If you can't understand them how on earth do you know they are 'bitching'?
Quite some ego if you think you are remotely interesting enough to be a topic of conversation among a group of strangers.
That's a bit defensive. One doesn't need a big ego to realise that they are not being talked about in a nice way. Body language tends to be a big giveaway for a start.
FWIW.....sometimes you don't need to know the language to know something 'not nice' is going on.
Some years ago when still married we were over in Switzerland doing the usual family visit. My ex-wife wanted to visit a furniture store in the French quarter. We were there in our car so 'brit' registered...pulled on the car park just in front of the glass fronted Reception.
As we walked in the three girls at Reception were all jabbering away in French.....naturally.
We'd been in the store less than 10 mins when my wife suddenly announces, "we are leaving, i don't like anything here". Nothing unusual in that.....she always was fairly impulsive.
As we left i headed for the doors but she made a mad beeline straight over to these girls where she promptly tore into them.....in French (she speaks five languages). I will always remember the look of shock on their faces.
My wife told me when we had arrived at the store, these girls had seen the car, assumed we were both British, and as we walked past, she overheard them making derogatory comments about British.
She gave 'em a lesson they would not forget.
.... and immediately confirmed all their criticisms!
One doesn't need a big ego to realise that they are not being talked about in a nice way.
Body language tends to be a big giveaway.
Likely to be fuelled by paranoia seeing as you think this is what happens in places where there is a bit of diversity in terms of different languages being used.
Nigel Farage made exactly these kind of insinuations regarding hearing people speaking different languages on trains as part of his insidious xenophobic little attacks.
Communities exist where the first language you speak isn't the language they speak. There is nothing sinister or threatening or insulting about it.
Yeah well try imagining if someone told you that the language you speak isn't really the one you use every day, but is merely some kind of degenerate code you use in pubs and cafés to baffle strangers with.
.... and immediately confirmed all their criticisms!
How much does politeness cost?
Nothing.
Rudeness can cost you your business though.
I'd better not tell you what i came up against in Rhosneigr.....you probably know the guy! Mind you, he's probably gone bust by now as it was a good few years ago.
Yeah well try imagining if someone told you that the language you speak isn't really the one you use every day, but is merely some kind of degenerate code you use in pubs and cafés to baffle strangers with.
Likely to be fuelled by paranoia seeing as you think this is what happens in places where there is a bit of diversity in terms of different languages being used.
Nigel Farage made exactly these kind of insinuations regarding hearing people speaking different languages on trains as part of his insidious xenophobic little attacks.
Communities exist where the first language you speak isn't the language they speak. There is nothing sinister or threatening or insulting about it.
Nope not paranoia. That's a bit arrogant isn't it? How do you know I don't already live in an area with a plethora of different languages being spoken?
My original post was describing Welsh people speaking English to each other before reverting to the Welsh language in the presence of an English person. I can tell they're talking about me because of their body language, their use of a few words including 'Sais' and a couple of Welsh swear words I know.
I don't know what the Nigel Farage thing is about to be honest. It's nothing but laziness if you're trying to associate me with him. You can do better, I know you can.
BiB - that is a great pity IMO. You'd think it's be the other way round, and that it would be cool to speak Welsh.
We've got/had two Welsh people at work. One is a guy who is from Anglesey, who can speak absolutely fluent Welsh. He is called upon sometimes to speak to customers in Wales who want to converse in Welsh - and there are quite a few of these. Elwyn has said they can all speak perfectly good English, but just insist on Welsh as they're being bloody minded !!! - don't know how true that is.
The other was a young guy from Cardiff (now left). Got on well with him and we often chatted. I asked him if he could speak Welsh, and he said he could - just about enough to get by on, but he'd only learnt from hearing his parents talk Welsh. He used to try and get out of Welsh lessons at school. I just think that is awful, I really do. I know if I had been brought up in Wales I would be a fluent Welsh speaker. It would have been a goal in life to speak the language of my country, and take a pride in doing so.
