If you've ever been job-searching in Wales, you are bound to have come across this at some point. There it is: the perfect job for you, and you are the perfect candidate! A match made in heaven! Finally! Where do I sign up? I-- uh, oh, great, "Welsh speaker essential". Nevermind.

And no doubt, anyone who has been politely shown the door because of their lack of linguistic ability has probably been left wondering why they are being discriminated against, or why positive discrimination is still acceptable, especially for the Welsh language. "Isn't having the language forced on us in school enough? Now I actually have to be able to speak it?!". I wouldn't really blame you for being angry. 

That is, until I did some reading. A few months ago I would have argued that jobs requiring Welsh speakers are actually pretty discriminatory, but I have now seen the light. So today, I want to give you a summary of why I think it's perfectly justifiable to have jobs that are 'Welsh speaker essential', and why non-Welsh speakers have very little to no reason to complain about them.  

Note: These are the very basics of what I wrote in a recent essay assignment. I have left a lot out for blogability reasons. 

I think it's important to get this mentioned before I get started on the discrimination aspect: bilingualism isn't what the majority of monolinguals think it is. Very few people are perfectly balanced in both of their languages; it is completely normal for bilinguals to feel more confident in one language than the other. So, say if you're in hospital and you need to explain to your doctor exactly what's wrong with you, would you rather: 

a) Use your second language, which you have trouble expressing yourself in and have a very restricted vocabulary

b) Use your first language, which you feel comfortable using and feel able to express yourself far more fluently in

This is something that many minority language speakers experience daily, and this is just one of many situations where being able to express yourself accurately and confidently is essential to your well-being. This is why it's important to have these jobs, to help make people feel confident and comfortable in a situation where they are already feeling vulnerable or are at risk. Now, is that really so bad?

First off, having a job advertised as 'Welsh speakers only plz' is not racist. Why? Because not a single one of these job advertisements have stated a need to actually be Welsh. You could be Welsh, English, Danish, Estonian, Japanese, whatever, it doesn't matter, you just have to be able to speak Welsh. The reason why people think that it's an issue of race is because, being a minority language, the majority of people who speak Welsh just happen to be Welsh. 

By this logic, you are also claiming that there is an ethnic difference between Welsh-speaking Welsh people and non-Welsh-speaking Welsh people. And to be fair, I'm pretty sure my mother and I aren't two completely different ethnicities. 

Prioritising a Welsh-speaker over someone who doesn't speak Welsh for a particular job certainly does look discriminatory, and I don't blame anybody for believing so. But seriously consider this for a moment: aren't all jobs discriminatory? 

Hiring: Personal Assistant. Must have excellent people skills. 
Great, I'm socially inept and have zero people skills. This job is discriminating against introverts!

Hiring: Cleaner. Must have valid driver's licence as job will require travelling to various locations. 
I'm a great cleaner but I don't drive! I'm being discriminated against for being environmentally conscious!

Hiring: Nurse. Must have competent knowledge of Welsh as will be working in the Welsh language heartlands. 
I'm a fantastic nurse but I can't get this job because I don't speak the local language? This is discrimination!

Do you see what I mean?

I don't know where you stand on the whole 'positive discrimination' front, but it is a tricky topic. Is giving some people an advantage for being in a particular ethnic group really 'equality'? This isn't something I want to get into in this blog post, but I'm just going to argue why giving a Welsh speaker a job over a non-Welsh speaker isn't positive discrimination. 

Positive discrimination is the promotion and inclusion of a certain group in a particular occupation because they have been discriminated against in the past. 

This is precisely what is not happening in Wales with Welsh speakers. Why? Nobody has never been denied a job simply for being a Welsh speaker. The government is not trying to promote the visibility of Welsh speakers in the workplace because of past discrimination, rather they are trying to promote the visibility of the Welsh language so that Welsh speakers in the wider community can live their lives through the medium of Welsh. It's about ensuring that Wales is a truly bilingual country, not about getting Welsh speakers better jobs. 

