Welsh language signage ‘risk to lives’ reports Telegraph
The Telegraph newspaper has said that Welsh language signage could constitute a “risk to lives”.
The dire warning of the fatal effects of having bilingual signs came after a report by a Welsh council cited the “safety benefits” of English-only signs.
The report by Monmouthshire Council suggested a Welsh place name could lead to delay if it does not officially exist in the National Land and Property Gazetteer, which is used by the emergency services
The report said that keeping English-only signs “will reduce the chances of confusion”. The report says: “The negative impact of reducing potential use of the Welsh language by translating existing street names is offset by the safety benefits for emergency services.”
However, the Telegraph newspaper interpreted this advice as a warning that bilingual signage “would put lives at risk”.
“The Welsh government has banned a border county from using English-only street signs despite being warned it would put lives at risk,” they said.
On Monday the council’s English-only sign policy fell foul of the Welsh Language Commissioner’s office who said that the council’s previous policy of replacing English-only signs with bilinguals ones was the right one.
Gwenith Price, Deputy Commissioner for the Welsh Language, said: “Organisations should not take decisions to do less for the Welsh language than they previously did, or to do the minimum where more progressive action in relation to the Welsh language was already being made.
“The suggestion repeatedly made by the Council that the policy had been amended to ‘comply’ with the Code of Practice is wrong and goes against the spirit of the Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 and the role of the Welsh Language Commissioner.”
The Telegraph is not the first time it has been suggested that bilingual road signs, which are common in many countries, pose a threat to the public.
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Telegraph reporting poses risk to public more likely.
Usual Daily Torygraph drivel
Not that old cookie again, yawn yawn
Lol fatha arfer! More colonialism tripe
Now I know, there is going to be the usual rabble of evil Welsh Nationalists, with their white hoods and burning crosses and Panzer tanks rolling up into this comment section prattling on and making a mockery of what The Tellygraph, an actual newspaper run by actual grown-ups that have cars and mortgages and everything, has chosen to publish …but let me tell you this: Kwasi Kwarteng read one “Dim Ysmygu” sign and then immediately crashed the economy. …so, think on you valley nazis, your language is destroying everything. Why only last week I saw a “Pwl Nofio” sign convince… Read more »
Love it! We need more ‘take the p**s’ Anglo-Welsh (Or should that be Cymraig/anglo?) humour. Learned several new Welsh words this morning.
Cach 🤹♀️🙈 might be one to
note when reading the newspaper 🗞 referred to…….not a word i
Use though 🙉
Why can’t I give this more than one like?
Can we have a seren aur button as well as the to bach, please? This has been the best bit of my day.
How do these journos cope with driving through any other country? Very few give an English alternative yet the Sais scribblers and their myopic readers are forever hopping across the Channel in their cars and mobile homes.
Their colleagues on the Costa Del Crime have no such worries. Odd, innit?
Lot of them can’t read English anyway and they just ignore most road signs as a matter of course. The way Truss’ mob are tucking the UK up they’ll soon be retiring to some safe haven with their ill-gotten gains too!
Yn cytuno. Dw i wedi syrthio oddi ar fy meic droeon yn ceisio darllen y Saesoneg gyda’i seiniau di-synnwyr. Dw i wedi sgwennu at y cyngor plwy ganwaith yn gofyn am arwyddion uniaith Gymraeg er lles diogerlwch pobol Gwalia. Ymunwch yn yr ymgyrch!
OMG ,the SAIS must be panicking in their pants a language that is going to cause a motorway pileup according to this journalists rag writter there’ll be carnage on the roads
The Telegraph seems to have a real problem with the use of the Welsh language.
What is it about Welsh that addles the brains of drivers? You never hear complaints about the signs around Calais being in French and English, by their logic this should be the accident black spot of Europe!
Well well, who would have thought that the Telegraph was anti English? Using their logic, people who can speak only English can only drive in England. Any country beyond its’ borders is going to have signage to varying degrees in other languages. If this means that drivers are going to pose a danger to other road users then they cannot drive anywhere else. I implore English people to take exception to this grave insult and batter this deplorable rag with complaints.
