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This description – of Gaiman, in the Argentine province of Chubut - comes from Catrin Williams, a Welsh-language teacher who spent a year in Argentina as part of the Welsh Language Project for Patagonia. The project was set up in 1997 by the then Welsh Office (today the National Assembly of Wales) jointly with the British Council to strengthen ties between Wales and the major Welsh-speaking community overseas: of an estimate 750,000 Welsh speakers around the world, 25,000 live in Chubut.
Catrin is a proud native speaker of Welsh. ‘I come from a Welsh-speaking home. I speak Welsh with my family and my friends, and in the school where I used to work. And I can say I’ve been speaking Welsh every day in Gaiman. It is possible to live your life there using only Welsh – still, I picked up some Spanish!’
‘I’ve been giving Welsh lessons in Gaiman and Trelew. In Trelew there’s a bilingual school for 3 to 8-year-olds, and I’ve been giving lessons to 5-year-olds. I really enjoyed working with them – they were having some Spanish lessons as well, but it was mostly Welsh. They speak mostly Spanish at home. The ones who are 8 now are really able to express themselves in Welsh, and it was a pleasure to work with them,’ describes Catrin. ‘At first it was a bit hard to work with my 5-year-olds, but now they try and speak Welsh and it’s possible to have a simple conversation with them in Welsh. We worked mostly with song and stories.’
The Welsh Language Project for Patagonia is in fact a two-way exchange: ‘Teachers from Wales go to Gaiman and Trelew, or Esquel and Trevelin, but many of the Argentines that speak Welsh try for a scholarship to go and study Welsh in Cardiff – at the moment there are five 20-year-olds from Argentina living in Cardiff for two months doing an intensive course. They are all advanced students and they are studying to give Welsh classes in the community when they come back to Argentina,’ says Catrin, who prepared one of those students in Gaiman before their trip.
But is Welsh a heritage language that stays only among Welsh families? ‘I taught some children whose families first descended from Wales, maybe their great grandfather or great-great-grandfather. Generally, the older generation speak fluent Welsh, then there’s a gap. They lost a generation - there was a time when there was less interest in Welsh and Spanish was very strong. Now, that generation (they are about 40 or 50 years old today) are going to Welsh lessons. Their surnames are Davis, Jones, Williams, the same as in Wales, but their first names are mostly Spanish. And there are also people with no connection with Wales wanting to speak Welsh. Because there are so many people in the classes, and the folk dancing, others are intrigued - they enjoy different things from Wales and decide they want to speak the language.’
‘People from Wales think it’s incredible that the Welsh language is still alive in Argentina, 144 years strong. We recently celebrated the fest to commemorate the day they first landed in Patagonia, the disembarking of the 28th of July, and we had a ceremony to remember them, and then we went to the chapel and sang hymns in Welsh and Spanish… The whole experience has been incredible: to see that Welsh is still alive and that there’s actually a bilingual school in Trelew; that they celebrate Welsh things and an eisteddfod. We think that we only get the eisteddfod in Wales, but they do it in Trelew and Gaiman as well,” describes Catrin, who has recently returned to Wales with fond memories of the tightly-knit Patagonian community – herself another link in the cultural chain that binds two cultures so remotely located and yet so close at heart.
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