Ihope Itoke orayt!
IT SEEMS that learning a foreign language at home has been extremely popular during the 2020 lockdowns. According to the website Duolingo, Welsh has recorded the fastest growing uptake with a 44 per cent increase ranking it the ninth most popular language to learn, outflanking Japanese, Turkish, and even French.
There have been many ways to pass time during the pandemic. But learning Welsh holds the least appeal for me, even as someone whose paternal roots grew in the worked-out tunnels of Cymru collieries. My personal recollections, however, blur along the caravan-infested North Wales coastline where the predominant accents have always been ‘Manc’ and ‘Scouse’.
For whatever reason, many people with distant Welsh ancestry are yearning to get back to their genealogical roots. As one Scottish-born woman with distant Welsh pedigree explained: “Och-aye! It felt like I was missing a piece of myself, d’ye ken?”
Paradoxically, the new Welsh-learners are those whose families left the valleys generations before to spread English abroad.
Statistics show that of all those using the Duolingo app to learn Welsh, it is Australians who represent the biggest take-up. The land down under, of course, provided the early colonial reformatories for miscreants transported from their homeland.
Although these early ‘Strines’ were harshly treated to begin with, compensation was found in surfing and volleyball, with daylong barbies on silver beaches. Getting there was easy. All you had to do was to demonstrate opposition to industrial tyranny, or repeat the crime of stealing food to prevent your kids from dying of hunger. So many former Welsh patriots took this route that parts of Australia were known as Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, ‘Land Of My Fathers’.
Australia’s version of English has come a long way since Captain James Cook stumbled across the East Coast naming it New South Wales. It evidently reminded him of Wales, even though the native yam and quandong fruit bore little resemblance to leeks and bara brith, and the Aboriginal war chanters added little to the melodic harmonies of the Treorchy Male Voice Choir.
As Cook’s journal noted on his first encounter with the locals, “All they seemed to want was for us to be gone”. The native leader having declared in a sentence ending like a question, ‘Onya bike cobber. We don’t encourage drongos or galahs in these paarts!’
All this brings me to the feature film The Colour Room, telling the story of Tunstallborn clay-artist Clarice Cliff, and my hope that the actors get the accent and dialect right.
Potterese is a difficult vernacular to articulate. In films like The Card and Marvellous even great actors,
Alec Guinness and locally-connected Toby Jones, didn’t quite capture the pronounced aural pitches of the Six Towns. Sad to say that the proper North
Staffs lingo disappeared long ago. Lads in Boothen streets no longer ‘kick a bo agen a wo’. Neck End wives and husbands, have lost the taste for chommeling chaze-npittles after a nite ite dine the Legion. Pottery lingo was lost when factories, pits and steel mills closed down, and choirs of cup-handlers and transferrers gave up chorusing like songbirds lined along potbank benches.
The Colour Room relates to the first half of the 20th century, therefore traditional dialect is relevant. It is nonetheless important that usage is kept to a minimum for fear of it becoming tedious.
I noted this in Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo, where in the family cottage scenes, the word ‘sithee’ was so overused that even the actors couldn’t tell whether they were coming or going.
The part of Clarice in the new film is played by Phoebe Harriet Dynevor, a Manchester girl and daughter of actress Sally Dynevor, who has been Corrie’s Sally Webster for ever. My advice to Phoebe is simple: harken the’sen to Owd Grandad Piggott. Dunna bay sneaped. Dunna get clemmed, and get an oatcake dine thee. So, cheers duck! Or as they say in Welsh Wales, Iechyd da!