North West Wales is a stronghold of the Welsh language, an area where many people still live their lives through the medium of Welsh. Perhaps due to the deserved pride and affection felt for the Welsh language, little attention has been paid to the variety of English spoken in the area.
There has only been one comprehensive study of the English spoken in North West Wales and that was in the 70s and early 80s as part of the Wales-wide Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects. Not only was that over 20 years ago, but it concentrated on older people in rural villages and towns - very different to today's increasingly urbanised and mobile population.
For instance, back in the 70s the word keats was used to mean fleas in Dolgarrog in the Conwy Valley, harry-long-legs was recorded as being used for daddy-long-legs in the area around Bala.
The word tundish was used on the Llŷn Peninsula to mean a funnel for pouring liquid from one vessel to another and if you lived in Betws y Coed you might have golloped your drinks if you were particularly thirsty rather than guzzled them.
When asked the question "What do you do with the dishes after washing and drying them?" many north Walians in the 1970s would answer that they keep them, instead of put them away.
North West Wales is also rich in what linguists call code-switching, the swapping between languages which bilingual speakers perform effortlessly, sometimes even mid-sentence. For example: "Dw i'n mynd i'r hospital." ("I'm going to the hospital"). This is surprising as there is a perfectly good Welsh word for hospital, ysbyty. In fact, ysbyty is a word which non-Welsh speakers know and use: the main hospital in Bangor is known as Ysbyty Gwynedd to both Welsh and English speakers, rather than Gwynedd Hospital.
These are a few of the things we know about how language was and is used in North West Wales, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. The Voices project set out to collect as much information about how language is used today across the British Isles, including North West Wales.
