Didn’t get a chance to post this over the weekend but the best of luck to Pobl Caerdydd, the new multi-media network for Cardiff’s Welsh-speaking population. From Roy Greenslade in the Guardian:
“A new Welsh language service, PoblCaerdydd, is being launched today in Cardiff to serve the city’s estimated 36,000 Welsh speakers.
The digital news and networking service will be introduced at the annual Tafwyl festival. It has been developed by and for the community with support from Cardiff university’s school of journalism.
Anyone who has a story to tell, news to share or an image to display can contribute content to PoblCaerdydd through a new tool developed by the university and its partner, the psychological creative agency Behaviour.”
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
It should be Pobl Gaerdydd, more tokenism and they can’t even get the grammar right. This is what they call “sgymraeg”.
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I had to look up “sgymraeg” 😉 We have a very similar situation in Irish. In fact there used to be a great blog devoted to it at one stage. I presume there is some grammatical rule why the “c” becomes a “g”?
Why “mere tokenism”?
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Pobl is a femine noun so a following adjecitve or indefinite genitive mutates, essentially the same rule as in Irish IIRC, only different in detail.
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Ah, good to know. So I wonder why no one picked up on this? They have a Twitter account so I might ask their opinion.
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How has Welsh become so popular? What approaches have the Welsh people used? I would love to know their secret and apply it to Ireland!
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Politics, politics, politics! 😉 In Wales the Welsh language became part of the weft and weave of party politics through its championing by Plaid Cymru and then adoption in response by Labour and the Lib-Dems (and even the Tories). When the language was seen as an electoral issue everyone jumped onboard. The same thing happened in Québec with the rise of the PQ and BQ on the back of language politics. In Catalonia the Catalan language was taken up by political parties and again experienced a resurgence. Belgium, with the Flemish parties, same phenomenon.
Unfortunately in Ireland all the parties play the token card when it comes to Irish, even Sinn Féin. No one is truly radical, all are conservative, most are indifferent, some are actively hostile.
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Séamas, did you spot NI21 tweeting as Gaeilge the other day?
Is fearr Gaeilge briste…
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Indeed I did and I meant to post something on it. It is very welcome (though ever-the-cynic I do wonder why?). NI1921 are an interesting grouping. They are half-way between being a “Northern Irish” nationalist party and a regionalist one, in some ways. As their policies and membership become more clear I will examine that later. They certainly match the mood of Slugger O’Toole and other similar media outlets. It is very much a “Northern Ireland” ourselves alone pitch, I might suggest 😉
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I have to correct Marconatrix.
“Pobl Caerdydd” is correct because the second word is a noun being used attributively. cf. “Pobl Cymru”, *not* “Pobl Gymru”. If the word after “pobl” had been an actual adjective, then it would have mutated in the way Marconatrix describes, e.g. “pobl wirion” rather than “pobl gwirion”.
le meas.
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Thanks for the clarification 🙂
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Apparently there has been a major falling out in village cricket after a mostly english speaking team objected to their opponents speaking Welsh.
http://www.carmarthenjournal.co.uk/Cricket-match-abandoned-Welsh-language-row/story-19317229-detail/story.html
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As they would say over yonder, poor show.
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