or are we as Carwyn Jones has urged going 'take possession and responsibility' for the language? Every single one of the 546,000 or whatever number the Census has manipulated us into thus far, need to become Teachers of Welsh. We need to pounce upon unsuspecting tourists having their ice creams in Llandudno or white water rafting in Llangollen and engage them in Cymraeg. We see its value and importance but persuading the other victims of austerity of its priority in our lives might be a different matter, but we don't know until we've tried. For my part I am tutoring a little Midlands Person who attends classes and comes to me for Conversation practice. I continue to write my beloved 'bratiaith' on this blog but I am aware that if we are all serious about 1 million Welsh Speakers by 2050 then we ourselves are going to have to become 'The Teachers of Welsh'