The left in Wales 'can't stay monolingual' according to Welsh researcher

Stephen Price

A Welsh writer and researcher has called for meaningful 'solidarity' from the left in Wales, arguing that they can no longer stay monolingual as the number of people speaking Wales' native language falls.

Llinos Anwyl, who writes on Instagram and Substack as Hen Bapur Newydd, is a creative researcher and grassroots organiser who is currently unionising tenants in Aberystwyth and Machynlleth.

Their written work is driven by a commitment to unearthing radical histories and sharing jargon-free anarchist analysis.

In one of Llinos' most read posts to date, titled "Learning Welsh Is What Solidarity Sounds Like", published on 3 November, Llinos argues that "language revival is class struggle", and demonstrates why "the left in Wales can’t stay monolingual".

The article follows the publication of the most recent Annual Population Survey from summer 2025 which shows a further fall in the number of Welsh speakers.

Released on 3 July 2025, the Survey  covers the period April 2024 to March 2025.

The Substack article begins by recounting experiences of most of the radical meetings Llinos has attended in Wales, where someone uses a Welsh word or two, such as "croeso" before the rest of the discussion unfolds entirely in English.

According to Llinos: "The word sits on the top of each agenda like a decoration - a gesture toward belonging that never quite lands.

"Most of us already support the language in principle," Llinos writes.

"We sign petitions, design bilingual posters for English-only events, and attend Welsh gigs… but principle is easy, participation is harder."

"Across Wales, the new left speaks the vocabulary of decentralisation but rarely practises it. English remains the medium of minutes, funding bids, and strategy documents. The political project of localisation is conducted in the language of centralisation. That isn’t accidental. It’s structural."

Llinos continues: "For two centuries, capital has concentrated ownership of communication just as it concentrated ownership of land and labour. English became the infrastructure of that concentration: the language of contracts, management, and scale.

"When industrialisation pulled labour into English-speaking centres, Welsh declined not because people stopped caring but because production moved. As the coalfields and docks expanded, labour migration and recruitment reorganised the Welsh economy around English as the lingua franca of hierarchy."

Continuing their piece about the state of Wales today, where tourism so often replaces industry, Llinos argues that Wales' resource extraction has simply shifted forms, but with Welsh added as tokenistic "branding", leaving behind a culture "detached from its conditions of survival".

Similarly, Llinos calls today's language "rights" merely "decorative" while Wales' young talent are unable to afford to live or function in their own communities

Moving on to Cymraeg 2050, the Welsh Government's target for a million speakers, Llinos decries the use of statistics to measure the success of the Welsh language today, which they argue overlooks the fact that so many can't to this day live or work in the language of Wales.

Offering suggestions how to address the decline, Llinos shares: "Real language planning would mean economic planning; community-owned housing, decentralised media, universal basic income, translation as public infrastructure."

Equality viewed as loss by those in power

Llinos' Substack addresses a complaint often held by minority groups, highlighting how those in power see a shift in platforming as a threat to their status, writing: "I’ve had several conversations with people who say that Welsh feels exclusionary. What they’re describing is the moment when power stops being automatic.

"For those used to living inside the linguistic majority, equality can feel like loss - just as workplace democracy feels slower than management, or community ownership feels messier than the market. It’s not exclusion; it’s redistribution."

Llinos argues that the feeling runs deep since English has long been the language of administration, education, and progress in Wales, while "Welsh became the language of the home, the chapel, and the playground; intimate, local, and undervalued".

"To learn Welsh," Llinos argues, "is to interrupt that one-way traffic of translation that has run for centuries, that being English as default, Welsh as supplement.

"Every bilingual conversation that begins in Welsh and stays there reverses that flow, if only for a moment. That reversal is what solidarity looks like when it’s lived, not just declared."

According to Llinos, "Solidarity means staying in discomfort long enough to understand it. It means hearing someone speak a language you don’t know, yet, and realising the gap is political, not personal.

"The work is not to demand translation, but to participate in creating the conditions for mutual understanding."

"Learning Welsh isn’t about heritage or guilt. It’s not a sentimental return to the past. It’s a material redistribution of the capacity to speak and to be heard. A way of ensuring that public life doesn’t belong only to those whose language was never taken from them."

"The old hierarchy"

For Llinos, learning Welsh is not only a form of resistance that the left should be taking part in, "it’s a rehearsal for a different kind of belonging, one where the future feels plural again".

"A minoritised language cannot live on sentiment. It survives where labour, land, and life still intersect. Where people can afford to create bonds, raise children, and love in their own words."

Concluding with a vision of "what solidarity looks like" in Wales today, Llinos urges the left to learn Welsh, and for both incomers and young to "dream in more than one tongue," since "solidarity spoken in only one language isn’t solidarity at all. It’s the old hierarchy rehearsed again under new management."

Read Learning Welsh Is What Solidarity Sounds Like in full here.

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