No it doesn't. 

Equality of opportunity does not mean that anyone has the right to have whatever job they want. You have to be qualified. Giving a Welsh speaker a job over a non-Welsh speaker in a hospital in Gwynedd is no different to giving a job to a tractor driver over a non-tractor driver on a big farm. 

Being able to speak Welsh in the job market is a skill. It's being advertised in schools as an employable skill. It's not nationalistic or racist. It goes without saying that knowledge of English is necessary for the majority of jobs in Britain, why is it such a big problem when we ask for the same thing in a community of minority language speakers? 

Last week I came across a meme on the increasingly bad Welsh Memes Facebook page and I admit, it was nice to see a meme that was actually being used correctly and wasn't about bestiality, but I ended up having to correct a couple of angry Welshmen who refused to believe that Welsh isn't one of the oldest languages in Europe. I admit this is something I used to believe myself, when I was maybe, oh I don't know, 13, but there are so many myths going around about the Welsh language that I feel need to be addressed, for Welsh speakers and non-Welsh speakers alike. 

This is absolutely in no way whatsoever an attack on the Welsh language, nor is it an attack on its speakers or those who believe in these myths. I just want to get this off my chest more than anything. People need to stop saying this stuff because it's ridiculous and starting to really, really annoy me. 

This is such a common myth and this is precisely why I'm writing this blog post. Within the past few months I have heard so many people argue that Welsh is older than English, and it truly is ridiculous. The idea that Welsh is older than English is incredibly outdated and goes back to the early days of Linguistics when people took the story of the Tower of Babel literally. By today we know that Welsh and English share the same root and have both been around for the same amount of time. 

True, Welsh (and Cornish and Breton) come from the Brythonic language, which existed in Britain before Anglo-Saxon arrived, but that doesn't make Welsh older than English. No, English didn't 'come from German'. No, English didn't 'come from Latin'. And, goddamnit, no, English isn't a younger language than Welsh. 

English as we know it today has changed a lot from Old English, which was a super cool language with lots of extra letters and is completely unrecognisable as the ancestor of today's language. It can be argued that Welsh hasn't changed quite as drastically as English over the centuries, but that doesn't make it any older either. 

Maybe people think that Welsh is older because it existed in Britain before English did, maybe they think it's older because minority languages are generally linked with tradition, maybe it's the aftermath of decades of being told that English is the language of modernity and Welsh is the language of the olden days, but none of these things matter because, and this is the last time I will be saying this, so read it slowly and carefully now, please: the Welsh language is not older than the English language. 

This is aimed at those who don't speak Welsh or feel like they were forced to learn Welsh in school: so often have you gone out of your way to let me know that the language I hear on a daily basis is dead. Just because you don't use it, it doesn't mean that it's dead. 

Let's put it this way: I don't personally know anybody with an iPad, I've never used an iPad despite all the adverts I ever saw and I never will buy such a thing. But I don't claim that it doesn't exist just because I haven't personally encountered one or found use for one. 

Me claiming that iPads don't exist is exactly how daft you sound when you say Welsh is a dead language, especially since it has 562,000 speakers in Wales alone. 

And this is for those of you who exaggerate the state of the Welsh language for the opposite reason. Now, I am by no means whatsoever saying that there is no need to preserve the Welsh language, or that no action needs to be taken to help the Welsh language survive. I wouldn't be dedicating my life to the cause if I didn't think so. The point is, I understand that Welsh is a vulnerable language but it is nowhere near dying. We have radio, TV, websites, education systems, newspapers, magazines, popular music, films, all sorts of amazing Welsh-medium stuff that most dying language activists would only dream of having. You can use Welsh daily if you choose to, speakers of real dying languages can't do this.

If you look at Fishman's Graded Inter-generational Disruption Scale, Welsh is most definitely at stage 1 or 2. That means, for a minority language, we're doing pretty damn well. I think more of us need to be grateful for that. Go and read about languages with less than 5 speakers and then see if you still want to complain about how we have English adverts on S4C. 

