By Daniel Strogen September 2026
Wales is often presented as a country of song. It is a place of poetry, bards, eisteddfodau and music, from the medieval tradition of the cywydd to Dylan Thomas. These cultural traditions have shaped how Wales is imagined, both at home and internationally. But they do not always feel connected to everyone’s everyday life.
In a recent Guardian report, Liz Puleston-Jones described how a folk-music project in the South Wales Valleys offered her a new way into local history and storytelling. While taking part in Cân y Cymoedd (literally "Song of the Valleys", and presented by Trac Cymru in English as "When Valleys Sing") she discovered the story of Isabel Thomas, a 14-year-old girl who left school in the 1940s and lied about her age so that she could work in a tinplate factory and support her family. Thomas’s story was subsequently turned into a song. Read the Guardian report here.
Cân y Cymoedd is a Trac Cymru project bringing musicians, schools and communities together across Rhondda Cynon Taf and Neath Port Talbot. Through workshops, participants turn local memories, histories and experiences into new folk songs. The project has produced songs in both Welsh and English, and welcomes people regardless of their musical experience or the language they speak. Trac Cymru describes the project here.
Cân y Cymoedd is not primarily a Welsh-language teaching project. Its purpose is not to deliver a lesson in grammar or vocabulary. Instead, it creates opportunities for people to gather, share stories and make something together. In one of the communities involved in the project, a partner organisation described both financial deprivation and a deprivation of opportunities, while also emphasising the area’s existing talent and rich heritage of Welsh music and song.
That raises a broader question about the Welsh language. Learning Welsh is one thing; finding reasons and opportunities to actually use it beyond the classroom is another. Could music help create the conditions in which Welsh becomes something people can continue to use and feel belongs to them?
For many young people, compulsory education may be their main contact with Welsh. School can provide knowledge, qualifications and familiarity with the language, but it cannot guarantee that Welsh will remain part of everyday life once young people leave school.
The transition after school is therefore important. A young person may still understand Welsh, value it or feel attached to it while using it less often. Another may become more confident when they encounter Welsh through friends, work, music or community activities. Music does not necessarily teach people Welsh. But it can create a reason to meet, collaborate and tell stories together. It can make language part of a shared activity rather than something associated only with lessons, examinations or formal institutions.
That does not mean that every participant will begin using Welsh in their daily life. The project is bilingual, and participation in a cultural activity is not the same as becoming a Welsh speaker. But it does raise questions about what makes a language feel relevant, legitimate and socially available after school.
There is also something important about where Cân y Cymoedd is taking place. The project is rooted in communities across Rhondda Cynon Taf and Neath Port Talbot. In short, places with rich histories of work, migration, industry, music and collective life, but where access to organised cultural opportunities has not always been easy.
It would be easy to describe working-class communities only in terms of deprivation or cultural absence. However, as many working-class people know, the culture is already there. What may be missing is not creativity, memory or talent, but the resources and opportunities that allow people to develop, share and be recognised for them.
This also has implications for the Welsh language. For some learners, Welsh can appear distant from the everyday identities associated with the industrial south: formal, institutional or connected to other parts of Wales. That does not necessarily mean that people reject the language. It may mean that they have not often encountered Welsh in settings that feel socially familiar, locally relevant or genuinely theirs.
A project built around local stories offers one way of changing that relationship. It begins with people’s own communities and experiences, rather than asking them to enter an established cultural world on someone else’s terms. The question is not simply whether participants speak Welsh already. It is whether Welsh can become part of the places where people meet, create, remember and express who they are.
Cân y Cymoedd is not the only example of Welsh being carried through music. On Y Llais, S4C’s Welsh-language version of The Voice, Welsh appears in a very different setting: on a national television stage, alongside contemporary performers, familiar talent-show drama and the language of popular entertainment. The programme was discussed as part of the growth and changing inclusivity of Welsh-language music here.
That visibility matters. It challenges the idea that Welsh belongs only in classrooms, chapels, formal ceremonies or discussions about cultural heritage. Y Llais presents Welsh as a language in which people can perform, compete, become known and pursue an ambition. It also gives viewers a programme built around musical styles and personalities that feel contemporary rather than purely traditional.
But visibility is not the same as everyday use. A television programme can make Welsh more noticeable and desirable without creating the friendships, workplaces or communities in which people use it regularly. The significance of Cân y Cymoedd is different. Its scale is smaller, but participants are not simply watching Welsh-language culture; they are taking part in making culture themselves.
The two examples therefore raise different but connected questions. Y Llais asks whether Welsh can occupy the centre of popular culture. Cân y Cymoedd asks whether Welsh can become part of local participation and shared experience. For a language to be sustained, it may need both: visibility on the national stage and opportunities for people to encounter, shape and use it in their own communities.
It would be too simple to say that music creates Welsh speakers. A song, performance or workshop cannot replace the wider conditions that make sustained language use possible. People need opportunities to use Welsh with friends, in workplaces, in education, online and in community life. They also need to feel that their Welsh is welcome, even when it is imperfect, and that speaking it will not make them seem unusual or out of place.
Nor should every reduction in Welsh use after school be understood as a straightforward loss. Someone may speak Welsh less often while still understanding it, valuing it or retaining a sense of connection to the language. Another person may return to Welsh later, when circumstances change or when they encounter new relationships and opportunities. Language use is not always a linear journey from speaker to non-speaker.
What music can do is create one possible bridge. It can make Welsh visible, give people a reason to participate and connect the language to emotion, memory and place. For learners and newer speakers in particular, creative activity may offer a less intimidating way to hear Welsh, experiment with it and encounter other people who are also finding their way into the language.
The important question is therefore not whether music can single-handedly save Welsh. It is whether projects like Cân y Cymoedd can help make Welsh feel relevant, legitimate and usable, and whether those moments of participation can connect to other opportunities beyond the project itself.
Music cannot create Welsh speakers on its own. Sustained use also depends on friendships, workplaces, education, families, online spaces and communities in which Welsh feels welcome and socially possible.
But that does not make projects such as Cân y Cymoedd insignificant. They could help connect language with memory, place, creativity and participation. They may give people a reason to encounter Welsh, hear it in a different setting or begin to see it as something that belongs to them.
For young people leaving compulsory education, those opportunities could matter. Welsh does not simply disappear when school ends, nor does everyone follow the same path. Some people continue using it; others use it less often but retain understanding or affection for the language; some return to it later when new relationships and opportunities emerge.
Perhaps, then, music cannot create Welsh speakers by itself. But it can help create somewhere for Welsh to go, and, just as importantly, somewhere for people to go with Welsh.