Funnily enough in our Cardiff office, I understand there are only two Welsh speakers out of about 140 staff.
.
There probably are some Welsh speakers who do it to be 'bloody minded'. I look at it two ways - if Welsh is your first language, surely it's easier to communicate in that language, isn't it? In my case I wouldn't complain if I couldn't have access to a Welsh speaking member of staff as I consider myself equally fluent in both languages. But if I've been working on something technical or complex in Welsh, it can be pretty difficult to suddenly have to translate everything over the phone.
I don't know what sector you work in, but in cases where there is a statutory obligation to provide a Welsh-language service, I think it's important that people make use of it. We've been conditioned for generations to accept English as the language of officialdom, and although many services are now available bilingually they aren't always given equal status, and often people have to specifically request a service in Welsh. A piece of research comissioned by the defunct Welsh Language Board found that when offered bilingual services, 9/10 Welsh speakers chose the Welsh option. But many people don't want the inconvenience and awkwardness of having to request a service... and that's precisely why service users are under the impression that there is no demand for bilingual services. It's a vicious circle, and I actually admire people who go out of their way to choose the Welsh option. All they are doing is normalising the language and proving demand.
I'm not surprised some of you have had bad experiences with Welsh speakers deliberately excluding you from conversations. They don't much like people like me either. There is a HUGE amount of snobbery in Welsh speaking communities. Take a moment to familiarise yourselves with the 'Crachach': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crachach
These people have undue influence over public life in Wales, especially in political, media and arts circles. They have strong family connections and jobs are handed down from generation to generation, while they move with ease from one section of the arts/media to another, with some well-paid directorships thrown in. Take S4C as an example - until very recently it required a public subsidy of £100 million every year and still made around 100 programmes per month that had fewer than 10,000 viewers, giving it an official BARB rating of zero. In turn, most of these programmes are made by independent production companies headed by veteran Welsh language campaigners from the 1970s.
These 'Crachach' characters usually dislike those of us with Italian/Irish/Devonian heritage, most of us in South Wales have at least one of those in our bloodlines. They also dislike Welsh speakers who have English-sounding names. They are parochial, small-minded, chip-on-the-shoulder snobs.
Snipped your post. While I think it contains too many sweeping generalisations, I do agree that many elements of Welsh life are ruled over by an ton who practise nepotism. But I don't their existence is owing primarily to the fact that they speak Welsh. Any society has it's 'elite' - just look at how many Government members are ex-public school and Oxbridge alumni.
Where I live, the 'Crachach' (particularly within the County Councillors) happen to be a band of middle-class little Englanders. They have a disproportionate ammount of power within the Council, and I'm often quite worried by their ignorant world-view. They can't see beyond the end of their suburban cul-de-sac. They are parochial, small-minded, chip-on-the-shoulder snobs - and not one of them speaks Welsh. They would ban the language tomorrow if they could. The 'ruling elite' are always going to be snobs, and they are always going to perpetuate their power by excluding others, no matter what language they speak.
There are some people in Wales who are quite militant and obsessive about keeping the language alive and attempt to force it on those parts of Wales where the language was never widely spoken. For example I live in a part of Wales where pretty much everyone speaks English as their first language and always have done. You rarely hear anyone speaking Welsh around here unless it's people who've come on the bus up from Bala and places like that.
I object to everything having to be bilingual. Whenever you get any kind of official documentation in the post, whether it be from the NHS, the local authority, the DVLA, the police etc you have to receive it in both English AND Welsh, so you'll get two lots of letters, leaflets etc. It's ridiculous and a waste of money and resources IMO, money that could be better spend on improving public services, which already lag behind those in England.
But you can't say anything about it because the Welsh language lobby, and they are in the minority BTW, are very vocal and carry a lot of clout in Wales.
