There are! Not many, but public facing bodies in Wales have started doing it.

So, for the most part, it is possible to just use any old font designed for English. Welsh has three main differences that pose a greater or lesser amount of difficulty for an English font, to whit:

We do not use the letters K, Q, V, X, or Z. (We didn't used to have J either but we nicked it and we're not giving it back.) Not a problem, those are just extraneous.

We have extra letters, all of which once upon a time had their own glyphs; but, the printing press meant these were lost. Instead, they're now what we call diglyphs - a letter seemingly represented by two letters. These are Ch, Dd, Ff, Ng, Ll, Ph, Rh, and Th. Not a serious problem, but word processors do count these as separate letters rather than diglyphs, so context-sensitive.

The to bach - in English, the circumflex. When Welsh needs to differentiate between long and short vowels, it uses a circumflex over the long ones: â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, and ŷ. This one is frequently a problem, particularly for ŵ and ŷ.

So, for the most part, you can get by with standard fonts, with the caveat that the circumflexes can be tricky. But:

In 2017, the Welsh Government commissioned a Welsh-specific set of typefaces, and the result was a trio of fonts called Cymru Wales Sans, Cymru Wales Serif, and Cymru Wales Transport. They are super cool and they turn the diglyphs into single letters, among other things. Transport for Wales use the latter in all official signage now:

And then as of 2023, Museum of Wales created a font called Amgueddfa Headline Cymru for its new logo that's Welsh only and uses the diglyphs properly:

I was in the Waterfront Museum today, and they've put up some official Nadolig Llawen signs for Christmas. Those are in the same font, and the Ll in llawen has been diglyphed up into a single stacked letter for it too.

So Amgueddfa Cymru is the umbrella super museum in Wales, and it is in charge of multiple museums around the country. Seven branches specifically. Entry to each is free, and each commemorates a different facet of Welsh history and culture; of the seven, I had (until a few hours ago) been to five. I've done Caerleon Roman Museum and Amphitheatre, Cardiff Museum, St Ffagan Folk Museum of Welsh Life, Big Pit Coal Mining Museum, and Swansea Waterfront Museum. I have yet to do the Slate Museum in Eryri.

And today, I went to:

The National Wool Museum

YEAH THAT'S RIGHT we have a national wool museum. It's so cool. We arrived at lunchtime so we started in the cafe and we had soup and also cheese and leek Welsh cakes. Except the soup was so Welsh it was correctly served with a piece of cheese:

AS IT SHOULD

Anyway, the building was a wool mill once upon a time, and half of the machinery still works, and still produces 100% woollen textiles. Also they run workshops for knitting and weaving and stuff. But you follow the rooms around and they show you the full process, from fleece to flannel.

BUT ALSO at each stop they had little stands where you could try a bit for yourselves. So for example, there was an exhibit where you could card fleece by hand, with a pile of washed fleece beside, and you could just... go ham with the carding.

I deliberately tried not to photograph literally everything. But here's a lil collection:

I should have taken a picture of the carding, actually, that was my favourite.

OH MY GOD YEAH and also, they had a section on the uses of the wool. A whole display of traditional Welsh blankets, trad and modern clothes, and, of course, instructions for how to cwtch a baby in a shawl, which was so lovely because that's what my Welsh paternal grandmother taught my English mother to do with me as a baby.

Anyway, then the gift shop sold balls of 100% wool in many fun colours, and tabletop looms, and books on how to knit/weave, and bags of roving that you could spin yourself, and plushie sheep and dragons. And Welsh blankets and shawls/scarves and that.

Just reading the summer/autumn edition of my RSPB magazine and theres a dedicated section in welsh!

Unsure why its orientated like that sorry!

Ah! It's an advert, look, for Transport For Wales trains - they're trying to convince you to take a train to Wales to look at birds

TfW trains are shit on toast, actually (ALTHOUGH SHOUT OUT to their nice overhead baggage space, which fit suitcases); but I must say I truly and genuinely admire their commitment to bilingualism. They run services throughout Wales, but that means running services on the main lines from Welsh places in the West to English places over the border. For example, they operate the service from Fishguard Harbour in West Wales, to Manchester Piccadilly in England, a route that covers 15 Welsh stops before crossing the border and passing through 13 English stops. Here it is in turquoise:

NOW. In Wales, of course, the announcements are all bilingual on trains. TfW trains have TV screens in the carriages that tell you which service you're on, which stops it will pass, and which stop is next. It alternates between Welsh and English to do this. So far, so normal. We are accustomed to such treatment.

