Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh [Paperback]

"Unlike most travel narratives, this is not a book about place, but a book about language. Can a language be said to describe a place, a place the language that is spoken there? Is it possible to travel to many different places and arrive, not back home, but in the terra incognita of a new language? And just where might that be?"

A young American woman of German-Hungarian descent comes to Wales, falls for the land and decides to learn the language. Why, why, ask all her friends and acquaintances. This brilliant, witty, wise book is her incontrovertible answer.

She starts, obviously, with the Welsh golfers of Oslo. Thereafter her odyssey takes her through fourteen countries on four continents in search of a language and its consequences. She practices and improves – and forgets – her Welsh with the expat cafe crowd of Paris, the TV correspondents of Brussels, the Gibbon lady of Bangkok, the students of Tokyo and the elderly of Patagonia, among others. Within the space of a week she can be found drinking sake and singing about Rugby and coalminers in Japan and then intoning Welsh Methodist hymns and imbibing mate in the Argentinean desert some six thousand miles away. There are many impediments to her progress – Welsh kitsch, slippage into English, an eisteddfod conducted in Spanish, mutation lessons, unreality endings – but the pull of the language, and its enthusiastic adherents worldwide, bring her on and through, into a sense of home.

Pamela Petro brings a rare flair for language to this stimulating, amusing and moving book about what happens when language meets identity. She flourishes her own 'Welsh' virtues – sociability, musicality, honesty – before us, and the hospitality her reader enjoys at her hands makes for something different, and sheer reading pleasure.

"'Travels in an Old Tongue' is a delightful read – a marvellous mixture of wit, nostalgia, character description and atmosphere-setting. Anyone who is Welsh, or who has connections with Wales, should read it, as should anyone who isn't, or hasn't, but who simply wants to work out what an earth is going on in the minds, hearts, and mouths of those for whom Welsh is the language of heaven."
PROFESSOR DAVID CRYSTAL

Pamela Petro has been educated at Brown, Paris and Harvard Universities; in 1983 she went to the University of Wales at Lampeter for the first time, to do her MA, returning in 1992 for intensive instruction in the Welsh language. She has since taught Welsh and travel writing in the USA. She regularly contributes to the New York Times Travel Section and to Planet, and has compiled a guide to New England. This is her first ‘real’ book. She has, by the way, no Welsh blood.