Connecting with mother through language

This is the Guardian. Welcome to The Guardian Long Read, showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking. For the text version of this and all our long reads, go to theguardian.com forward slash longread. Duolingo falls down. How I learned to speak Welsh with my mother. By Dan Fox. Read by Matt Addis. My maternal grandmother died 20 years ago. The funeral was held in a small Methodist chapel in the lush Conway Valley of North Wales. Her entire life, she had almost reached a hundred, was spent in these hills. The drizzle that morning had slicked the trees and turned the slate of the chapel black. Our family, gathered under umbrellas, entered in order of seniority. Mum, now the family elder, with dad on her arm, Then my six aunts and uncles with their spouses And finally the cousins. The room was austere. Walls, sturdy wooden furniture, a plain cross on the wall. Our families squeezed into box pews in the centre of the chapel. A couple of older men among the crowd reminded me of my grandfather. died decades earlier. Similar thatches of black hair. weathered complexions. History book faces. The funeral was conducted in Welsh. Mums too. I didn't understand a word. I followed the congregation when they stood to sing and sat to pray, and But my grief remained isolated in English, and the music of sniffly noses and creaky pews. Near the end of the service came a hymn. I recognize the melody. Kumranda. So rousing and anthemic that Welsh rugby fans belted out from the terraces before big matches. At the end of each verse the lines repeat. Step higher. and split into harmonies. Everyone knows how these go. Tennis climbing on baritones, sopranos atop altos. At its peak the melody slows dramatically, voices at full power and before making a stately descent to its resolving cord. I knew the tune well enough to hum along. The air seemed to tremble. Small and intimate room. I heard myself embedded in the chorus, but outside the language. In the final soaring bars of the hymn. I looked at my grandmother's little coffin resting in the aisle. and something between a thought and a sensation. I am part of her language. I must not let it go. I called her nine. Nine means grandma. I would have been one or two when I picked it up. A little older, having learned to put my scroll on drawings and Christmas cards, I spelled it with a capital N and believed it was her given name. Tight. Granddad. These were my first Welsh words, and for a long time my only ones. I didn't need more. My grandparents could speak English. And I grew up in the south of England, where almost nobody knew Welsh. Mum, born in the late 1930s in Flan Roost, pretty market town, two miles north of where Nine's funeral was held. had left Wales in the 1960s, shortly after my brothers were born. Moving first to Canada, then back to Britain after the end of a short marriage. In search of work, she landed in Oxford. Where she met my father. who came from an Irish Catholic family in the north of England. They married. Settled in a nearby village and had me. When I was a baby, Mum sang Welsh lullabies. And no. Hen or Hin Bluntbach. Tonight, tonight, little children. Occasionally, Welsh words became family slang. I'm going to the Covley Stera. Meaning conveniences, bathroom. But we always spoke English. Dad, conversant in Italian, French, Latin, Greek, and German, Never picked up much Welsh. I often heard English people dismiss Welsh as a jumble of consonants. A nuisance to tourists, a dyage. I took the insults personally. Feeling protective of Mum and the family, like a guard stationed outside castle walls, loyal to the life inside. Growing up in England with a southern accent, I was different from my Welsh cousins. But I seldom thought about why I couldn't speak their language. The Welsh call their country Cymri. Which derives from an early Britannic word for Compatriots. Welsh? To those who speak it. belongs to the same family of Celtic languages as Cornish and Breton. spoken in the British Isles and Brittany before the arrival of what became English. In fifteen thirty six with the Act of Union. When Wales was brought under English law. Officials sought to restrict the use of Welsh in legal and government affairs. But it remained the vernacular. Several decades later. New translations of the Bible standardise the language in its modern form. The language's decline began during the Industrial Revolution. Which brought English speaking workers to Welsh coal mines as Welsh speaking families moved away in pursuit of a better life. New money and new inequalities fermented civil unrest. In eighteen forty seven Infamous government report on education in Wales blamed the evil effects of the Welsh language for indolence, illiteracy and violence. As a consequence of the report. English was aggressively pushed in schools. Putting Wales on an expansive path of bilingualism. When nine was a girl. Children caught speaking Welsh at her school were made to wear a wooden paddle around their necks. Welsh knot. The last one tagged with the knot at the end of the week was beaten. Welsh was cast as subaltern. impediment to