WE NO LONGER TALK

What does it mean to be Welsh and not speak the language?

To not know the history? Or the activism behind preserving the language?

What would happen if you could speak Welsh?

We No Longer Talk was a project funded by Llais y Lle; it allowed our Artistic Director Rhiannon White and artist Ffion Wyn Morris to explore the different relationships to the Welsh language in working class communities in North and South Wales.

Rhiannon and Ffion foregrounded connection, empathy and curiosity in their work, and the beautiful and haunting film captures this spirit. The film uses Arabic, English, Somali and Welsh to explore relationships between language, place and community. We No Longer Talk movingly explores redressing the missed opportunities to learn Welsh; the connection between our ancient rivers and revolutionary history; and the importance of digging deeper than the shallow slogans on unsustainable gift-shop tat. 

Process

We began our project with a series of interviews with artists and activists from working class areas of Cardiff; St Mellons, Ely and Butetown. We had wide-ranging conversations about our relationship to Welsh and our direct experiences of trying to use Welsh – or not having the opportunity to do so. We discussed the history of Wales, including the gaps in our knowledge and what we’d like to know, and how we’d like Welsh to be part of our lives.

We discussed how we might challenge the assumptions that people in Cardiff might have about Welsh, including the assumption that speaking Welsh is a marker of class privilege in Cardiff. Our research found that in some circumstances this can be true. For example, Dr Siôn Llewelyn Jones used data on the provision of free school meals to demonstrate that Welsh medium schools in South East Wales have fewer pupils in receipt of free school meals. In 2021 the census confirmed that 12.2% of people in Cardiff speak Welsh, which is an increase of 1.1% on the last census. However, our research also found changes in how Welsh is spoken in Cardiff, with interviewees saying that they’ve heard Welsh spoken in areas not traditionally known as strongholds of Welsh in Cardiff, such as Grangetown. The 2021 census showed an increase in Black and Brown people who speak Welsh, particularly amongst young people. This shows that the relationship between Welsh Language and the city is changing. 

Next, we interviewed people in North Wales to build a picture of the relationship between language and class in North Wales. We learned about gentrification and the role that short-term accommodation services play in excluding Welsh speakers from their community, and how they contribute to the erasure of the Welsh language, identity and culture. Our interviewees told us about the importance of Welsh names for places and how they are disappearing, often after places are re-named by people moving from England to Wales. The original names often have meanings that connect people to their landscape by describing its features, or relate to ancient stories passed down from generation to generation. 

We programmed a series of workshops designed to be in dialogue with the themes that emerged from our interviews.  Over 75 people took part.

• Historian Chris Parry and visual artist Jon Pountney explored Welsh identity, landscape and our relationship to Wales’ radical, post-industrial past. 
• Writer Patrick Jones and Phillip Prosser from the Tredegar Medical Aid History Group hosted a workshop that delved into radical ideas of the past in order to express ideas for now and the future through creative writing.
• Artist Bedwyr Williams held a Grumpy Drawing Workshop which allowed participants to explore the things that annoy them. 
• Activist Sarah Bowen and writer Taylor Edmunds held a creative writing and contemporary history workshop exploring the erasure of working-class stories and how we share our stories. 

We welcomed local people to our book club in our office in Llanrumney, reading Brittle with Relics by Richard King. Brittle with Relics is a history of Wales from 1962 – 1997. In addition to our English language club, we have set up a Welsh language book club, Clwb Llyfrau Cymraeg, to support us to practice our Welsh together. 

We also matched three artists from Cardiff who don’t speak Welsh with three Welsh speaking artists in Bethesda. They worked in Bethesda for three days, finding points of connection. They created work in response to these conversations, which were performed in our short film created by Gavin Porter. 

For our website we commissioned two blogs about Welsh and class from the perspective on an anonymous Welsh speaker. These blogs, The Welsh Language and Class: Paradoxes and Contradictions, and Language, Class and Cywilydd, have provoked some really important conversations online.