Cymraeg Byw was promoted with the intention of facilitating thelearning of Welsh particularly among adults, and providing a stable ‘plat-form’ from which they could progress to fluency – and inevitably, as withLiterary Welsh, the loser once again was the native speech of ordinaryWelsh speakers, dismissed by implication as irrelevant. The counter argu-ment, now all the stronger for hindsight, must be that, as with all languages,the aim of the serious learner is competence in the living language; if thatmeans coping with dialect variation, then so be it – it has to be faced sooneror later, and it may as well be sooner.