Mind your language in the Valleys
The Welsh Language Board has launched a £10,000, year-long sponsorship programme with Tesco to promote the use of the language. As part of the initiative, packaging in Welsh Tesco’s will carry bilingual labelling and be sourced locally. Langua
Hello ‘i s ‘r Ddyddiadur ‘ma. For those of you who are less linguistically gifted than the Diary, that was, “Hello it’s the Diary here.” In Welsh. Now, you see if you worked for a Tesco supermarket in Wales, you would have known exactly what it meant.
This, however, is not because everyone in Wales speaks Welsh, far from it – most Welsh people don’t speak their native tongue. The reason for this outbreak of slobbering and use of syllables like “llan” is because the Welsh Language Board has launched a &£10,000, year-long sponsorship programme with Tesco to promote the use of the language. As part of the initiative, packaging in Welsh Tesco’s will carry bilingual labelling and be sourced locally.
Language Board chairman Rhodri Williams says: “This promotion sends important signals [and some flegma] to businesses and helps us underline the message that bilingual use of Welsh is a positive asset.”
The Diary can see how this would be useful in marketing to the Welsh, but will this trend be continued elsewhere? What about Scotland and Ireland? Will they start hearing their native Gaelic? As for the poor Cornish, what about a revival of Celtic? Who knows? Anyway, as they say in Wales, goodbye achos awron.
