IN THE Blue Boar, a pub so local that the landlord is surprised to hear its sign is missing, Roy Thomas picks up a text from his grandson. It contains the word “brechdanau”, meaning sandwiches. A Welsh speaker, Mr Thomas knows the word, but only because he has read it in old books. “I’ll probably text back in English,” he says. “Otherwise I’ll make a mistake.”

Wales’s native language is in decline. Between 2001 and 2011 the proportion of people in the principality who speak it fell from 21% to 19%, with the steepest decline in its rural northern and western heartland (see map). Native Welsh-speakers continue to leave for work, to be replaced, in those beautiful districts, by English retirees. But a new kind of Welsh language is rising, giving hope to some and perplexing others.

Welsh identity is linked to the Welsh language—far more than, say, Scottishness is linked to Gaelic—and the devolved government has done much to promote it. Almost a quarter of primary schoolchildren in Wales are now taught mostly in Welsh, and the proportion is steadily rising. Civil-service and media jobs often require it. As a result, the language is holding on, and sometimes even growing, in traditionally Anglophone south Wales, particularly in and around Cardiff, where politics and the media are clustered.

But the Welsh that can be heard in schools and that is spoken by the sports commentators on the Blue Boar’s small television set is different from the kind that many native speakers grew up with. A standardisation centre at Bangor University has added new words, such as “cyfrifiadur” for computer. Old words that had fallen out of use in many parts, like “brechdanau”, have been revived. Grammar is more English and less complicated.

The new Welsh also sounds different. The second syllable of “tadau” (fathers) now has an a-sound in the north and an e-sound in the south. But in the 16th century it sounded something like the English “die”, and this is the way the new speakers have it. This is also the way the word is read out loud: written Welsh emerged when the Bible was translated in 1588, and preserves the ancient pronunciation.

Not everybody is delighted with the new lingo. “So bloody fake”, mutters the Blue Boar’s landlord at the television, while local comedians like Daniel Glyn mock the clunky phrases on stage: “I can speak English and Welsh, but neither of them proper, bach.” Jonathan Snicker of St John’s College, Oxford, says the change breaks the link between older villagers and the urbane young, who can struggle to understand each other.

But Colin Nosworthy, a spokesman for the Welsh Language Society, points out that the birth of a new dialect is a good sign for a language. “Better a slack Welsh than a slick English,” he says—and many agree. Efforts are being made to spread the new dialect to a belt above Swansea, where Welsh is doing particularly badly. S4C, the Welsh-language broadcaster, is moving from Cardiff to Carmarthen taking Welsh-speakers with it. This year’s Eisteddfod, a cultural festival, is in nearby Llanelli.

There are worse ways of trying to preserve a language, some of which are also being tried in Wales. A planned nuclear power station in Anglesey has run into opposition from people who worry that many of the 6,000 construction jobs would go to non-Welsh speakers, diluting the language. Protests from the same quarters have held up the building of 8,000 homes in Gwynedd. A few awkward phrases from schoolchildren seems like a relatively small price to pay.