Guardian News and Media/London
There was a time when Welsh was the only language to be heard at the post office in Pontyberem, a former coal mining village nestling in the rolling hills of Carmarthenshire.
“It’s not really like that now,” said postmistress Morfydd Evans. “The older people still always speak Welsh but lots of the young ones don’t. They can speak it. They learn it in school, but they choose not to use Welsh. It makes us older ones sad. We’re proud of our culture and our language and more needs to be done to protect it.”
This is an important time for the language in traditional Welsh-speaking heartlands, both in south-west Wales and across the country.
A report just published by the assembly government, the BBC and the Welsh-language broadcaster S4C, has concluded that only half of Welsh speakers aged 16-24 consider themselves fluent, compared with two-thirds of the over-60s.
Just a third of the young speakers said they always or usually communicated in Welsh with friends.
The report established that few Welsh speakers, even young, tech-savvy youngsters, are using the language when they communicate online or when they use the internet for research or entertainment.
The study comes after the census revealed that the proportion of people in Wales able to speak Welsh fell from 21% in 2001 to 19% in 2011.
If the headline figure wasn’t disturbing enough, there is particular concern about what is happening in the traditional Welsh stronghold of Carmarthenshire.
In 2001 there were five electoral divisions where more than 70% of people spoke Welsh. Now there are none.
In Pontyberem – such a hotspot that it is commonly believed to be the inspiration for the long-running Welsh-language soap opera Pobol y Cwm, or People of the Valley, which helped launch the career of actor Ioan Gruffudd – the number of speakers has dropped from almost three-quarters at the turn of the century to 69%.
“There is no doubt this is a crucial time for the Welsh language,” said Cathryn Ings, business manager of the Welsh language initiative Menter Cwm Gwendraeth in Pontyberem. “If we don’t act the number of people speaking Welsh will continue to fall.”
Ings said there was a lot of pressure on young people to keep the language alive. “They are seen as the future, as the great hope. But it’s very difficult when you’re living next to a language superpower. The young people are bombarded by English whether it be in computer games or on social media.”
She said she believed one problem was a lack of confidence and a perception that Welsh was not for everyone. “A lot of people who can speak it aren’t confident enough. They don’t think their Welsh is good enough. We’ve got to make the language more welcoming, more inclusive.”
The new report published by the government and broadcasters picked this up. It found that the fear of getting things wrong was one of the main reasons why Welsh speakers were not using the language. It said people needed to be reassured that they did not have to speak grammar-perfect Welsh but it was acceptable to use “everyday Welsh” peppered with some English words.