Walesffact no.6: The Welsh Language

The BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme ran a feature yesterday morning on the oppression felt by literally millions of super-qualified monoglot civil service drones in Wales, who are literally scared of speaking out - except to national radio - against the tyranny that requires them to accept that some people in the service sector ought to be able to deal with Welsh-speaking tax-payers in their own language in their own country.

Or so I gather. I dunno. That time of the morning I'm having my sac shaved by a strumpet in a Glenys Kinnock mask, and can rarely muster the strength to re-tune from Radio 3's weekly rediscovery of Alexander Zemlinsky.

Since then, the bucket next to the mangle that serves as my post box has been full of crayoned requests from concerned No Good Boyo readers, Cymru Rouge cadres and junkmailers asking, to quote them all, "what the ffyc's all this then?"

I have therefore taken some time off mining literary gold to provide this brief primer on the Welsh Language.

Welsh is a language spoken by people in Gwynedd pubs about 15 seconds after someone an Englishman knows once walked in.

Most languages are written in ink. Welsh is written in green paint on road signs and cars belonging to passing morticians from Birmingham.

Welsh has only two genders - masculine and feminine - thereby proving its reactionary nature through this deliberate deprivileging of the hermaphrodite community.

Welsh is the only language that cannot be taught. The traditional means of transmission to non-members of Plaid Cymru is through being "rammed down the throat" and the denial of toilet rights to apocryphal children on Anglesey.

Welsh has no vocabulary to convey complex modern ideas like "engine", "love-grinder" or "tea", and Welsh-speakers from the south use diametrically opposed opposite words to those from the north, and perhaps vice versa. According to a bloke in the Cader Bookshop in Dolgellau who smelled of Deep Heat.

Welsh is an ancient language, having been invented by the BBC in 1928. For many years it was only spoken by the late sister of George Thomas, quondam Secretary of State for Wales, Speaker of the House of Commons and pit-pony, until JRR Tolkien made it the official language of Trollland. Since then computer scientists and the t-shirt community have taken it up.

It was later promoted by a vigorous Luftwaffe bombing campaign during the Second World War, when pacifist native-speakers set fire to heathland around Wrexham in the hope that someone might one day build a holiday home there.

Welsh books are very small, so the language fanatics that make it up as they go along randomly double-up letters like "ll", "dd", "nn" and "ff" to make them look longer.

Being able to speak Welsh is considered a racial characteristic by some Labour Party supporters, which comes as a surprise to the Welsh-speaking Sikh bus-driver on the Dolgellau-Aberystwyth Arriva route.

Speaking Welsh is the only remaining requirement for joining the South African Broederbond.

Irish is less threatening. As is Gaelic, as long as you pronounce it "Gallic". And have it sung by Enya.