I've had the same argument with my Mum. Ceasing to print bilingual signs / pamphlets would not lead to an improvement in other services. Marketing is in a separate cost heading to patient care, and even if a hospital saved thousands on translation, that wouldn't really benefit patients - it would just be swallowed up by some other administration expense. It wouldn't employ more doctors or nurses or cut waiting times.
It's a myth that doing things monolingually would save huge sums of public money. I received a letter from my county council regarding voter registration. It was franked as second class, and yes, it contained a letter in both English and Welsh. The cost of hiring / employing a translator to translate this one letter, I estimate was about £25. (500 words at £50 per thousand, the current going rate). Assume it had been sent out to at least 10,000 other people - 0.0025 pence for my letter. The extra sheet of paper didn't increase the cost of the postage, so really, all this cost was the price of an extra sheet of printed paper. Even larger documents don't mean a huge increase in cost, because economies of scale make it cheaper to product larger documents in larger quantities.
And I talk so much about marketing and admin, because in many public sector departments that is as far as 'bilingualism' goes. Token signs and paperwork. Very little money has been invested in developing services, where staff can actually offer a bilingual choice. You might be able to complete an enquiry form in Welsh, but any response you receive will usually be in English only. That's what I find ridiculous; but not as stupid as the idea that the Welsh language is a huge drain on public resources. It's a convenient category to demonise.
The financial wastage going on within the public sector is HUGE. The Chairman of my local health board (yours too, I think Vodka) resigned - and she got a £200,000 pay-off! Protected pay, sinecures, budget over-spends, food and resource wastage - compared to how much money is being frittered away by bad budgeting, translation costs become a drop in the ocean.
Hmm. There are very very few places in Wales where Welsh was never spoken widely. Even the most anglicised of places today (e.g Radnorshire and the Vale of Glamorgan) were heavily Welsh speaking as late as the 19th century.
Basically if the names of the villages towns and farms around where you live are predominantly Welsh then you can be pretty sure that Welsh was the original language of the inhabitants.
The reality of having two languages of equal status (as conferred by the Welsh Language Act) is that official things will be bilingual. However I agree that there should be a central database whereby people indicate their language preference. NHS, councils, DVLA could have access and send only one document. Fairly easy to set up I'd have thought.
There must be the option of correspondence in Welsh though, otherwise, by implication, the organisation would be diminishing the status of one of the languages, and as I said they are meant to be equal.
Agree with all of this post.
Looking back at my family's census entries, you only have to go back as far as 1911 to see that they were all Welsh speakers. And they lived in Rhyl town centre. Go back to 1901, and none of my family even spoke English - and this was just down the road, in Prestatyn and Dyserth. And their neighbours were the same.
You'd be hard-pressed to imagine an all-Welsh speaking Rhyl today, but for hundreds of years that was the case with the north east. Communities were largely Welsh-speaking (you only have to compare the number of chapels with churches to see that) and it's only really the industrial revolution and the 'retiree boom' which changed that. The 'natives' are usually Welsh speakers, and the reason the area has become so Anglicised is because of English people moving into the area. (50% of Flintshire's population were born outside of Wales).
I have no problem with people moving into the area, just so long as they adhere to the 'when in Rome' rule. Sadly, they don't and seem to expect that just because they choose to live their life in English, everybody else should do likewise. Speaking Welsh means I'm choosing to continue the language my family has spoken for hundreds and hundreds of years, and I take offence at anyone who tries to prevent me from doing that.
That's a bit defensive. One doesn't need a big ego to realise that they are not being talked about in a nice way. Body language tends to be a big giveaway for a start.
I'm Welsh.
I used to live in London.
I'd go into my usual newsagent and the Asian man would start talking to his son in some Asian language.
It never bothered me in the slightest.
I had no idea what he was jabbering about, but I was never paranoid enough to think "is he saying 'look at the big fat cow, what does she want now?' ".
I object to everything having to be bilingual. Whenever you get any kind of official documentation in the post, whether it be from the NHS, the local authority, the DVLA, the police etc you have to receive it in both English AND Welsh, so you'll get two lots of letters, leaflets etc. It's ridiculous and a waste of money and resources IMO, money that could be better spend on improving public services, which already lag behind those in England.
