Bendigeidfran e-shrine

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

W is a vowel, and LL and FF are single letters not two Ls or two Fs. Saying LL is two letters is as dumb as saying W is two letters just because it looks like two Vs.

In Spanish, l is a consonant and ll is a different consonant and a single letter. This is exactly the same as Welsh using ll as a single letter.

The violent suppression of Welsh in schools lasted until about the 70s, by which time it had done so much cultural damage that we’re still unpicking it literally here on tumblr dot com in 2019.  If you’ve ever laughed at Welsh for how it looks or sounds, or whether or not its native speakers can actually speak it, you’re literally participating in that damage splash zone. 

The specific method for suppressing Welsh in schools was a wooden sign called a “Welsh Not”, used in the 18th - 20th centuries, until about the 1940s.  If a child was heard speaking Welsh (or reported to a teacher for speaking Welsh by another child) then they would wear this sign around their neck, humiliating them for speaking their native language.  This sign would be transferred from them if another child was heard (or reported for) speaking Welsh.  At the end of the day, the child wearing the Welsh Not was beaten.  This, as you can imagine, fosters an environment of shame and isolation, and destroys any natural solidarity between Welsh children in schools as it literally encourages them to turn on each other to avoid corporal punishment.