Welsh

Also known as: Cymraeg, An Bhreatnais, Cuimris

Welsh in Wales Mid, United Kingdom.

Bend in the Towy below Coed Alltyberau - geograph.org.uk - 1240589 — Chris Eilbeck — CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons licence

Plan your visit

Typical visit: 1 h–2 h

Welsh is a place of interest in Wales Mid, United Kingdom — drawn from open-data sources for visitor reference. See the linked Wikipedia article for the full description.

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From the Wikipedia article

Welsh (Cymraeg [kəmˈraːiɡ] or y Gymraeg [ə ɡəmˈraːiɡ]) is a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively in Wales by about 18% of the population, by some in England, and in Y Wladfa (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina). Historically, it has also been known in English as British, Cambrian, Cambric and Cymric. The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 gave the Welsh language official status in Wales. Welsh and English are de jure official languages of the Senedd (the Welsh parliament). According to the 2021 census, 538,300 usual residents in Wales aged three or over (17.8% of the population) were able to speak Welsh, while just over a quarter (25.1%) reported having some Welsh language skills. Other surveys have produced higher figures: a survey in 2022–2023 found that 34% of people aged 16 or over could speak Welsh (of whom 18 per cent said they could speak Welsh, and 16 per cent said they had some Welsh speaking ability). In December 2025, other survey data estimated that 844,300 people (27.3%) aged three or over in Wales could speak Welsh. Almost half of all Welsh speakers consider themselves fluent, while 20% are able to speak a fair amount. 56% of Welsh speakers speak the language daily, and 19% speak the language weekly. Since 1951, the number of Welsh speakers living in Wales has gone up, though the percentage of Welsh speakers with respect to the entire population of Wales has decreased every census year, with the exception of the 1991 and the 2001 UK Census. The Welsh Government plans to increase the number of Welsh-language speakers to one million, and to double the daily use of the language, by 2050. Since 1980, the number of children attending Welsh-medium schools has increased, while the number going to Welsh bilingual and dual-medium schools has decreased. Welsh is considered the least endangered Celtic language by UNESCO.

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Background

History

The language of the Welsh developed from the language of Britons. The emergence of Welsh was not instantaneous and clearly identifiable. Instead, the shift occurred over a long period, with some historians claiming that it had happened by as late as the 9th century, with a watershed moment being that proposed by linguist Kenneth H. Jackson, the Battle of Dyrham, a military battle between the West Saxons and the Britons in 577 AD, followed by the Old Welsh period – which is generally considered to stretch from the beginning of the 9th century to sometime during the 12th century. The first Welsh-English dictionary was published in fifteen parts between 1770 and 1794 by John Walters based on…

Description

Welsh-speaking communities persisted well into the modern period across the border in England. Archenfield was still Welsh enough in the time of Elizabeth I for the Bishop of Hereford to be made responsible, together with the four Welsh bishops, for the translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Welsh. Welsh was still commonly spoken there in the first half of the 19th century, and churchwardens' notices were put up in both Welsh and English until about 1860. Alexander John Ellis in the 1880s identified a small part of Shropshire as still then speaking Welsh, with the "Celtic Border" passing from Llanymynech through Oswestry to Chirk. The number of Welsh-speaking people in…

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