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Only 2? you're lucky, whenever I get any official communication it is in 14 different languages from Urdu to Polish.
I have no problem with people moving into the area, just so long as they adhere to the 'when in Rome' rule. Sadly, they don't and seem to expect that just because they choose to live their life in English, everybody else should do likewise. Speaking Welsh means I'm choosing to continue the language my family has spoken for hundreds and hundreds of years, and I take offence at anyone who tries to prevent me from doing that.
Do people really move to Wales and expect everyone to "live their life in English"? If so, surely they must be in the minority?!
I can't imagine why anyone who had a problem with the Welsh language would move there!
I'm a monoglot English speaker and find other languages fascinating. I know if I moved to Wales, I'd try to learn Welsh rather than get narky about Welsh speakers. But then I did well in French at school and still remember a lot of it, so I suppose some people just naturally have more of an interest in it.
I like how the signs are in two languages in Wales. I do try to pronounce the Welsh, with very little success I suspect. I like how they minimise space on signs, e.g. when I went to Powis Castle last year, instead of the signs saying "Powis Castle, Castell Powis" they said "Castell Powis Castle".
Back in the 70's I read an article in the South Wales Evening Post about two backpacker students who travelled across Europe and even into Arabic speaking countries.
They claimed that, whenever they hit a language barrier, they often had success by using Welsh - not whole conversations but keywords.
Back in the 70's I read an article in the South Wales Evening Post about two backpacker students who travelled across Europe and even into Arabic speaking countries.
They claimed that, whenever they hit a language barrier, they often had success by using Welsh - not whole conversations but keywords.
Welsh and Arabic have some surprisingly similar sounding phrases, "good health" for example.
I'm Welsh.
I used to live in London.
I'd go into my usual newsagent and the Asian man would start talking to his son in some Asian language.
It never bothered me in the slightest.
I had no idea what he was jabbering about, but I was never paranoid enough to think "is he saying 'look at the big fat cow, what does she want now?' ".
It's obvious when someone is not talking about you in a nice way. My original post was describing Welsh people speaking English to each other before reverting to the Welsh language in the presence of an English person. I can tell they're talking about me because of their body language and their use of a few words including 'Sais' and a couple of Welsh swear words I know.
Of course, feel free to overlook this and hysterically shout paranoia, xenophobia or whatever...
I visited Camborne and the street name signs had the Cornish translation under the English name.
Interesting to see that 'road' in Cornish is 'ffordh'.
The reason I know any Welsh is that my mother was Cornish, and she knew some of the language - her parents spoke it quite a lot, and her grandparents spoke it fluently.
When I was a boy, we went to Wales on holiday and my mum (who wasn't well-travelled) was struck by the similarity of the language. Philology and etymology are interests of mine; one thing led to another and we ended up studying Welsh as there weren't any books on Cornish at the time.
It's obvious when someone is not talking about you in a nice way. My original post was describing Welsh people speaking English to each other before reverting to the Welsh language in the presence of an English person. I can tell they're talking about me because of their body language and their use of a few words including 'Sais' and a couple of Welsh swear words I know.
Of course, feel free to overlook this and hysterically shout paranoia, xenophobia or whatever...
How do you know they were speaking English before you were in their presence?
Do people really move to Wales and expect everyone to "live their life in English"? If so, surely they must be in the minority?!
I can't imagine why anyone who had a problem with the Welsh language would move there!
I'm a monoglot English speaker and find other languages fascinating. I know if I moved to Wales, I'd try to learn Welsh rather than get narky about Welsh speakers. But then I did well in French at school and still remember a lot of it, so I suppose some people just naturally have more of an interest in it.
I like how the signs are in two languages in Wales. I do try to pronounce the Welsh, with very little success I suspect. I like how they minimise space on signs, e.g. when I went to Powis Castle last year, instead of the signs saying "Powis Castle, Castell Powis" they said "Castell Powis Castle".
