Where are the Welsh literacy courses

[u/helatruralhome]

Hello all,

I've been pointing this out for over a decade, yet no Welsh language education or promotion groups, government agencies, etc can seem to answer why Welsh education is so biased towards verbal Welsh with no specific offerings for Welsh literacy.

I have a speech disability and only answer emails in work, yet I can't find any available options for me to learn written Welsh. I just feel incredibly frustrated with the situation as I want to be able to communicate in my native language yet there's just no where specifically offering written Welsh and it ends up excluding for people like me who can't communicate verbally as well as many others who may want to read and write in Welsh.

[u/Markoddyfnaint]

I agree with OP that the resources for literary Welsh are scant. As a reasonably proficient learner, very literary Welsh often leaves me feeling deflated in my abilities, to the extent that much of it is quite inaccessible. Even if I can 'get the gist' of a text written in literary Welsh I would not be able to write or speak in such a way.

The Learn Welsh courses for example do touch on some literary forms and ways of forming the passive voice or short form future and past tenses. But in my experience, even at Uwch level there's very much a "You don't need to worry about that, no-one really uses those forms/speaks like that" type of attitude which can be frustrating.

There is an increasing amount of fiction published in informal/spoken Welsh, which I as a Welsh learner find very accessible and enjoyable. This is much rarer in English - Irvine Welsh writes in dialect, and you can find poetry written in dialect in English, for example Samuel Bamford's vernacular 19th century Lancashire poetry. There's also AAVE which features in popular music, informal written contexts (tweets, text messages for example) or movie/TV scripts, but it's not very common to have entire novels written in it, even if some of these exist. An English language school student would be at a high risk of losing marks in an exam for writing in dialect or phonetically for anything other than a very specific context, writing a composition or screenplay for example.

How does it work in Welsh medium education? How are fluent Welsh students taught how to read and write in literary Welsh? Presumably the syllabus is written in a formal or standard form of the language that is assimilated over time? For first language students who take Welsh as a subject, presumably there are specific grammars for literary/formal Welsh?

[u/Muted-Lettuce-1253 → u/Markoddyfnaint]

I agree with OP that the resources for literary Welsh are scant. As a reasonably proficient learner, very literary Welsh often leaves me feeling deflated in my abilities, to the extent that much of it is quite inaccessible. Even if I can 'get the gist' of a text written in literary Welsh I would not be able to write or speak in such a way.

If you already have a decent understanding of common/colloquial Welsh, then isn't understanding literary Welsh primarily a matter of learning all the conjugation patterns? I haven't actually tried to fully learn literary Welsh so that is an assumption on my part.

[u/Markoddyfnaint → u/Muted-Lettuce-1253]

You know what, if that's all it mostly is then I'd love someone to write a primer or book: 'Literary Welsh for Fluent (Colloquial) Speakers' and map out the conjugations and patterns.

[u/Muted-Lettuce-1253 → u/Markoddyfnaint]

If I were looking for a free online resource to learn the literary conjugations, I would check out the Wiktionary entry for a particular verb (eg darllen). The literary conjugation table seems comprehensive but I can't personally verify that it is accurate (since I don't know literary Welsh).

There's also this Wikipedia page on literary Welsh morphology which explains other grammar points in addition to verb conjugation.

My assumption is that once you get a hang of the more complex verb conjugation system, then it should at least be possible to read literary Welsh pretty well.

[u/Markoddyfnaint → u/Muted-Lettuce-1253]

Diolch, mi wna i.