prosperity. English became the tongue of modernity and opportunity. Spread through laws, commerce, Quiet acceptance. By 1911, when nine was two, only 43% of the country spoke Welsh. By Mum's infancy in the late 1930s, that number had sunk to almost 30%. And in the 1960s, when she left the country, it was down to a quarter of the population. Welsh remained was concentrated in the rural north. This was where Nine and Tight lived. When I was small, we travelled to their cottage in the Conway Valley three or four times a year. during the school holidays. I remember interminable hours in the car. The narrow Welsh roads winding like loose shoelaces. Tide was a shepherd. Nine, a mother with all the auxiliary duties of a shepherd's wife. England was barely fifty miles east. but they used English only when necessary or polite. My grandparents' life together was conducted in Welsh. Dinner table On the radio. In the fields. Gossip. For poetry. Welsh was the language at Chapel. Where the Bible was Bable. Their home. Existed out of time. An illustration from a children's book written before TV and plastic toys. Dazzling whitewashed barns, an orchard in the back garden. Each morning Nine would take me with her to feed the chickens and collect eggs. I wasn't much taller than the birds. And I remember finding it pleasing when the colour of the feed bucket matched the blue of Nine's work coat. Tea-time she served wafer-thin slices of fruitcake glossed in butter. called Parabrief. Butter? Bread? Breathing Speckled. I slept under thick Welsh blankets so heavy they pinned me to the bed. Tide died shortly after I learned what to call him. Far too soon for me to print memories of how we spoke to each other. I remember silent images. Watching him asleep on the couch curled on his side. sunlight outlining his body. After his death, nine moved to the coast. In the kitchen, the radio was tuned to Welsh language stations for news and choral music. She always spoke to me in English, but If I behaved well, she'd call me. Hogging Duh Hogan? Boy. Da. Good. Shunky Meal. Swallow a mule if I sulked. If I made a mess, it was Mochin. Which means pig. If she was surprised, she'd exclaim Bah. A Welsh Oive. Which Translatory is Little people. I understood the og. For thank you. Dim deal for no thanks. And I intuited from birthday cards that Kariad Love. Context provided the feeling, if not the definition, of basic words. not have told you how anything was spelled. Whether I was hearing one word or ten. Instead, I heard my family's phrases as micro melodies and ritual refrains. Big round vowels drummed by rolled R's and split syllables that spliced new beats into the middle of words. My aunts and uncles were bilingual. But they had not lived outside Wales. And they carr Welsh rhythms into English. Only Mum's accents was tempered by far away places. by a husband and three boys who did not sound like her. Conversation at Nine's was aerated by interludes of quiet. Filled by the steady tick of the grandfather clock in the living room. Love was strong and unconditional among the family members. yet shaped by a deep emotional privacy that, to outsiders, could seem like an extreme reserve. Disagreements were rare. Without Welsh, my busy imagination filled the pauses with drama. And I'd wonder whether a lull suggested that Something had been said. to use a family euphemism. Is everything okay? I'd ask mum. Only to learn I had overheard a debate about where to take nine for a day out. In these gaps. The Welsh of my childhood became imbricated with the weather. I would sit at the windows and stare at snowflakes forming intricate patterns in concert with Nine's lace curtains. tried to identify the feeling evoked in me by passages of delicate sunshine. a certain quality of light reflecting off the nearby sea. Something like melancholy. I came to associate Welsh with voices close to the ear. in small spaces heated by gas fires. I rarely heard Welsh on TV. Never saw it printed in a newspaper. It was only and always alive in the room with me. I hit seventeen. eighteen and visited Wales less often. Modern art was my new discovery. My compass turned to London. where I believe that over a cappuccino at Bar Italia behind the sooty facade of what was then the Tate Gallery, I might discover the life I longed for. I wanted to make movies imitat films I had read about but never seen. and to go to art school, not learn Welsh. Chunky Meal As nine would say. By my twenties, I had a job as an art critic. In a world with its own minority language. Work took me to New York, where I lived surrounded by immigrants who spoke two languages or four And I was only a monoglot. Americans, I noted, like to index their ancestry. I would explain that my mother was Welsh speaking. And wish I had a phrase to show off. Nobody I met in New York had ever heard it spoken. After Nine died, the memory of her funeral would surface occasionally. By a snatch of music. Stray remark. Returned over time. distilled into an image of the coffin and a fragment of the hymn's refrain tugging at my conscience. The vague sense that I was neglecting something. Something could not be satisfied. Bar