Rediscovering my roots…

Good morning everyone,

I hope you’re having a cracking start to the weekend!

Welsh was my first language when I was younger, however, over time, I found that I slowly began to stop speaking it. In today’s blog, we’re going to be taking a look at how I’ve been using the past year or so to delve back into my roots and restart my cultural exploration.

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

When I was growing up, I always used to speak a mixture of Welsh and English to my grandparents, Nana and Cap. As they were fluent speakers, we found that it was very natural for us to switch between the two languages, depending on what we were saying.

While I wasn’t 100% fluent, I found that I could adjust to conversational Welsh pretty quickly and that I never really had to think too much about what I was saying. I suppose a large part of that comes from going out with my grandparents and seeing them speak and adjust how they used the language depending on who it was that they were speaking to.

Last year, I sadly lost Nana and Cap, which I have spoken about very openly here on the page for you all. They were the last two people that I used my Welsh somewhat frequently with, and I found that I was gradually losing my confidence in the language.

I started using Duolingo in May 2023, to help me start practising again and it’s been making a massive difference so far. I do a couple of lessons each day, starting right from the very beginning and have learnt so much along the way.

After speaking to several Welsh speakers over the last year, at Social Media Conference Cymru 2023, as well as a couple of other events that I’ve had the pleasure of attending, I decided that I was going to make my content more bilingual going forward. I’ve been doing this a lot across on my LinkedIn page, however, for some reason, I never carried that over to here for you guys – which is something that I am going to be correcting as of today 🙂

I’m going to incorporate more Welsh into my content, doing so in a way that works for non-speakers too. Being born and raised in the Swansea valleys, as well as working in Wales, I believe it is super important to actively celebrate and promote our heritage and culture.

With all of that being said, I’m on a mission to make my content more bilingual, dych chi eisiau ymuno â mi? If you don’t speak Welsh, that last bit translates to, are you with me? 😄

That’s all for today’s blog, what do you think? How do you celebrate your culture and identity? Would you be interested in seeing more bilingual content here on Sweeney’s Blogs? Do you have any ideas for how I can go about doing this?

I’d love to hear your thoughts ⤵️

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a lovely day!