They are in a minority, but sadly, a rather vocal minority. And I have to count some of my own relatives amongst them. Welsh has no relevance in their lives, so they can't understand how it could possibly be important to anyone else.
There are examples of it on this thread... Billy One Ball trotting out the old lie that 'as soon as an English person enters the room they all start speaking Welsh'. In effect, the only way to avoid offending him and his ilk would be for people to stop having any private conversations at all in Welsh!
If somebody is paranoid enough to object to a private conversation, on the grounds that I may or may not be gossiping about them, I'd tell them to get stuffed. I hear Polish, Lithuanian, Urdu and dozens of other languages and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. And so what if someone in the Polish shop is talking about me? They have the right to have an opinion. But yes, there are those Nigel Farage types who would have everybody speaking English all the time, so that no one is ever made to feel 'uncomfortable' or excluded.
And then there are those types who might not have any objection to people speaking Welsh amongst themselves - but see it as a colossal waste of money. The sort (again, examples on this thread!) who would rather save a few pounds and have everything in one language. Fine, but if I have to chose one language for offical correspondence, I'd select Welsh. After all, it was here long, long before English was.
There are people who begrudge the language its very existence, and sadly, because of my work, I encounter quite a few of them. If you have time and experience enough to talk to them, you can usually get to the bottom of their antipathy. It's usually down to fear of being exposed as a failure - they failed Welsh at school and present a hostile face to avoid revealing a lack of skills; or they are failing to meet the obligations of their Welsh Language Policy / Scheme and so would rather just pretend the obligation didn't exist. Making Welsh speakers out to be unreasonable / demanding is a way of disguising their own weaknesses.
It's interesting to me how a lot of people who claim that the Welsh are unfriendly, hostile or extremist, are in my experience, very defensive themselves. In a professional context, I find it's usually with good reason.
Comments
That's a bit defensive. One doesn't need a big ego to realise that they are not being talked about in a nice way. Body language tends to be a big giveaway for a start.
.... and immediately confirmed all their criticisms!
Likely to be fuelled by paranoia seeing as you think this is what happens in places where there is a bit of diversity in terms of different languages being used.
Nigel Farage made exactly these kind of insinuations regarding hearing people speaking different languages on trains as part of his insidious xenophobic little attacks.
Communities exist where the first language you speak isn't the language they speak. There is nothing sinister or threatening or insulting about it.
Yeah well try imagining if someone told you that the language you speak isn't really the one you use every day, but is merely some kind of degenerate code you use in pubs and cafés to baffle strangers with.
Nothing.
Rudeness can cost you your business though.
I'd better not tell you what i came up against in Rhosneigr.....you probably know the guy! Mind you, he's probably gone bust by now as it was a good few years ago.
Nope not paranoia. That's a bit arrogant isn't it? How do you know I don't already live in an area with a plethora of different languages being spoken?
My original post was describing Welsh people speaking English to each other before reverting to the Welsh language in the presence of an English person. I can tell they're talking about me because of their body language, their use of a few words including 'Sais' and a couple of Welsh swear words I know.
I don't know what the Nigel Farage thing is about to be honest. It's nothing but laziness if you're trying to associate me with him. You can do better, I know you can.
There probably are some Welsh speakers who do it to be 'bloody minded'. I look at it two ways - if Welsh is your first language, surely it's easier to communicate in that language, isn't it? In my case I wouldn't complain if I couldn't have access to a Welsh speaking member of staff as I consider myself equally fluent in both languages. But if I've been working on something technical or complex in Welsh, it can be pretty difficult to suddenly have to translate everything over the phone.