We've all either said it or heard it at some point: Welsh looks like a cat walked across a keyboard. Trust me, it gets funnier every time, folks. But what a lot of these people don't realise is that Welsh spelling is far more uniform and easy to learn than English spelling is. 

I can understand why words like anghydweddogrwydd  might look like a mess to non-Welsh speakers, but while our spelling system may seem strange to outsiders, it is at least more or less, what we call, transparent. What this means is that a letter of the alphabet represents a particular sound and will represent that sound in all contexts. This seems basic enough, but there are plenty of languages that aren't transparent; English being one of them. Orthographical transparency is almost entirely true for Welsh however, with only a few exceptions that have simple rules that can be learned. 

For example: 

Most people can't get their head around the fact that <dd> is used in Welsh to represent [ð] (i.e. the 'th' sound at the beginning of the words 'the' and 'this'). It might seem weird to have <dd> for this sound but whether it is at the beginning, middle or end of a word, it will always be pronounced the same way. 

What about English? Well, just then I had to clarify the fact that <dd> in Welsh is the 'th' sound of 'the' and 'this' rather than 'thin' and 'through'. In English, <th> represents both sounds [ð] and [θ] and it isn't immediately obvious which is used in what context. Essentially, with English you generally have to learn how to pronounce a lot of words individually, whereas a Welsh speaker will be able to pronounce almost any new or unfamiliar Welsh word when it is presented to them. If you need more proof, you need only try to list as many words as you can that end in -ough and hopefully you will never need to think that Welsh spelling is stupid ever again. 

In fact, I'm not quite done just yet, because this is the one myth that bothers me above all others. I am going to give one final example before I leave you all alone. So let's look at a nice made up word:

If I were to show this to 50 Welsh speakers and tell them 'this is a brand new Welsh word, how do you think it's pronounced?' I would say that almost all of them would pronounce it something like [aˈbamɛ]. Tell the same amount of English speakers that it is a new English word and you would get all sorts of different answers ([ə'beɪm, 'abeɪm, ə'bɑːmeɪ, ə'bɑːmiː] etc etc). 

The point is that Welsh spelling is far more regular than English so please stop complaining about it, thank you. 

We get this one a lot, and you have no idea how stupid you sound when you say that Welsh has no vowels. In all fairness, unless you have some knowledge of Linguistics you probably don't know that spellings and sounds are not the same thing, so even in English, 'the word rhythm has no vowels' is about the dumbest thing you can say because <y> is being used as a vowel in this context.

As far as phonemes go, standard RP English and Welsh have pretty much the same amount of vowels, with Welsh winning by one extra. When it comes to the alphabet, English vowels are taught as a e i o u (y), Welsh vowels are taught as a e i o u w y. So as far as the alphabet goes, Welsh has more. 

So the reason why people think that Welsh has no vowels is because <y> is used to represent a vowel sound in Welsh, and <w> is used as both a vowel and a consonant (just like how <y> is used in English, e.g. yes vs happy). In fact, <w> is used to represent vowels in English, too (crowd, crown, news), so it's not that weird that we use it as a vowel (words like cwrw are a lot of fun for non-Welsh speakers). In fact, ever stop to think that the English name for <w> is called DOUBLE-U and the Welsh use it as a long [u:] sound? Logic'd. 

Welsh is full of English loanwords and apparently this is a source of much hilarity. There's no point in me lying though, I've found myself scoffing at an ashtray marked stwmps sigarets in Welsh, and I think everyone in Wales is familiar with bin brown, the Welsh translation of 'brown bin' found on our food waste bins. To be honest, this is a lesson I need to learn myself; I am always the first to laugh at 'stupidly bad' Welsh borrowings but I'm also the first to point out that there is nothing wrong with loanwords, no matter how stupid they seem. 