I must live in a parallel universe. When country’s like Aus and NZ are reverting to native names and removing the English, eg Ayers Rock to Uluru, the mention of using a native name here, eg Eryri, send certain people into spasms. Are people in Aus and NZ dying by the car load because of this policy ? has the death rate increased because monoglot English have driven through Pontypridd, Beddau, Porth or Ynysmaerdy, as these places have no English translation. It beggars belief such drivel can be printed I would like to see official figures for death by “enwau… Read more »
If you want to pick a fight with them, declare Y Bala the 1st Welsh Gaeltacht and switch all signs to Welsh only over night; wait for them to react and then do it again.
Bigotry.
Easy answer to this.Have them in welsh only.That’s how it is in other countries.
Some people have nothing better to do than knock and watch everything Wales and the Welsh do. They think they are so knowledgeable and superior. It would be better if they concentrated on the shambles that is England.
Very good point
And Nation Cymru once again platforms far right Cymrophobia from the Torygraph, provoking ire amongst the independence minded community.
The Torygraph only has a few thousand readers and does not represent the mainstream. These are the elderly fools who voted in Liz Truss on our behalf. They can’t use the internet, so other than reposting angrily to Facebook, the Torygraph articles live and die on their own site / toilet paper.
Why not just let it die there? Nothing happens other than people who are already angry about things get just a little angrier.
Telegraph editors haven’t realised that their anti-welsh drivel is actually boosting the independence movement. A bit like the king’s PoW announcement …
Perhaps the Telegraph (an outmoded and obsolete piece of kit) should turn it’s attention to the innumerable road signs in England (and also Wales, it must be admitted) that are almost completely obscured by overgrown vegetation. Some are impossible to read unless one slows down dangerously…
That’s true. And the Welsh language is also responsible for the war in Ukraine.
And for global warming
… and Covid versions 1 -10!
….. and it collapsed the pound. Just as well we won’t be using the pound once we become Independent.
Most people no longer use the street names to navigate now and use various Satnavs or What three words. My children don’t know the names of many of the local streets. The Telegraph is prone to stupid insular comments without any evidence base. The observant among you will have noticed that street names in Lviv are in Polish in the Roman alphabet and Ukrainian in the Cyrillic alphabet.
I forgot to add that some years ago Cornwall decided that having too many signs caused accidents and removed most of the signage to no great detriment.
So how do the Torygraph’s headbangers manage in places like Switzerland which routinely manages working through four official languages and frequently adds a fifth (English) ?
But then, they are Swiss.
If bilingual signs can be confusing let’s stick to Welsh only signs. Imperialist colonial mindset again!
It really peeves the english that we can speak two languages and they find it difficult to learn their own language correctly.
What utter 🐂💩
The Telegraph are like anti-vaxxers who claim Bill Gates used the Covid vaccination to implant computer chips into our brains. Obviously they have something in common with these fruitloops. They too don’t have a brain to implant anything of substance.
It doesn’t take much to confuse some telegraph readers. Poor souls. It’s why they read the equivalent of the Beano .
That’s right, people’s minds will explode if they have to deal with more than one language!! The usual codswallop from the Torygraph.
Political proposal:
Can we create: a) a charge for rightwing pundits writing and spreading this sort of story, b) a charge for Welsh journalists getting hits off the back of reacting to it, and c) a charge for anyone injured due to dual language signs in Wales.
Money raised can be split evenly between Welsh language causes and boosting the NHS obviously overworked by huuuge number of injuries caused by this issue.
Might be worth an extra £1,000 per year.
The Gvt Bowen Commission on bilingualism in signing of roads looked at the various types of signs across Europe and impact or benefits to drivers in bilingual settings. They found NO evidence for matters the Daily Torygraphs raises and set the template for both Cornwall and Highland Scotland 🏴 signage policy
Telegraph reporters can’t all be that stupid….. it must be policy….. we know what their policy is, and that of Monmouthshire council. Both do a diservice to the Welsh people.
