‘Yr Wyddfa’ one of the words of 2021 says The Telegraph

The Telegraph newspaper has chosen Yr Wyddfa’ as one of its words of 2021 after calls were made to use the Welsh rather than the English name over the summer.

In June a 5,000 signature petition was presented to national park bosses asking for them to refer to the highest mountain in Wales only by its Welsh name.

The Telegraph newspaper in their article may however have misunderstood that yr Wyddfa is the original name for the mountain, writing that they were looking at “all the new terms coined over the past 12 months” and saying that the people of Wales wanted Snowdon officially “renamed Yr Wyddfa”.

The Snowdonia National Park Authority eventually kicked a motion calling for the peak to only be known as Yr Wyddfa into the long grass after authority chiefs instead set up an ongoing working group to consider its future policy on Welsh place names.

The calls, which would also have seen the park referred to as Eryri rather than Snowdonia, were prompted by Gwynedd councillor John Pughe Roberts who felt it would be “a real chance to make a statement on the need to protect our indigenous Welsh place names”.

Previous efforts have been made to drop the English forms including one from language pressure group Cymuned in 2003, who claimed that the area only became known as Snowdonia due to Victorian day-trippers.

The campaign received the unexpected backing of the Telegraph in April of this year, which said that the “Anglicising of Welsh places and landscapes is becoming endemic” and “driving a dagger through the heart of the language”.

The article finishes: “The motion in North Wales should be passed. The mountain is Welsh, the mountain range is ours, and Yr Wyddfa should be screamed from the rooftops.”