Yr Iaith Gymraeg: We need to talk about Conwy

Conwy County Borough is a local authority area located about half way across the coast of North Wales (see right) and is bordered by Denbighshire to the East and Gwynedd to the south and west, and in Gwynedd, Welsh is still spoken natively by a majority of the population.  Together, Gwynedd and Conwy share the Snowdonia National Park (Parc Cenedlaethol Eyiri), known to be a bastion of Welsh culture and home to Wales's most iconic scenery, and which covers about a third of Conwy. One would therefore assume that Conwy was pretty Welsh speaking.  Yet the 2011 Census recorded that only 27.4% of the population could speak Welsh, while the 2013 school census recorded that of Conwy's primary school children over the age of five, only 10.6% spoke Welsh 'fluently at home'.  The figures for each individual primary school, however, give one an idea about how the Welsh Language is doing in different places around the county borough.

They show that of Conwy's 58 primary schools, 13 have a majority of their children over the age of five speaking Welsh 'fluently at home', of which five are above 80%, and of those five, three are above 90%.  The map below shows each of the schools in Conwy colour-coded to show the percentage of children speaking Welsh at home with the greenest colour representing schools above 80% and the gray representing schools below 20%.  Any school that is either green or 'greeny-brown' has a majority of its pupils from Welsh-speaking homes.

It goes without saying that we see a coast-hinterland divide here, with many of the schools on the coast having none of their pupils speaking Welsh at home.  Indeed, I once met someone who described the north coast of Wales as the 'Costa-Del-Scouse.'  When you look at the hinterland however,  what you see is quite bizarre; the strongest Welsh speaking areas are mostly not in the Snowdonia national park area itself, but in the less mountainous countryside to the east of it.  Mountainous areas tend to be very good at conserving languages and cultures which have disappeared elsewhere since they are less accessible to the 'outside world' yet here the countryside that is less mountainous and closer to England has conserved the language better.  Why is that? One word: Migration; English people who move to Wales are more likely to chose the scenic areas, or as already mentioned, the coastal areas; take the now anglicized Snowdonian village of Betws-Y-Coed as an example of the former, there, 43.3% of the population was born outside Wales according to the 2011 Census, and fewer than five of the twenty primary school children there spoke Welsh at home in 2013, while in Cerrigydrudion, only 22.8% of the population was born outside Wales and 85.7% of primary school children speak Welsh at home.  Similarly, in the book For Wales, See England, Martyn Ford, describes how another Snowdonian village, Penmachno, underwent rapid Anglicization starting in the 1970s; in 1971 the percentage of Welsh speakers  there was 84%, but a decade later, such a figure was only 70%, with 37% of houses being holiday homes by 1981.  By 2013, fewer than five of Penmachno's 23 primary school children over the age of 5 spoke Welsh at home.  Nevertheless, as the map shows, there are still some schools in the Snowdonian portion of Conwy where a majority of pupils do still speak Welsh at home, the three being in the villages of Ysbyty Ifan, Capel Garmon and Dolwyddelan, although the overall percentage for the primary schools in the Snowdonian portion of Conwy was only 36.6%.  The fact that a higher percentage of incomers from outside Wales appears to be linked to fewer children speaking Welsh at home suggests that it is not merely retirees moving to rural Wales, as is widely believed; after all, retirees tend not to be of the age group to be raising young children.

Despite the geographical paradox already discussed, the rule that minority languages tend to survive better in rural areas is certainly present in Conwy; although truly welsh speaking towns do exist in Gwynedd and Anglesey, in Conwy everywhere where a majority of children speak Welsh at home is rural.   Llanrwst is the most welsh speaking of Conwy's towns, but even there, only 25.6% of pupils in the town's primary school speak Welsh at home.  Llanrwst is a key example of where the Census can be quite deceptive; the 2011 Census recorded that 61% of the population could speak Welsh, potentially giving one  completely the wrong impression as to the actual state of Welsh in the town.

So how far back would you have to go to find a predominantly Welsh speaking Conwy? Figures for Conwy as a whole don't go back very far, since the area as a unit of local government only came into existence in 1996.    What are available however, are the individual figures for different urban and rural districts, and in particular, the percentages for each age group are available for the 1911 and 1921 censuses (but not after!!.)  So what was the situation then?  Below are the percentages of children aged 3-4 speaking Welsh within each town at the censuses of 1911 and 1921 with every town except for Llanrwst and Betws-y-Coed being located on the 'coastal strip' across the north of Conwy:

Both inland towns had very high percentages of children speaking welsh at home and neither of them saw a decrease at this time and thus they had not yet diverged from their rural surroundings.  The coastal strip, however, was a different story; Llandudno and Colwyn Bay had already ceased to be primarily Welsh speaking by as early as 1911, while the other four seaside towns, although majority Welsh mother tongue at both censuses. all experienced spectacular decreases during the 1910s.   I therefore think it is highly likely that none of the coastal towns would have had a majority of their children still speaking welsh at home by the era of the Second World War. The fate of Welsh in Conwy can therefore be described as having first lost the coastal strip to, it seems, seaside tourism, in the first half of the twentieth century, and then much (but not all) of the scenic and mountainous hinterland in the second half of the twentieth century with the arrival of the motorcar.

Conwy, is thus today an area where only a minority of people are able to speak Welsh overall and where an even smaller minority of children speak it at home.  However, even though it has lower overall percentages than say, Ceredigion, this is more than made up for in my opinion by the fact that genuinely welsh speaking areas genuinely do exist in Conwy.  As for why Conwy is so much less welsh speaking than Gwynedd, and has such a low percentage overall, an obvious factor is the fact that Conwy is simply closer to England, while other factors include the fact that the county has such a sparsely populated hinterland, and a densely populated but incredibly anglicized coastal strip.  The lack of a significant slate industry in the interior meant that the hinterland did not see the growth of the slate mining towns that Gwynedd has, and which provided the interior of that county with urban centres of population which are also heavily Welsh speaking.

Talking of Gwynedd, if you are interested in reading my blog on the status of Welsh there, click here, whilst I have also written blogs on Anglesey and Ceredigion.