(M)other Tongue

Were I ever to be asked to name my native language, say in a form-filling context, I could only say English. The form’s an entirely functional device. It simplifies matters and that’s what ‘the authorities’ like. Their statisticians are not interested in nuances or caveats of any kind. ‘My’ and ‘native’ and ‘language’ go unexamined. So does the matter of when. I had a native language once. It came in a form of English that entered my ears from the mouths of parents, one of whom (my mother) was a Londoner by birth (but somewhere of Welsh extraction, her maiden name being Hoyles, a very old Welsh name), the other a mix of Scottish birth and Irish origin. I prefer the term ‘mother tongue’ to native language. The mother is the infant whisperer, the original shaper.

Though how far that carries anyone along is an open question, dependent on social circumstances and cultural exposures. Maybe too the distant echoings from the wireless of BBC ‘received pronunciation’ played a part, or indeed of ‘Workers’ Playtime’, while my language acquisition gates were still sufficiently open in the second half of the 1940s. Who can say? Welsh was not spoken in our home. But surely the voices of Welsh neighbours, and in the schoolyard, conditioned my ear beyond doubt, as did hours of daily hymn-singing, much of it in Welsh, in post-war North Wales.

All this meant I was well primed (as PNR readers might know already) to discover the poetry and other writings of Dylan Thomas around and about when I was sixteen. Thomas didn’t speak Welsh. His Welsh-speaking father refused ...