Welsh people

Categories: Ethnic groups of Europe | Ethnic groups of the United Kingdom | Wales | Welsh people | Celts

This article is about the Welsh as an ethnic group. For information about residents or nationals of Wales, see demographics of Wales.

The Welsh are a Celtic ethnic group primarily associated with Wales and the Welsh language.

Welsh
{{|{{{3}}}}}}|show1|}}
Total population: About 4.5 million
Significant populations in: Wales:
   2.908 million (2001)

United States:
   1.75 million (2000) 1
Canada:
   28,000  2

Language: Welsh, English
Religion: Christianity, Other, None
Related ethnic groups: Irish, Breton, Scottish, Cornish,Manx

Contents

[edit]

History

Main article: History of Wales

The names that the earliest inhabitants of Wales had for themselves is not recorded.

The tribes the Romans encountered in their time in Britain were known to the Romans as Ordovices, the Demetae, the Silures and the Deceangli: all Celtic tribes which had arrived in Britain from Europe over the preceding centuries. Many people in Wales today regard themselves as Celtic, asserting a link ultimately back to these tribes. When the Roman legions departed Britain around 400, a Romano-British culture remained in the areas the Romans had settled, and the pre-Roman cultures in others.

The people in what is now Wales continued to speak Brythonic languages with additions from Latin, as did other Celts in the other areas of Great Britain. The surviving poem Y Gododdin is in Old Welsh despite the Gododdin (aka Votadini) tribe being based around current lower Scotland and Northumberland, demonstrating the geographical reach of these languages. John Davies places the change from Brythonic to Welsh between 400 and 700.

As the Angles, Saxons and Jutes settled Great Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, the territory of the Celts shrank into the north and west, one of these territories starting to form the basis of Wales as a country. Eventually Offa's Dyke was erected in the mid-eighth century, forming a barrier between two peoples.

The process of coming to think of themselves as Welsh is not clear. There is plenty of evidence of the use of the term Brythoniad (Britons); by contrast, the earliest use of the word Kymry (referring not to the people but to the land—and possibly to northern Britain rather than to present Wales) is found in a poem dated to about 633. Only gradually did Cymru (the land) and Cymry (the people) come to supplant Brython. Although the Welsh language was certainly used at the time, Gwyn A. Williams would argue that in fact even at the time of the erection of Offa's Dyke, the people to its west saw themselves as Roman, citing the number of Latin inscriptions still being made into the eighth century.

The word Cymry derived from Brythonic combrogi, meaning fellow-countrymen (J Davies), and thus Cymru carries a sense of "land of fellow-countrymen", "our country". The name "Wales", however, comes from a Germanic root word meaning "stranger" or "foreigner," and as such is related to the names of several other European regions where Germanic peoples came into contact with non-Germanic cultures, including Wallonia (Belgium), Valais (Switzerland), and Wallachia (Romania), as well as the "-wall" of Cornwall. (In return, the Welsh words for the English people and the English language today mean Saxon.)

There were subsequent further influxes of people into the country. After the Norman Conquest, several Normans encouraged immigration into their new lands; the Landsker line dividing the Pembrokeshire "Englishry" and "Welshry" is still detectable today. The terms Englishry and Welshry are used similarly about Gower.

[edit]

Culture

Main article: Culture of Wales
[edit]

Language

Main article: Welsh language

The traditional language of the Welsh people is the Welsh language (Cymraeg or y Gymraeg), which is a member of the Brythonic branch of Celtic languages. It is spoken natively in parts of Wales, and in the Chubut Valley, a Welsh immigrant colony in the Patagonia region of Argentina. There are also speakers of Welsh throughout the world, most notably in England, Scotland, the United States, and Australia.

The 2001 census found that 20.5 percent of people living in Wales speak Welsh, up from 18.5 percent in 1991). However, the same census shows that 25 percent of residents were born outside Wales. The number of Welsh speakers in other places in Britain is uncertain, but numbers are high in the main cities and there are speakers along the Welsh-English border.

Even among the Welsh speakers, very few people speak only Welsh, with nearly all being bilingual in English. However, a large number of Welsh speakers are more comfortable expressing themselves in Welsh than in English. A speaker's choice of language can vary according to the subject domain (known in linguistics as code-switching).

Thanks to the work of the Mudiad Ysgolion Feithrin (Welsh Nursery Movement), recent census data reveals a reversal in decades of linguistic decline: there are now more Welsh speakers under five years of age than over 60. For many young people in Wales, the acquisition of Welsh is a gateway to better careers and increased cultural opportunity: Wales's third greatest revenue earner is media products and Cardiff boasts a world-class animation industry.

Although Welsh is a minority language, and thus threatened by the dominance of English, support for the language grew during the second half of the 20th century, along with the rise of Welsh nationalism in the form of groups such as the political party Plaid Cymru and Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society). The language is used in the bilingual Welsh Assembly and entered on its records, with English translation. Technically it is not supposed to be used in the British Parliament , but several Speakers (most notably George Thomas, 1st Viscount Tonypandy, himself born in Wales, close by Tonypandy) spoke Welsh in longer English-language speeches.

Welsh as a first language is largely concentrated in the less urban north and west of Wales, principally Gwynedd, Merioneth, Ynys Môn (Anglesey), Carmarthenshire, North Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, and parts of western Glamorgan, although first-language and other fluent speakers can be found throughout Wales. However, Caerdydd (Cardiff) is now home to an urban Welsh speaking elite which dominates the media and government throughout the nation.

