How you can take part...
Welsh, like every other
living language, is changing constantly. Children don't speak like their parents, even though
they learned their language from them. How do new patterns and expressions emerge and spread?
The dialects of Welsh are part of its richness, but people today are more likely to hear accents
from another part of the country than they were a century ago, and are more likely to move from one
end of the Wales to the other. Are linguistic differences disappearing as a result? Are we all beginning
to talk more like one another? New people are learning the language too, outside the traditional areas.
Is this having an effect on the language and changing its structure?
These are the sorts of questions we are trying to answer by creating the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects. To do this, we are looking for people who would be willing to spend 15 minutes going through a questionnaire/interview. We'll ask you some general questions (where you have lived, what you do) and then ask you to repeat a list of sentences as you would say them naturally in your everyday language. There are no correct or incorrect answers, and we are not testing anyone's language.
To get an idea of the sort of thing you could expect if you agree to do a questionnaire, click here (MP3 recording in Welsh, 1.2MB).
To see what we do with the interviews and how we use them to track the development of the language, click here.
If you're willing to take part by doing a questionnaire, or by publicising the project to other people, or in any other way, please contact David Willis.