a breeze. Heavy Welsh blankets. was inside the Welsh language itself. One day I'll learn it, I told myself. and I will understand the message carried in the memory. I'll start tomorrow. Maybe next week. arrived during my tenth year in New York. Stranding me an oceanway from my parents. They were in their eighties and isolated in their Oxford village. On my last visit, only months earlier, I had watched Mum shuffle old photographs from a wrinkled envelope. Her fingers thick with arthritis. and spread them on the cheerful oil cloth that covered the kitchen table. We often spoke through pictures. There she was at age four, little pixie hat, sandwiched between bigger kids at Sunday school in Slanrust. My goodness, they were rough. she said. Teens, trench coat, hair short, and modern Early twenties posed on the doorstep of the family farmhouse. Now a mother. There were things I knew about that house, but Was cold. Talabraich Ihav. Perched on a remote ridge in the Arari Mountains, Better known in English as Snowdonia. Talabreich means high spur or arm. Ihaf means Apa. Nine of them lived in three bedrooms. The house was lit by oil lamps. They kept food cold in the stream outside. Tide tended his sheep on the slopes, and And sometimes the children would summon him in for meals with blasts from a conch shell. out more stories of Talabreich. We needed more slow afternoons at the kitchen table. Phone calls and emails were too crude. Unable to travel, I wanted another sympathetic magic with which to close the ocean between us. Dissolving into the couch one afternoon during those first months of sourdough and dread, I opened an email from Auntie Gwenda. She had sent the family a YouTube clip showing dozens of shaggy wild goats roaming the deserted streets of Flanditno. on the North Wales coast. Liberated by lockdown, they had ventured into town. Nibbling garden hedges, sitting in parking lots. Tide had driven his sheep to Flandno to graze on these headlands. I had run along the beach below as a boy. When I closed the video. I opened another browser window. With a few swipes of my thumb, I downloaded Duolingo. Selected Welsh. Play the first quiz. Pleasure was immediate. Familiar sounds crystallized into verbs and nouns, as if there were some base material of Welsh already within me. How slow Embarrassingly slow for a writer. I had been to see that mum's language was a portable inheritance. If I learned Welsh, I could take it with me anywhere. Weighed nothing. Yet it held my family and so much else inside. I walked around my apartment repeating fragments of tourist Welsh. Do we done. I am done. Between Bill and Evrognow. I live in New York. Ever now. There was a translation nobody needed, but what a beautiful sound. I thought of mum. I thought of a story she had told me about having to walk for miles along the empty roads between Talabrike and School. She said, she decided to bring a pocket mirror. and hold it in front of her as she walked. So she could see the reverse view. I asked why. For a change of perspective. She said. Thanks for listening to The Guardian Longry. The story continues right after this. Welcome back to the Guardian Long Read. There is a Welsh saying I learned only recently. Kanadl Heb Yais. Canedl Heb Gawang. Nation without language, a nation without heart. For the older generations of my family, it was self-evident. When Mum left Wales in the 1960s, nationalist sentiment that had been growing for decades took new form. It galvanised a direct action movement to save the language to which Welsh identity was tightly bound. Among its pioneers was Saunders Lewis, a founder of the nationalist political party Plied Cummrie, which had been agitating for self-governance in Wales since the 1920s. In nineteen sixty two Lewis, then nearly seventy, gave a landmark radio address titled Tanged Ayai. The fate of the language. He predicted that without drastic action, Welsh would vanish altogether by the twenty first century. And he called on his listeners to to make it impossible for the business of local and central government to continue without using Welsh. In his speech, Lewis slambasted a proposal to construct a new reservoir in North Wales that would transfer water across the English border to Liverpool. The government planned to flood the Trowerin Valley, drowning the entire Welsh-speaking village of Kapel Kellen. Even before Lewis's address, the The project, which many saw as a symbol of English indifference to Welsh culture, had drawn anger and protest. But in nineteen sixty five Plan went forward. Koviuch Drowerin Remember Truarin. graffitied on the wall of a ruin cottage, became the slogan for the darkening mood of Welsh nationalism. past the reservoir in the car as a child. and was haunted by the thought of houses and shops beneath the water's surface. Traces of life floating inside them. Tins of food, toys, family photos. Trawerin stoked long held grievances. By the mid-1960s, acts of resistance had spread across Wales in a push for official recognition of the language. People refused to pay parking tickets or taxes and ignored court summonses if the paperwork was in English. Road signs