Lexical borrowing happens in all language contact situations, and the language with less influence is the one that ends up borrowing lots of words from the language with more influence. This happens all over the world and it's not just the Welsh 'being lazy'. The people who criticise the amount of English loanwords in Welsh tend to either be monolinguals who don't understand how bilingualism and language contact works, or language purists who won't accept the reality of how bilingualism and language contact works. But for those of you who scoff at our words like tacsi, ciwb, pyramid, ambiwlans and coffi, let me just remind you: 

Taxi comes from French (from German, from Latin)
Cube comes from French (from Latin, from Greek) 
Pyramid comes from French (from Latin, from Greek)
Ambulance comes from French (from Latin) 
Coffee comes from Italian (from Turkish, from Arabic).

Yup, my life is so void of any real excitement that my favourite thing to do is collect interesting words. Since I have a vast collection of many, many words, today I thought I’d share about 10 of these with you. Enjoy!

I don't think this word needs much explanation. It comes from French "oui, oui". Can you imagine naming a country after one stereotypical phrase used by its language's speakers? Just beautiful.  

(n.) The light reflected by snow

I'll be honest, I thought I had invented this word myself, so I was a little disappointed to see that it already exists, but it's a wonderful word nonetheless! Have you ever noticed how the world just glows when you're outside in the snow at night? You could walk through a field in the middle of the night and be able to see clearly just from the light reflected by the snow. It's one of my favourite things about winter.

(vb.) The ebbing and flowing of the waves on Lake Alexandrina, South Australia

I can't vouch for the authenticity of this word, as a Google search will only give you links to various dictionaries and a couple of books. Whether this word is genuine or not, the idea of a language having such a specific term fills me with joy. 

(n.) Forest

"Forest?" you might ask, "that's an interesting word?". Well, stop asking such silly questions and just look at it. It's literally a picture of five trees. In fact, from what I've seen, it gets even better. Let me show you how often you can use this simple 木 character: 

How can you not adore this language!?

It's essentially comparing a spoilt brat to a dying fish, what more could you possibly want from a word? There can't really be that many instances in which you could use it, but I can just imagine it being hilarious. 

(n.) The distinctive scent which accompanies the first rain after a long warm dry spell.

Some people use this word to mean 'the smell of the earth after rain', but it does have a slightly more specific meaning than that. It was coined by two Australian researchers, and it is an absolutely beautiful word: it's combined of the Greek words 'petra' (πέτρα) meaning 'stone', and 'ichor' (ἰχώρ) the ethereal golden blood of the gods. 

The graphemes for <w> are a little hard to decipher. They look a bit like Cyrillic <ϭ> or Greek <σ>. I know that in Mediæval Welsh texts, a letter that looked similar to the number <6> was used for this letter, so it's likely based on that (I don't think it's available in Unicode yet). Since neither of these however will combine with a circumflex, I'm going to be boring and just use the <ϭ> for both <w> and <ŵ>.

In all fairness, it is a complete mess of an orthography. But it has its charms, and the fact that you can tell which letters are mutations is useful. Apart from that though, it's an awful, awful mess. Just for fun here's a little comparison of the first verse of the Welsh national anthem in both orthographies: 

Contemporary Welsh: 
Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi,
Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri;
Ei gwrol ryfelwyr, gwladgarwyr tra mad,
Dros ryddid collasant eu gwaed.

This silly Welsh: 
Mae hen ϭlad vᶌ t̔adau ᶌn annϭyl i mi, 
Gϭlad beird̓ a ćantorion, enϭogion o b̓ri; 
Ei gϭrol rᶌvelϭyr, gϭladc̓arϭyr tra mad,
Dros rᶌd̓id col̔asant eu gϭaed. 

Despite being messy, I think it's fairly cool-looking. I'm personally a big fan of having lots and lots of diacritics (Vietnamese, hnngg). Being the big orthography geek that I am, I might spend lots of time learning to read and write this fluently. Maybe it would make a useful shorthand for Welsh? Or maybe it should just stay in that book forever where it belongs.