You would think. You'd think, wouldn't you. That when they cross the border into England, it would switch to English-only. You'd think so. After all, every other service does this! Bristol is not far from Newport, but the moment you reach it, First Great Western don't bother with bilingualism anymore. Cross Country only goes into Wales as far as Cardiff, but they do not bother adding in Welsh for the Newport/Cardiff leg of their journeys. You'd think that a service that runs fully half in England - and that's stop numbers, the length of time for the journeys is longer in England than in Wales - would not keep strictly adhering to Welsh language inclusion for that part.

Except the operators of TfW do not agree. Not only do you get a bilingual service all the way up to Manchester, they have even included the Welsh names for the English places they pass. And that is notable, because while larger places in England usually have Welsh names (with exceptions), smaller ones generally don't; so, the dedicated translators of TfW either coined new terms, or - and this is my favourite part - they delved deep into the history books to find a time when those places had archaic Welsh names in the past.

So you get:

Manchester: Manceinion

Shrewsbury: Amwythig

Hereford: Henffordd

Ludlow: Llwydlo

So far so sensible. All major market towns or cities near to the border, would have had a lot of trading and migration with/from Wales over the centuries. Of course there are Welsh names for them. "Manceinion" is a back-formation from the New Latin "Mancunium", from the 1700s; "Henffordd" means "old road" and so is a Welsh corruption of the English via hypercorrection; "Llwydlo" is a corruption via hypercorrection to include the word "grey"; "Amwythig" is actually so old a name we don't even know what it means anymore. Fine. Move on.

Then you get:

Whitchurch: Yr Eglwys Wen

Literal translation! White church = eglwys wen. Yeah, that makes sense. There's a Whitchurch in Cardiff with the same translation. Why not just re-use it in both languages? Fine. Move on.

And THEN you get:

Leominster: Llanlieni

Nantwich: Yr Heledd Wen

I. I promise you. No one used the name yr Heledd Wen in centuries before TfW found it listed in the depths of some dusty etymology encyclopaedia. No one remembered the original name of Leominster was Llanlieni until TfW dug it out of the fucking Doomsday Book. Want to know what's really mad? Both of those are the original place names. The English names came later. Wild. Absolute scenes. TfW explain yourselves challenge.

Which means, if you are English, living in Nantwich, and you want to hop on a train to Manchester and back for the day, you legitimately might have to get on a train that talks to you in the language of the country next door and learn archaic place names that had been lost to the mists of time in order to do that. And while I think TfW really needs to learn how to add some extra fucking carriages to their services and maybe step into the 21st century by learning that you can let passengers book seats if they want, I respect the hell out of their policy of Compulsory Welsh.

Haha, I don't have much yet, but:

I mean I know things are much bleaker in Scotland and particularly in poor England and there are certainly caveats to what I'm about to say but lads I personally am fucking delighted

Plaid Cymru have literally never in history done anything close to this well. And this is a big fucking deal, because they were one of the only two parties remaining in Welsh politics that are left of centre, so even if you take the Wales-specific aspect away, this is a staggering development

That is an absolute wipe out for Labour. The Tories had barely clawed in their seats in recent years anyway, not surprised they've lost them, but you cannot imagine the stranglehold Labour has had since Thatcher decided to girlboss our economy into oblivion. This is huge fucking news. All the more so because the First Minister lost her seat, and so is having to resign as party leader, even! I found her outgoing speech to be interesting. She's very party loyal, and she refused to answer any questions about Keir Starmer, but she did say she hopes the national party will correct course; which, from Eluned Morgan, is damning.

Reform, meanwhile, were doing better than this in the polls. Most polls suggested they'd either come out on top or be close to the top, but in the end only Clywd hit the projected numbers; people wanted Reform out, and they united behind Plain to do it, by and large. I was concerned about Greens splitting the vote, but it was actually not too bad in the end.