Welsh language is an important part of Welsh identity, but not an essential part. Welsh speakers actively distinguish between 'Cymry Cymraeg' (Welsh-speaking Welsh), Cymry-di-Cymraeg (non Welsh speaking Welsh) and Saeson (English). Parts of the culture are however tied to the language - notably the Eisteddfod events, poetry and aspects of folk music and dance.

[edit]

Religion

Main article: Religion in Wales

Most Welsh people of faith are affiliated with the Church in Wales or other Christian denominations such as the Presbyterian Church of Wales or Catholicism, although there is even a Russian Orthodox chapel in the semi-rural town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. In particular, Wales has a long tradition of nonconformism and Methodism. Other religions Welsh people may be affiliated with include Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Sikhism, with most non-Christian Welsh people found in the southern cities of Cardiff, Swansea, and Newport.

The 2001 Census showed that slightly less than 10% of the Welsh population are regular church- or chapel-goers (a slightly smaller proportion than in England or Scotland), although about 70% of the population see themselves as some form of Christian. Judaism is the oldest non-Christian faith established in Wales, with a community recorded in Swansea from around 1730. In August 1911, during a period of public order and industrial disputes, Jewish shops across the South Wales coalfield were targetted by mobs. Consequently the Jewish population of that area, which reached a peak of 4000 - 5000 in 1913, declined with only Cardiff retaining a sizeable Jewish population, of about 2000 in the 2001 Census. The largest non-Christian faith in Wales is Islam, with about 22,000 members in 2001 served by about 40 mosques, following the first mosque established in Cardiff in 1947. A college for training clerics has been established at Llanybydder in west Wales. Islam arrived in Wales in the mid-nineteenth century, and it is thought that Cardiff's Yemeni community is Britain's oldest Muslim community, established when the city was one of the world's largest coal-exporting ports. Hinduism and Buddhism each have about 5000 adherents in Wales, with the rural county of Ceredigion being the centre of Welsh Buddhism. There are about 2000 Sikhs in Wales, with the first purpose-built gurdwara opening in Cardiff in 1989. In 2001 some 7000 people classified themselves as following "other religions" including a reconstructed form of Druidism, which was the pre-Christian religion of Wales (not to be confused with the Druids of the Gorsedd at the National Eisteddfod of Wales). Approximately one sixth of the population, some 500,000 people, profess no religious faith whatsoever.

The sabbatarian temperance movement was also historically strong among the Welsh, the sale of alcohol being prohibited on Sundays in Wales by the Sunday Closing Act of 1881 - the first legislation specifically issued for Wales since the Middle Ages. From the early 1960s, local council areas were permitted to hold referendums every seven years to determine whether they should be "wet" or "dry" on Sundays: most of the industrialised areas in the east and south went "wet" immediately, and by the 1980s the last district, Dwyfor in the northwest, went wet, since when there have been no more Sunday-closing referenda.

[edit]

Symbols

Image:Wales flag large.png
The Welsh flag depicting y Ddraig Goch

The Welsh flag depicts the Welsh dragon (called y Ddraig Goch, "the red dragon"), one of the most widely recognized Welsh national symbols and the national animal of Wales. It appears in the early legends of Merlin, and from them is taken to be the battle standard under which the Pendragons, Uther and Arthur rallied their troops.

Wales also has use of another flag, the flag of Saint David. Although unofficially a national flag it is flown across the country every year to mark Saint David's Day and in 2002 was incorporated into Cardiff City Football Club's logo.

The leek is another national symbol and is worn every year on Saint David's Day. According to legend, St. David (the patron saint of Wales) ordered his troops to identify themselves by wearing the plant on their helmets during a battle against the Saxons. The daffodil is the national flower, symbolizing chivalry and respect in the language of flowers. The Narcissus obvallaris species only grows in the Tenby area of Wales.

[edit]

Welsh emigration

Welsh people have emigrated to many countries, notably the United States (in particular, Pennsylvania) and Canada, but most famously to Patagonia. Malad City, Idaho which began as a Welsh Mormon Settlement, lays claim to having more people of Welsh descent per capita than anywhere outside of Wales itself.[1] Malad's local High School is known as the "Malad Dragons" and flies the Welsh Flag as school colors.

Around 1.75 million Americans report themselves to have Welsh ancestry, [1], as did a further 28,000 in Canada's 2001 census . This compares with 2.9 million people living in Wales (as of the 2001 census). Many English people also have some Welsh ancestry. Note that the American practice of identifying people as "X-Americans" frequently results in self-identifications which would not be recognised in the country of origin. In the Canadian census of 2001, 28,000 people identified themselves as belonging only to the Welsh ethnic group, while an additional 320,000 included Welsh as one of multiple ethnic groups they claimed to belong to.

There is no known evidence which would objectively support the legend that the Mandan were the company of Prince Madog.

[edit]

See also

[edit]

External links

[edit]

References

  • John Davies, A History of Wales, published 1990 by Penguin, ISBN 0-14-014581-8
  • Norman Davies, The Isles, published 1991 by Papermac, ISBN 0-333-69283-7
  • Gwyn A Williams, The Welsh in their History, published 1982 by Croom Helm, ISBN 0-7099-3651-6 (contains the essay later expanded into its own book, When Was Wales?)