One of the curious pleasures for an amateur linguist is to live (like the majority of the world's peoples) in a bilingual community. In the part of Wales in which I live there is a long and rich tradition of completely mixing the two languages - here (with a blunt language warning) is a sentence I actually heard last night in The Black Lion on Cardigan High Street:

“Well, apparently aeth e lan i’r Wine Bar a cafodd two shades of shit ciccio mas o ‘i, see?”

aeth e lan i'r renders as he went up to the, and ciccio mas o 'i is "kicked out of him"... the conclusion with see? is use of an English lexical item in a characteristic Welsh tag.


After spluttering in my beer, I fell to wondering: does anyone else live in a community where this sort of language mix and match is observable?