Wales

A country whose language survived conquest, industrialisation and a deliberate school policy against it, and is now growing again. Welsh descends from the Brittonic spoken across most of Britain before the Anglo-Saxon settlement, which makes it older in the island than English. Welsh princes held the west against Norman marcher lords for two centuries until Edward I's conquest in 1282 and the ring of castles built to hold it - Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris, now a World Heritage site. Owain Glyndwr's rising from 1400 was the last serious attempt at independence. The Acts of Union from 1536 annexed Wales legally into England and made English the only language of the courts. Yet the language survived, largely through Nonconformist chapels and the Welsh Bible of 1588, and through a literary culture that kept the eisteddfod going. Coal and iron then made the south a global industrial region, drawing in English and Irish migrants and shifting the linguistic balance. The Welsh Not punished schoolchildren for speaking it into the twentieth century. Devolution created a Senedd in 1999. Welsh is now compulsory in schools and speaker numbers are rising. Around 850 thousand people report speaking Welsh, out of a population of about 3.1 million. Cardiff is the capital and Snowdonia the best-known upland. The Welsh flag's dragon is not used on the Union Flag. Hay-on-Wye and the National Eisteddfod are its literary institutions. The government has a target of a million speakers by 2050. Rugby union carries a national significance out of proportion to the sport.

• Existed: 600 CE – present
• Type: Entity