Time to decide what a native speaker is.

[metal56]

My father founded the English Congregational Church in the town, but continued to also preach in Welsh churches until a few years ago, when increasing age affected his mobility

Am I right in thinking that your "increasing age" above sounds like a Welshism?

[metal56]

Can we say such as "he's a native speaker, but his usage is not that of a competent speaker"?

[JuanTwoThree]

Dylan Thomas's father was an English teacher at Swansea Grammar though from a Welsh speaking background so you could be right about the Welshisms being from close at hand. You don't hear that much Welsh in Swansea except on market day but it may have been different then. Though given that we've had 30 or 40 years of education in Welsh his childhood might have had less Welsh around than there is now.

But in deepest Cardiff you will hear the same Welshisms from people who have heard a Welsh speaker using English about as often as someone from Birmingham has.

Apparently that double use of the conditional in Northern Spain (It would have been better if I wouldn't have learnt Spanish up here) is a Basque thing but it is used well outside where Basque is spoken or has been spoken for hundreds of years. Similar.

[lolwhites]

Your description could also fit many native-born British people.

Could you give an example? I definitely perceive a difference between my biligual students who grew up in France and "native-born British".

[Anuradha Chepur]

Bilinguals mix their languages, and they can't help it. I once did a project on the language of early bilinguals. They code-mix not only interword, but also intraword. For instance (a Kannada-Telugu bilingual) says a sentence in Kannada, with a few words in Telugu and vice versa. Or, more interestingly, a Kannada root with a Telugu suffix and vice versa.

Code-mixing is also found extensively in adult bilinguals (those who grew up as a monolingual and learnt other languages later on) People here often mix English and Hindi when conversing in their native language.

A monolingual native speaker will naturally be "pure."

[Stephen Jones]

Am I right in thinking that your "increasing age" above sounds like a Welshism?

As I left Wales at the age of eight knowing more French than Welsh (and that only a half-dozen words) I suspect you are wrong.

Google gives over a million hits for the string "increasing age", and the BYU has 53 tokens so if it is a Welshism there must be a lot more Welsh about than figure on the census.

[lolwhites]

Regarding Anuradha Chepur's remarks about English/Hindi mixing, when I taught English in Spain my colleagues and I often dropped Spanish words into our English conversations, and the expats here in France do the same. I've heard "native-born Brits" in France talk about a "*beep*" to mean an informal drink (e.g. "The conference will close with an informal *beep*"), when the word probably wouldn't be used that way in the UK. The thing is that it's not always done consciously.

[metal56]

As I left Wales at the age of eight knowing more French than Welsh (and that only a half-dozen words) I suspect you are wrong.

You wouldn't have to had know any Welsh just to pick up Welshisms?

Google gives over a million hits for the string "increasing age", and the BYU has 53 tokens so if it is a Welshism there must be a lot more Welsh about than figure on the census.

Still, is does sound a bit redundant, doesn't it?

[metal56]

This seems rather to overlook the point that these writers are poets, who are also making a political statement through the use of these forms. When Mr. Agard speaks on a radio broadcast, he does not use the patois of the poems. To say that "Black English" is the patois of some poems may be tantamount to saying that the very idiosyncratic styles of James Joyce, Dylan Thomas or James Kelman are "Celtic English" (in Irish, Welsh and Scots flavours).

http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang ... hisles.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_English

And here you can listen to the man himself:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointer ... asd1.shtml

[metal56]

Dylan Thomas's father was an English teacher at Swansea Grammar though from a Welsh speaking background so you could be right about the Welshisms being from close at hand.

This is interesting:

My father was taught English by Dylan's father. A "severe man in winged collers" was my father's description. He also said that Mr. Thomas, though a Welsh speaker, was anti-Welsh and so was hated by almost all the pupils.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/l ... omas.shtml