So, now, Plaid need to enter a coalition. This'll be the first test. They only need 6 extra seats to form a majority, so the logical choice is Labour, since they still have 9, but the historical relationship between Plaid and Labour is, um, Quite Bad, so lol we'll see. I suspect they'll have to, though

All of which means, we have a Plaid-led coalition Senedd, with Reform in opposition. That worries me a bit, because in spite of prevailing opinion, the opposition is actually a vitally important role in politics. I think Keir Starmer is fucking awful, and an absolutely dreadful Prime Minister, but he actually shone in opposition because he's a details -oriented former lawyer who knows how to Cross examine, and that's the opposition leader's job.

Meanwhile, in Wales, for ages that was Notable Clown Andrew RT Davies, former leader of the Welsh Tories. The death of Welsh democracy is on his fucking idiot head. He has been incompetently failing to hold Labour accountable for years. Like... I like Mark Drakeford! I do! I absolutely do not see eye to eye with him on many things, but I think he means well and he was a competent politician who knew how to get the bins collected!

I also think there were many things he needed to be challenged on. Take the NHS, for example. It's on its fucking knees in Wales, and yes, absolutely, that's true across the UK thanks to underspending and understaffing. It's also true that Wales' budget is terrible, but that's true of the Scottish NHS, too. So; why is it that the Welsh NHS is doing so much worse than the others? Even accounting for all those factors, something is different here, and we need to know what.

It's the opposition's job to ask that. Andrew RT Davies tried. But he's such a fucking idiot that rather than asking that normally, he decided to do that stupid Westminster thing of attempting a zinger and trying to say that Labour is shit. He described the Welsh NHS as being "like a third world country". He did so in 2022, at the height of Partygate and the COVID enquiry, when we were still clapping NHS workers.

Drakeford's response has gone down in history, because I cannot stress enough that this kind of chest-thumping slanging match is not actually normal in the Senedd. If you see that video, look at Drakeford's hands. Look how he's so angry that they're vibrating. He was such a mild-mannered man normally. But Davies fucked it so badly that this was the response. Drakeford atomised him. He might as well have just gone "How fucking dare some worthless stray dog bark at me." The speaker had to halt proceedings and calm everyone down; again, normal in Westminster, but very much not in the Senedd, as was the subject of academic study as far back as 2009, a mere 10 years after its creation

And the problem is, every single Reform representative here is a fucking joke. I do not for a second believe they'll be any better than Andrew RT Davies, a guy who once compared the American January 6th riots to people who voted Remain in Brexit, lied to the press that innocent white children were being forced to eat halal food in school, and then made repeated populist lying statements that broke Senedd Code of Conduct until his own party got so sick of him that they held an open vote right to his face to force him to resign. We will not even get THAT standard.

But, on the bright side, Reform IS a joke, and so far nationwide we've seen repeatedly that people lose enthusiasm for them very quickly once they realise what it's like to be ruled by a circus juggler that doesn't know where the balls are kept and keeps trying to fuck a lion. So, if that holds true, it's good for them to get it out of their system now, before the next GE

HAHA yes okay

So, I will preface this with saying that the standard word for rain is 'glaw'. Rhymes with the English word 'cow', like the animal. And that is the word you will hear and most people will use like... 99% of the time. So far, so normal.

I will also say there is a very large number of terms we use. Not a single word, but usually 'glaw' followed by a very precise adjective. Sometimes 'glaw' is not involved.

And then there are all the words we use. Single words, though most have the -law ending from 'glaw'.

This is because Welsh has many dialects, and so people ran in many directions with this incredibly common concept, because skies above We Do Be Having Rain, We Do, as they say in the south east valleys around Abertillery way. At this point it starts getting Silly.

But the BEST bit

is that in Welsh, we commonly give names to certain types of weather. I suppose there's echoes of this in English, where particular species get names? The Redbreast became the Robin Redbreast and now is just known as a robin, that's probably the most commonly known one. Jenny Wren, Tom Tit, etc. Birds get it a lot. But, in Welsh, we also do this with some weather, and this includes the rain. So; it also has names.

SO WITH ALL OF THAT IN MIND

I can only pick out my favourites, because Tumblr polls do not allow enough options. But:

As ever, the fake has been positioned using a random number generator.

Etymology notes under the cut to help you make your choice! Typically in these polls people have frequently voted for the North Walian terms, which I find very funny, and the Gogs take very well (trololol). Let's see if that happens this time!