There’s a tired old trope that some visitors to Wales invoke when they reflect on having walked into a pub or bar: “Immediately,” they say, “everyone started speaking Welsh.” This is taken as an affront, an act of rudeness, exclusion or even aggression. Never is it considered that the Welsh clientele may have been simply speaking their own language in their own country anyway, despite the fact that if you transpose the scenario to most other world nations it ceases to make any sense.
I was thinking about this during the furore about the Brecon Beacons national park reverting to its indigenous name of Bannau Brycheiniog. Note my construction. Welsh is an older language than English; it is the oldest language of these isles.
This decision was reported by many news outlets as a “renaming” – our headline writer even fell into that trap – though the Guardian correspondent Steven Morris correctly reported the park as “dropping its English language name and scrapping its logo of a fiery greenhouse gas-emitting beacon as it launches a plan designed to tackle issues in the park created by the climate and biodiversity emergencies”.
An old name for a new future, as Michael Sheen, splendid in a North Face fleece and a joscyn hat, passionately enunciates during Owen Sheers’ film launching the “rebrand”. My heart stirred, anyway, but then I’m a soft-hearted Welshie who is worried about the climate crisis.
Predictably, the usual parties took the bait, with even No 10 unable to resist the “anti-woke” bear trap that had been set for it. No doubt it felt this was a prime opportunity to court its “old man yelling at cloud” core vote by engaging in another culture war that leaves the Tories looking fragile and out of touch.
“No one could accuse the Tories of being ‘trendy’, in that their whole identity is stuck in a colonial past,” said the language campaigner Ffred Ffransis (Ffred is the Welsh way of spelling Fred, FYI, because otherwise it would be pronounced “Vred”. Knowing at least one Ffred is on the Welsh nash bingo card, right next to “can do an accurate impression of Wil Cwac Cwac” and underneath “knows someone who knows someone who once set fire to a holiday cottage”. This is a joke. I am not advocating arson, merely noting that it happened.)
I digress. There’s nothing that imperialists hate more than Welsh people (or Irish people, or Scottish people) doing Welsh (Irish/Scottish) things in their own country. Throw in concern about the environment and you basically have what amounts to a genius marketing strategy, and right before the coronation of the former “Prince of Wales” as King. Note my use of quotation marks, because the last true Prince of Wales – that’s literally his name – Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, died in 1282.
These sorts of union-flag-waving English jamborees can make even the mildest Welsh person feel a bit queasy. I used to rant and rave, but now that I’m married to an Englishman whose family once owned a holiday cottage in the county I grew up in (before I burned it down! Another joke), I’ve been working on projecting a veneer of unflappable indifference. (Formative experiences of being heckled as a Saes by blue-eyed, dark-haired Welsh girls may have had an impact on his “type”.)
The day of the Queen’s funeral was certainly testing. Friends in Wales had been sending me photos of various tributes, my favourite being the advertising screen outside Big Tesco in Bangor, below which someone had left a solitary bunch of flowers. I’ll be curious to know how many street parties will be happening in Gwynedd on the coronation weekend.
There’s been chat on social media about Wales not being represented on the union flag (or “butcher’s apron” as your dad calls it on the Welsh nash bingo card), and not being properly represented on the new King Charles coins (England has two shields, Wales has none – but we do have a leek!). I can’t get worked up about it (I personally feel the less we have to do with the royal family, the better), but can see why others think it’s a problem. As the journalist Will Hayward notes, more and more young people are identifying themselves as Welsh, not British. Making Wales feel like the “principality” it is so often treated as will probably only enhance the appeal of independence.
As will all the outrage over Bannau Brycheiniog. Those of us who grew up in Eryri, in the shadow of Yr Wyddfa, have already had a taste of that. But do you know what? Though there will always be the idiots who try to scale the summit in flip-flops, who take their dogs off their leads during lambing season, scorch the earth with their campfires and defecate on public footpaths, the vast majority of people who come to national parks in Wales do so because they love the mountains and they love the country, and they want to be kind and treat the local population and language with respect. I can’t see using “the Bannau” being too much of an onus for them to bear, somehow.
As to why the UK can’t be more like New Zealand, and see the use of its indigenous languages as a cultural boon, not to mention a marketing strategy, well … I left my London flat and went to the pub to ask some people, but the minute I walked in, they all started speaking English.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
