Yesterday the news was announced that, following the recent decision by its fellow national park authority in North Wales, the one covering a large swathe of south Wales would henceforth be called the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park in English.
There was also a video to accompany the name change.
However, the change has not gone down well, particularly in the rabid right-wing monoglot English press, as shown by the image below from yesterday’s Daily Mail website.
Not forgetting to add all their typical smears, they’re touchy souls at the Mail, aren’t they? Nevertheless, like all good Anglophone monoglots, they cannot even get the pronunciation of Bannau Brycheiniog right. In Brycheiniog, the ch is pronounced as in the Scottish loch, not like an English ck as written in the Mail.
Furthermore a ‘columnist‘ at The Independent also did not want to be excluded from being outraged and mocking the Welsh language, as Nation Cymru reports.
Nor has the change met with universal approval in Wales itself.
To being with, Reach plc’s Cardiff-based Wales Online title adopted a provocative stance with its headline at the top of yesterday’s home page (clickbait for a largely monoglot Anglophone readership not known for voicing its support for either Cymraeg or Cymdeithas yr Iaith? Ed.).
However, the all-Wales whinging trophy has to go to the Welsh Conservatives, those faithful servants of their colonial masters in London SW1, with the charge being headed by their Senedd and Welsh ‘leader‘, one Andrew RT Davies, who planted the Welsh Tories firmly in the Anglophone camp.
This earned him plenty of derision, particularly from his fellow Welsh, of which the following is typical.
If Mr Davies doesn’t like his compatriots using their own language and celebrating their own heritage (the hills were known as the Bannau Brycheiniog long before the monoglots arrived in force), perhaps he ought to relinquish his seat in the Senedd Cymru and find a nice safe Tory constituency in the English Conservative heartlands.
I for one shall look forward to visiting the Bannau Brycheiniog and Eryri (the national park formerly known as Snowdonia. Ed.).