were painted green or taken down, with demands for bilingual replacements. A new direct action group. Kam Deyta Saryaith Gamrai. The Welsh Language Society organized sit-ins and roadblocks. drawing inspiration from the civil rights and peace movements. Hundreds risked arrest and trial. including my cousin Andres, who was sent to prison with other student members of the organization. As the nineteen seventies wore on, the Activism became violent. The fringes, secessionists turned to bombs and torched English-owned holiday homes. These were grim decades for Wales. Deindustrialization devastated the country in the 1980s. Mines and steelworks closed. Communities were ruined. Even as a child, I sensed the sadness. We'd drive through Mum remembered as thriving towns. Now lined with shuttered storefronts. was a hat shop, she'd say. Over there we went for ice cream. It seem inevitable that the Welsh language would mirror this decline. The 1981 census put the number of Welsh speakers at 18.9%. The next census, a decade later, recorded only a fractional drop. to eighteen point seven per cent. The steep decline of the previous decades had stalled. Changes in law and policy made a difference. Legislation in the late 1980s and early 90s provided a pathway for making Welsh compulsory in schools. and required bilingual road signs and official documents. In nineteen ninety nine The National Assembly for Wales, a bilingual body, was established in Cardiff. Now called Seneth Cumri or Welsh Parliament. It has control over education. Health? Transport and rural affairs. There was a cultural shift, too. Small Welsh literary presses flowered during the activist years of the 1970s and 80s. Young people drove a bilingual music scene. bringing Welsh into contact with punk and other subcultures. An official Welsh radio station. BBC Radio Cymri began broadcasting in 1977. And after extensive campaigns, including a hijacked transmitter and the threat of a hunger strike by one politician, TV station S. Pedwarek launched in 1982. Nine, I remember, liked to watch the soap opera Publicum. of the Valley on the channel. In the twenty first century the Census figures for Welsh language speakers have continued to hover near 18%. Five hundred and thirty eight thousand people in twenty twenty one. But the Welsh government plans to up that to one million by twenty fifty. An optimistic target. Though there are signs of hope. Today, Espedwarec draws big audiences for sports and Welsh noir thrillers. When the Welsh football team qualified for the World Cup in twenty twenty two, The first time in sixty four years, Fans adopted as their anthem a 1980s protest song about Welsh survival. David Yuan's Amma Oheed. Which means still here. twenty twenty five report for the Welsh Language Commissioner. found that young people surveyed overwhelmingly preferred English for social media but felt positive about Welsh and used both languages. school and sometimes at home. The government has pledged more support for Welsh speaking communities. Still. For every boosterish show on BBC Radio Cumri about the music scene in Wales. There are gloomy debates about the country's divided politics. Predictions divined from rising home prices or lagging school exam results that foresee only continued struggle for the language. grew up in the secure empire of English. But at a young age, I was made aware that for some in my family, it was a foreign power. Mum did not begin learning English until she was ten. I had just turned thirteen when my great auntie Kelly who had worked as an activist for Plyde Cummrie in her youth. me to the National Istedvod. An annual festival of Welsh literature and music that dates back to the Middle Ages and is a pillar of cultural tradition. That summer she had tickets to the chairing of the bar. A major ceremony in which the Gorseth A society of writers and musicians Selects the best poem written in the strict Kanhanev meter. I was excited to learn that the Gorshev members, dressed in colored robes, were called Druids. But I was frustrated that I could not understand the poems songs. As we took our seats. Great Auntie Carrie whispered in my ear. Only half joking. Breat a word of English. Mm. Welsh has a reputation for difficulty. A cartoon that sometimes does the rounds on social media shows a man returning a Welsh scrabble set to a store with the complaint that half the vowels are missing. There is a YouTube clip of the stand-up comic Rod Gilbert, an Anglophone Welshman. Describing the fate of his classmates in a 30-person Welsh class. One past? Three failed. 