The fading Welsh accent, and does it even matter?

Stephen Price

Discussing the ‘overwhelm’ of his autism for a BBC documentary, Chris Packham described walking through a forest and noticing every leaf, every detail, every sound around him.

Where others may just pass through, the onslaught of his brain takes in everything. At rapid speed, but also at an overwhelming, energy-zapping cost. Everything all at once, all in need of processing, all just a bit too much.

His description felt very familiar to the workings of my own brain (a shock to no one) and brings me to my experience of walking through a park, sitting in McDonald’s with my nephew, you name it.. I’m hypervigilant, hyper-aware, and I’m also incredibly bloody nosey.

Over the past few years, when both listening in or chatting with younger folk in my square few miles of southeast Wales, I’ve noticed a radical shift in the ‘softening’ (or should that be erasing?) of Welsh accents – chiefly within Blaenau Gwent, south Powys and Monmouthshire (which incidentally don’t have a Welsh language high school but I’ve already covered that)…

And the biggest shift amongst that ‘softening’, is a very strange hardening too – namely the introduction of Received Pronunciation (or RP) into Welsh accents.

GlaRsses?

FraRnce?

DaRnce? What the actual ffoc!?

PaRss

Murder on the daRncefloor

And RP isn’t just infiltrating my small patch either.

Calling John Francis Estate Agents out west a few years back, the Welsh folk answered with ‘John Frarncis’ each time. And each time felt as painful as the first.

And it’s not just Welsh accents that are at risk of fading into a bland indistinctive mono-palette – regional accents and dialects across the whole UK are said to be fading into oblivion.

Watching episodes of George Clarke’s Remarkable Renovations, I’m always struck by (or should that be cringed out by) Clarke’s use of “maRster bedroom” completely at odds with every other detail of his wonderful Sunderland accent. *shudder*

Wales isn’t alone, either, in having beautiful, soothing, interesting and lively accents.

From Liverpool to Newcastle, Aberdeen to Cornwall, there’s charm and wonder in so many (let’s not lie and say all!) – and I’m rather partial to a cut glass Helena Bonham Carter style RP accent myself too. Just not mixed in with a Sunderland or Abertillery one.

Hyur, hyur!

I’ve made no conscious effort to change my accent in my lifetime.

In true valleys style, I generally pronounce ‘ear’, ‘here’ and ‘hear’ as ‘yur’.. But noticed a while back how, over the years, I’ve shifted from a peculiar valleys way of seeing ‘yours’ in three different ways depending on the desired intonation (youaz, yoz and yarz – you’ll notice it now I’ve said) to the more traditional ‘yours’ (rhyming with paws).

My (much older) siblings and parents would make an ‘O’ sound into an Or.. ‘Coke’ becomes ‘cork’.. ‘No’ becomes ‘nor’, ‘Toby’, ‘Torby’ and so on… A hard ‘O’ becomes soft in other ways too, so ‘don’t’ will rhyme with want.

A hard ‘A’ will become softer – ‘David’; ‘Dairvid’, ‘Babe’; ‘Bairb’… To my ears, all made ‘gentler’.

I remember chatting at an event with my mum in tow, and someone remarking how my accent was noticeably less strong than hers.  I’ve also been told that I sound like I have an ‘educated Welsh accent’ –  as opposed to the uneducated one. Charming.

The term ‘educated’ is of particular note.

In days gone by, rather than signifying one’s bilingualism (and intelligence), the dominant and self-assigned ’superior’ monoglot cultures of these isles have tended to view those with Celtic accents as ’thick’, as typified by outdated ‘Paddy and Murphy’ ‘jokes’.

Hearing generations below me speak, I can’t help but feel sad (and somewhat hypocritical) that the dilution that my generation ran with shows no signs of stopping.

It also makes me wonder if older generations felt the same hearing the natural shift in my accent (one that I might just have called ‘saying certain things properly’) as I do when I hear friends of my children speak with barely a trace of a Welsh accent, and the use of received pronunciation. 

Charnce, darnce, Frarnce, marster and the like.

Of course, there is no one Welsh accent, and most of us have certainly used a mix of received pronunciation and not since us Welshies first learned to speak English (see bath and path) but things have definitely ramped up a notch of late.

And why is it happening? Television, inward and outward migration, teachers a-teaching, more contact with the big bad outside world, a number of reasons.

And naturally, too, no doubt, just as mine did back in the 80s.

The tide and the jury are out

The Welsh Government has an admirable, hopeful, and achievable (if we get real about Welsh medium education) target of a million Welsh speakers, but when it comes to accents is there anything we could and should be doing?

Picture it now, teachers across the land telling people how to pronounce ‘here’ the Welsh way, ‘whole’ the Welsh way (whool if you’re wondering!) or ‘tube’ (tewb) and so on and so forth. Or don’t, since it won’t be happening.

I remember an English language and literature teacher at my high school drumming out one classmate’s use of ‘do’ which is a valleys add-on for verbs, for example ‘I do like’, ‘I do think’, and the best of all, ‘I do do’. 

I see why the teacher (from England, incidentally) did it.. but what else are we drumming out? What else are we saying is just ‘speaking properly’, as I thought to be the case by saying coke in a way that doesn’t rhyme with cork.

And it’s not just teachers drumming it out. We in Wales police ourselves and each other just as much ourselves. 

I remember being mocked by friends for calling my mum, “mam”.

Mam, so endearing, so evocative, so Welsh. But Welsh is bad, right?

And another friend knocked me in my early twenties for saying “pube” in the way Welsh folk would say Huw (Hew vs Hyew)…

How many times too, do we hear our voices recorded and say “I sound so Welshy”. Again, how terrible!

Welsh but in English

And changing Welsh accents in English aren’t the only shifts I and others are noting. 

Welsh sports stars have come under fire time and time again for not using ‘proper Welsh’ in post-match interviews, and critics have rightfully received a backlash.

But an observation I’ve had for a long while which many seem afraid to voice, is the strange way in which younger second-language Welsh speakers often have stronger Welsh accents in English than in Welsh.

I’m not talking Welsh language skills here, so ‘don’t get it twisted’ as the young ‘uns say, I’m on your side here – use the Welsh you’ve got – I just mean the accent.

In an act of reverse Welsh rebelry, the beautiful and I would say essential accent ain’t in, and to me that’s tragic.

Is the letter ‘r’ that hard to ‘rrrrroll’? The effect comes off as ‘I’ll say what you want me to say, because you want me to say it, but don’t expect any effort.’

Talk tidy, mun

Anyway, back to the point in hand. Does it matter if English-speaking Wales, or Welsh-speaking Wales, loses its accents?

To me, undoubtedly it does.

It’s a marker of our identity, a direct trace back to the language and melodic tones of our ancestors, and a key pathway to getting us back to one day being a Welsh-speaking nation again.

I’ll be criticised for saying it too, but I simply like hearing Welsh language and accents around me when I’m in Wales.

On a cellular level, they land in my brain better, they soothe me, they’re of this soil, of my people.

So I’ll say it hyur, so you can all hyur me with your own yurs: I don wonna hyur any more RP this side of the border, orrrrrrite.

Although, chaRnce would be a fine thing.