I don't know what sector you work in, but in cases where there is a statutory obligation to provide a Welsh-language service, I think it's important that people make use of it. We've been conditioned for generations to accept English as the language of officialdom, and although many services are now available bilingually they aren't always given equal status, and often people have to specifically request a service in Welsh. A piece of research comissioned by the defunct Welsh Language Board found that when offered bilingual services, 9/10 Welsh speakers chose the Welsh option. But many people don't want the inconvenience and awkwardness of having to request a service... and that's precisely why service users are under the impression that there is no demand for bilingual services. It's a vicious circle, and I actually admire people who go out of their way to choose the Welsh option. All they are doing is normalising the language and proving demand.
Never. In the same way that no one in England never says 'Tally Ho, old Chap.'
Snipped your post. While I think it contains too many sweeping generalisations, I do agree that many elements of Welsh life are ruled over by an ton who practise nepotism. But I don't their existence is owing primarily to the fact that they speak Welsh. Any society has it's 'elite' - just look at how many Government members are ex-public school and Oxbridge alumni.
Where I live, the 'Crachach' (particularly within the County Councillors) happen to be a band of middle-class little Englanders. They have a disproportionate ammount of power within the Council, and I'm often quite worried by their ignorant world-view. They can't see beyond the end of their suburban cul-de-sac. They are parochial, small-minded, chip-on-the-shoulder snobs - and not one of them speaks Welsh. They would ban the language tomorrow if they could. The 'ruling elite' are always going to be snobs, and they are always going to perpetuate their power by excluding others, no matter what language they speak.
I've had the same argument with my Mum. Ceasing to print bilingual signs / pamphlets would not lead to an improvement in other services. Marketing is in a separate cost heading to patient care, and even if a hospital saved thousands on translation, that wouldn't really benefit patients - it would just be swallowed up by some other administration expense. It wouldn't employ more doctors or nurses or cut waiting times.
It's a myth that doing things monolingually would save huge sums of public money. I received a letter from my county council regarding voter registration. It was franked as second class, and yes, it contained a letter in both English and Welsh. The cost of hiring / employing a translator to translate this one letter, I estimate was about £25. (500 words at £50 per thousand, the current going rate). Assume it had been sent out to at least 10,000 other people - 0.0025 pence for my letter. The extra sheet of paper didn't increase the cost of the postage, so really, all this cost was the price of an extra sheet of printed paper. Even larger documents don't mean a huge increase in cost, because economies of scale make it cheaper to product larger documents in larger quantities.
And I talk so much about marketing and admin, because in many public sector departments that is as far as 'bilingualism' goes. Token signs and paperwork. Very little money has been invested in developing services, where staff can actually offer a bilingual choice. You might be able to complete an enquiry form in Welsh, but any response you receive will usually be in English only. That's what I find ridiculous; but not as stupid as the idea that the Welsh language is a huge drain on public resources. It's a convenient category to demonise.
The financial wastage going on within the public sector is HUGE. The Chairman of my local health board (yours too, I think Vodka) resigned - and she got a £200,000 pay-off! Protected pay, sinecures, budget over-spends, food and resource wastage - compared to how much money is being frittered away by bad budgeting, translation costs become a drop in the ocean.
Agree with all of this post.
Looking back at my family's census entries, you only have to go back as far as 1911 to see that they were all Welsh speakers. And they lived in Rhyl town centre. Go back to 1901, and none of my family even spoke English - and this was just down the road, in Prestatyn and Dyserth. And their neighbours were the same.
You'd be hard-pressed to imagine an all-Welsh speaking Rhyl today, but for hundreds of years that was the case with the north east. Communities were largely Welsh-speaking (you only have to compare the number of chapels with churches to see that) and it's only really the industrial revolution and the 'retiree boom' which changed that. The 'natives' are usually Welsh speakers, and the reason the area has become so Anglicised is because of English people moving into the area. (50% of Flintshire's population were born outside of Wales).
I have no problem with people moving into the area, just so long as they adhere to the 'when in Rome' rule. Sadly, they don't and seem to expect that just because they choose to live their life in English, everybody else should do likewise. Speaking Welsh means I'm choosing to continue the language my family has spoken for hundreds and hundreds of years, and I take offence at anyone who tries to prevent me from doing that.