96 dead. Thanks to my mum, in my first weeks on Duolingo, I had no fear of consonant gridlock. Here's the thing. Welsh has more vowels than English. Its alphabet uses twenty-nine letters No J. Okay. Q V X or Z. Instead, it has CH. D? F F M Gm? L. PH? R H. And T H. All treated as separate letters. What are commonly considered consonants in English have open vowel sounds in Welsh. W is often used for Mm. The letter Y can be E. Or uh. CH is like the in Loch. Double D makes a firm v. as in these. One of my favorite Welsh words is smooth. S MW Double D I O Here the W is U. And double D is V. Making it. Smoothio. It means ironing. The hardest sound to make might be the double L. tip of your tongue behind your top front teeth? Hold it there and breathe out. Let the air pass along the sides of your mouth, and let your tongue drop to make a la. It should sound loose and airy. We'll do fine if you can't. Grammar can be a challenge. There is no single word for yes. changes according to tense and context. A variety of mutations can transform M's into Fs and Cs into G's Even the terrifying NGH. None of this was conveyed by Duolingo. I soon realized. Mutations and syntax went unaddressed. A year after the pandemic began, I made my first visit back to Oxford. The oil cloth-covered kitchen table remained the steady heart of our shaken world. One afternoon I sat with Mum and talked. I saw more grey in her hair. But like tides it had remained thick and streaked with black in old age. Conversation meandered. And we often sat in quiet. Watching a neighbor's cat through the window as it prowled the garden. Tried to show off some Welsh. Dwe isha Mindam draw a Nessum line. I said. She frowned. I repeated the phrase With a doubtful upward inflection. I want to go for a walk later. The words were right. My pronunciation confounding. She asked to see Duolingo. Within moments she found errors. When she heard it speak. She gave me a withering look that needed no translation. Delete. I felt like a sucker for putting my faith in an app. As if I had done something disrespectful. Her disdain reminded me that Welsh was ours. I simply needed a new key to the door. Returned to New York resolved to take my lessons seriously. Determination didn't make the task easier. Back in the mid-19th century, the city had a Welsh language newspaper. A dreek. The mirror In 2021, even in a city home to 800 languages, I struggled to find in-person Welsh classes. When I tried the Ame Kumu app. Designed to locate nearby speakers of a given language. closest Welsh speaker was in Philadelphia. I attended a meeting of the New York Welsh. A friendly group that meets regularly at a bar in Midtown. Everyone I met was an Anglophone from South Wales. Friends asked how the Welsh was coming along. Slowly, I'd say, meaning badly. When I told people about Welsh, I was often asked about its utility. As if it were an exercise routine or a life hack. People speak it outside Wales? Was it useful? Yes. gave me access to complex emotional circuits. to say even the simple word ruan. Now conjured people and places. Mum in the living room at home, signing off a phone call to Wales. Cha chao everyone. Bye now. The novelist John Le Carrey once wrote that the decision to learn a language is Of friendship. was this feeling, not functionality that I was looking for. Music helped. On the Internet radio station, NTS, I found the Castliad Cymri, Welsh collection, and went deep into a playlist for the post-punk label Angst. Pick out the odd word. But I was mostly content to let Welsh wash over me as it did in childhood. I liked Griff Reese's gentle psychedelia. He grew up near Nine and Tide's farmhouse and sang in a crisp Welsh that reminded me of people who would pop in to visit Nine. Around this time. I stumbled upon an online trial lesson in Welsh offered by the company Say something in. It's mission. Reverse the language shift in Wales? Through the development of a totally original language learning methodology, had an appealing nurdery. This methodology promised to teach me a sentence in just one week. The approach is simple. The teacher provides a phrase in English. The student repeats it in Welsh. The teacher adds a few words to the phrase. The student follows suit. busy online forum made it easy to ask questions. and provided the sense that the system was run by Welsh teachers, not startup bros. I can still remember the sentence from that first week. Ishut tuski sharadkam Raig achos dwim kari kamri adwi ishuar yfkam raig bar hai. I want to learn to speak Welsh because I love Wales and I want the Welsh language to continue. A mutation of par high, the word Bar high. means to continue. It can also mean to persist. Endure. Survive. For the first twenty five lessons of the course. I did not learn a single number. or how to ask directions to the railway station. I was drilled in meta-statements about learning Welsh, such as I want to speak Welsh with you. And I still need to practice more. The system didn't explain the rules of mutations. It advised internalizing them through practice. As new vocabulary cemented rapidly, The sentences developed into mind-bending strings of social relationships. I met someone in the pub last night who told me that she wants to speak Welsh with you. For instance. Oh I met an old woman in the pub last night who told me that she knows a young man who works with your sister. This felt real. It was how I had first heard Welsh, and Gossip at Auntie Gwenda's house. News in Nine's Kitchen. At home I hammed up the North Wales cadences and Enjoying how the accent rolled from my mouth. I sounded like my family. I began to write emails that began An oil mom Dear Mum. I said Penbloth Hapis on birthdays and Now Dolly Flowen are