Please… remember… You are entering another country… in which there exists another language! Any suggestion that the native language of the country you visit or live in would be unsafe, is infact ignorant and if all signs should only be one language then naturally it should be changed to just Cymraeg… you can all learn what they mean… just like when you travel to another country! You wouldn’t ask the French or Germans to change their signs to English! How about Ireland? What language is on road signs in Ireland? The system of directional signs is based upon, and is… Read more »
Total bull manure, as attested to by multiple studies. See, for example: “Analyses of the effects of bilingual signs on road safety in Scotland – final report” (N Kinnear, S Helman, S Buttress, L Smith, E Delmonte, L Lloyd and B Sexton) And also Jamson, S., Tate, F. and Jamson, A.H. (2005) Evaluating the effects of bilingual traffic signs on driver performance and safety. Ergonomics, 48 (15). pp. 1734-1748. The journalist is a trainee, namely a fresh faced youth named Timothy Sigworth. This is his first article for the Telegraph. Obviously went to a sh*t university, or a wee bit… Read more »
So the problem is the National Land and Property Gazetteer being incomplete? Obvious solution here.
Ah but it’s not just our road signs which are a semiotic sign of how thick English translations of Cymreig names are, and what an awkward twinning we see paraded in front of us daily. There is another awkward twinning going on here too. On the one hand we’ve got the Welsh-speakers in Wales who, in my experience, have a perfectly understandable superiority complex towards many English people. Then, tragically, conversely, we have the English-speaking Welsh – so many of whom – have an inferiority complex towards the English! The after-math of the evils of industrialisation ay! All linguistic logic… Read more »
Torygraph states untruths 🙄 How is this news 🤔
Imagine if the tory graph ever employed journalists, not just fools with hate agendas. They might want to take a look at Westminster, the true risk to lives. But no, just distraction with hate against us again.
If you’re stupid enough to crash your car because of confusion over a bilingual sign in a bilingual country then it’s Darwinism in action and there’s one less idiot in the gene pool.
Jokes aside though, I think if there was any truth to this idiotic and xenophobic reporting from the toilet paper news junket, the telegraph. Then it says more about the intelligence of the English readers of said paper, than anything else.
Rubbish, better stop teaching French and German in schools and change all the European road signs to suit the English. Once again trying to rid us Welsh from the face of the earth. It’s all to do with second house owners.
Thinking about it yeh, apparently thousands of French, German and Spanish people die on uk roads every year because they don’t understand a slow down, arafwch nawr sign. Anti Welsh and attack on a minority again. The article writer just may be tried in court for spreading racial hatred.
Does anyone in England have sat nav. They usually get this sort of technology years before us valley heads apparently. Baaaaaa.
Is this theory of theirs based on any factual evidence or just their opinion? Unfortunately ‘opinion’ seems to carry more clout than evidence, nowadays. With technology giving us such apps as ‘what three words’ and th availability of good old fashioned postcodes, I doubt there’s much in th way of evidence to back this lame theory up. If th Torygraph were really concerned about Welsh lives, maybe they could do a feature on ambulance waiting times, here in Wales. Apparently 3 to 5 hours is pretty much th normal waiting time for an ambulance now (that’s before th huge wait… Read more »
Lordy they must be thick,heh
What a load of nonsense. They don’t say anything about some parts of London that have English and other foreign languages on signposts. They wouldn’t dare. Because they would be called Racist. But it’s cool to come down on the Welsh language. John. Jones
Never heard such tosh. I am English, living in Wales and have learnt enough to know what they mean. They dont convert signs in other countries so why should Wales. This sort of reporting stirs up trouble.
Quite right! All the bluddy road signs all over the world are bluddy foreign. Bluddy dangerous!
Wales, a very small country with very little GDP decides to spend a fortune trying to resurrect an ancient language that only has any use in said tiny country. Is it any wonder Wales is a mess?