While Wales were playing in the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar, the Welsh-language song Yma o hyd by Dafydd Iwan aroused a great deal of admiring attention. It has a wonderful melody and it was very moving to hear it ringing out from the “red wall” of massed red-shirted Wales supporters, who sing it with a passion and a degree of musicality totally beyond the reach of the fans of most other nations.
The title is best translated into English as “[we are] still here”. The message is that, in spite of all the attacks their land has been subjected to, and in spite of all the attempts which have been made over the centuries to suppress their culture, the Welsh people are still here, and so is the Welsh language.
And it really is very legitimate and relevant for Welsh speakers today to claim that “we are still here”. As readers of this column know, the Brittonic Celtic language which eventually became Welsh (and Cornish) first arrived in Britain at least 3,000, and quite possibly even 4,000 years ago. In contrast, the other major indigenous British languages, English and Scottish Gaelic, are
relative newcomers, having been here no longer than 1,600 years, both of
them having arrived at about the same time. But the Welsh are not just still
here – they have been here for an extremely long time.
The Welsh language is specifically mentioned in the song. Er gwaetha ’rhen Fagi a’i chriw/Byddwn yma hyd ddiwedd amser/A bydd yr iaith Gymraeg yn fyw! translates as “Despite old Maggie and her crew, we’ll be here until the end of time, and the Welsh language will live!”
The song then goes on: Chwythed y gwynt o’r Dwyrain – “Let the wind blow from the east”. The point here is that it was from the east, across the North Sea, that the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxon tribes first arrived, bringing with them the language which was gradually to replace Welsh over much of Britain, for it is instructive to recall that there really was a time when the whole of Britain spoke the language ancestral to Welsh.
When I was growing up in Norfolk, in the far east of this island, we were
taught at school about our local warrior-queen, Boudicca, who fought bravely against the Roman invaders. But no one ever told us that our East
Anglian heroine was not English and that it would make more sense to regard her as having been Welsh.
The song Yma o hyd has also itself contributed to Welsh still “being here”. When the song was first performed in the 1980s, it helped to inspire a resurgence in support for Welsh- language education. And the enthusiasm about the language which it helped to generate played a big part in getting the UK Welsh Language Act passed, in 1993. This gave the Welsh language official equality with English in Wales, finally cancelling out the consequences of the Tudor monarchy’s 16th-century language acts which had decreed that English was to be the only language of public administration in the country.
As those thousands of Welsh football supporters were happy to remind us so melodiously, in spite of centuries of opposition and antagonism, after 4,000 years our oldest British language is indeed “still here”.
FAGI
“Maggie” in Yma o Hyd refers to Thatcher’s role in the miners’ strike of 1984-5, with “Fagi” (pronounced Vaggi) illustrating the linguistic phenomenon of word-initial consonant mutations – in this case a change from m to f – which are used grammatically in the Celtic languages.