blowing now with that. Christmas and New Year. Mum and I were on the phone, we'd play tennis with a single phrase. He will va I'd say. Mangling Hoilvauer. An informal goodbye. No. It's Hylvower. Who? Hyle. Well. Hyo. our rally would collapse into laughter. As the eldest, Mom had helped her brothers and sisters learn how to read and write, and Uncle Deli, born with a cleft palate, how to speak. They addressed Mum using the formal he for you, not the informal T, as if she were a parent. In one sense, my exchanges in Welsh with Mum were family history repeating itself. They were also specific to our own relationship. She had never gone to university, but she had bought books and records for my hungry teenage mind. She took me to art exhibitions and to the movies, and wanted to talk afterward about what we had felt. Learning her language was another gentle process of discovery. I would like to say that I have sailed into fluency and that Mum and I recite Kanghanef poem to each other on FaceTime. The truth is more complex. I am not a reliable student of Welsh. Some weeks I dutifully complete my exercises, listen to BBC Radio Cumbrae while I do the smoothie o Then I let a month slip by and have to scramble to catch up. Earworms from the online courses loop through insomniac nights. Understand. There is a paradox to my efforts. I am learning Welsh to speak to my family and make it always alive, in the room with me as it was in childhood. Yet I often shy away from the opportunity to speak. In the presence of my aunties and uncles, and even with mum, the sounds clog in my mouth, and I become suddenly doubtful and halting. I retreat into English. I am so used to being outside their conversations that I find it hard to give myself permission to enter. The same sentence I have repeated so many times in front of my computer goes unsaid. to speak Welsh with you. My parents recently moved to Chester. on the English Welsh border. My brother Mark lives there too. When my wife and I visit, we squeeze into Mark's car for a drive into North Wales. On our last trip, we climbed into Arari. Driving through the landscape of granite, heather, and grass. Mist often shrouds the peaks. Day we had fine weather. The sun pulling delicate shades of yellow and brown from the rocks. Mum brought the isolated farmsteads to life. It used to be Mr. Evans' place, she said. Pointing at a distant house invisible to the rest of us in the car. He would put wooden planz on the back of his truck and drive us to chapel. I used to work in a little coffee hut on the right here. Was my job to fire the flare gun to call mountain rescue if there was an accident. On these drives we pass Flinogwan. The Ribbake at the mouth of the valley in which Talabrich sits. And remark how cold it looks. We talk about how hard it must have been for Tide to work in the harsh mountain weather. Mom finds new details about her childhood And I try to commit them to memory. Who else will remember them when she's gone and my aunties and uncles are no longer around? Today, Talabreich is a vacation home. Maintained by the National Trust Conservation Charity. with a wood burning stove, washer, dryer, and TV. You can rent it for about five hundred pounds for a minimum of three nights. There's a Welsh word. Here I' means something like A longing for a place that may no longer exist. In Wales it's a cliche. But I find it helpful. The message of Nine's funeral stays with me. The language a talisman I carry unseen in New York is And to wherever I might go next. Mom is nine herself now. My niece and nephew live nearby, and both speak Welsh. On my last visit, they came to join us in the kitchen. My nephew wore a t-shirt with a picture of Trevan. The mountain across from Talabreich on it. He told us about his girlfriend who was singing in the Nationalist Edward the following weekend. I listened to Mum and her grandson flow easily between Welsh and English. Couldn't always keep up. Mum speaks faster in her first language than she does in English. Wetwe these way do. Can you say it again a little bit slower? Sometimes I sense she is puzzled that I cannot understand her better. Together we are shaping our own private meaning of learning Welsh. We go through her 1950s Welsh novels, covered in tatty jackets with elegant woodcut designs. Or the Sunday School newsletter where her photograph once ran. From these Mum draws a family story or a scene from mid-century Wales. I ask what the Kamraig is for this or for that. The lesson is in texture. image Music. When I last returned to New York, we said goodbye at the airport. Mum held my hands and said something I couldn't quite understand. It was long, I was crying, I could pick out only fragments. It didn't matter. We were speaking Welsh. Than for listening to The Guardian Longread. That was where Duolingo falls down. How I Learned to Speak Welsh with My Mother by Dan Fox Read by Matt Addis and produced by Nicola Alexandru. The executive producer was Ellie Bury. This article originally appeared in the Yale Review. For more Guardian longreads in text and a selection in audio, go to theguarion.com forward slash longread. This is the Guardian.