#cue queue

I went on Google for something completely different, but this made me punch the air in jubilation, so you might be interested to see it too.

In case you're not familiar with the background, this is important because, despite rallying massively over the last 70 years or so, Welsh is still very much a language at risk. And when I say "at risk", I mean "subject to a campaign to drive it into extinction that very nearly worked and still might". Welsh speakers of my grandmother's generation and earlier were subjected to corporal punishment and shame tactics (see The Welsh Knot for one particularly notorious example), and workers to disciplinary action for speaking Welsh in school or workplace. In Wales.

And since tourism has been a huge source of income for the country (increasingly important, arguably, since so many coalmines and steelworks were shut down), using English placenames to be, I guess, less off-putting for visitors, has been increasingly the norm. Which means that the arguably far more beautiful (in Welsh or more directly translated into English) names are dying out, as locals forget them too.

One of the reasons I get quite passionate about this, is that I'm the last person in my family to speak Welsh much beyond the usual "good morning", "exit", and "welcome to Wales", and I'm a second language speaker at that, horrendously rusty. Another is, I guess, the guilt of the voluntary exile – what can I do but shout about it from far away and make occasional forays back to Duolingo's Welsh course?