I'm Welsh.
I used to live in London.
I'd go into my usual newsagent and the Asian man would start talking to his son in some Asian language.
It never bothered me in the slightest.
I had no idea what he was jabbering about, but I was never paranoid enough to think "is he saying 'look at the big fat cow, what does she want now?' ".
Only 2? you're lucky, whenever I get any official communication it is in 14 different languages from Urdu to Polish.
Interesting to see that 'road' in Cornish is 'ffordh'.
Do people really move to Wales and expect everyone to "live their life in English"? If so, surely they must be in the minority?!
I can't imagine why anyone who had a problem with the Welsh language would move there!
I'm a monoglot English speaker and find other languages fascinating. I know if I moved to Wales, I'd try to learn Welsh rather than get narky about Welsh speakers. But then I did well in French at school and still remember a lot of it, so I suppose some people just naturally have more of an interest in it.
I like how the signs are in two languages in Wales. I do try to pronounce the Welsh, with very little success I suspect.
They claimed that, whenever they hit a language barrier, they often had success by using Welsh - not whole conversations but keywords.
Welsh and Arabic have some surprisingly similar sounding phrases, "good health" for example.
The same as Welsh, Cornish is similar to Welsh, as is Bretton in Brittany, all Celtic languages.
It's obvious when someone is not talking about you in a nice way. My original post was describing Welsh people speaking English to each other before reverting to the Welsh language in the presence of an English person. I can tell they're talking about me because of their body language and their use of a few words including 'Sais' and a couple of Welsh swear words I know.
Of course, feel free to overlook this and hysterically shout paranoia, xenophobia or whatever...
When I was a boy, we went to Wales on holiday and my mum (who wasn't well-travelled) was struck by the similarity of the language. Philology and etymology are interests of mine; one thing led to another and we ended up studying Welsh as there weren't any books on Cornish at the time.
How do you know they were speaking English before you were in their presence?
Is that a trick question? I heard them...
Maybe Wales isn't for you then.
Perhaps you should try Paris.
They are in a minority, but sadly, a rather vocal minority. And I have to count some of my own relatives amongst them. Welsh has no relevance in their lives, so they can't understand how it could possibly be important to anyone else.
There are examples of it on this thread... Billy One Ball trotting out the old lie that 'as soon as an English person enters the room they all start speaking Welsh'. In effect, the only way to avoid offending him and his ilk would be for people to stop having any private conversations at all in Welsh!
If somebody is paranoid enough to object to a private conversation, on the grounds that I may or may not be gossiping about them, I'd tell them to get stuffed. I hear Polish, Lithuanian, Urdu and dozens of other languages and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. And so what if someone in the Polish shop is talking about me? They have the right to have an opinion. But yes, there are those Nigel Farage types who would have everybody speaking English all the time, so that no one is ever made to feel 'uncomfortable' or excluded.
And then there are those types who might not have any objection to people speaking Welsh amongst themselves - but see it as a colossal waste of money. The sort (again, examples on this thread!) who would rather save a few pounds and have everything in one language. Fine, but if I have to chose one language for offical correspondence, I'd select Welsh. After all, it was here long, long before English was.
There are people who begrudge the language its very existence, and sadly, because of my work, I encounter quite a few of them. If you have time and experience enough to talk to them, you can usually get to the bottom of their antipathy. It's usually down to fear of being exposed as a failure - they failed Welsh at school and present a hostile face to avoid revealing a lack of skills; or they are failing to meet the obligations of their Welsh Language Policy / Scheme and so would rather just pretend the obligation didn't exist. Making Welsh speakers out to be unreasonable / demanding is a way of disguising their own weaknesses.
It's interesting to me how a lot of people who claim that the Welsh are unfriendly, hostile or extremist, are in my experience, very defensive themselves. In a professional context, I find it's usually with good reason.
That's Mr Billy One Ball to you.