Ever heard of Yr Wyddfa? Perhaps not, but you will have heard of Snowdon. Yr Wyddfa is the mountain’s Welsh name, and you’re likely going to be hearing it a lot more from now on. After a long campaign, Wales has just agreed to refer to the famous mountain by its Welsh name only. So no more Snowdon (and no more Snowdonia).
More than 5,000 people signed a petition in June last year calling for Wales’s highest mountain to be known as Yr Wyddfa, after the motion was discussed by the Snowdonia National Park Authority in April. It had been put forward by Gwynedd councillor John Pughe, who told the BBC would be ‘a real chance to make a statement on the need to protect our indigenous Welsh place names’.
Now the 1,085-metre mountain itself will be known as Yr Wyddfa and the national park as Eryri. According to Cymuned, the group that campaigned for the name change, the mountain only became known as Snowdon because of Victorians taking day trips there to hike. Who knew?
Yr Wyddfa is pronounced ‘Er with-va’ and Eryri is pronounced ‘Eh-ruh-re’. The move follows football officials in the country asking for Cymru to be internationally recognised as the team’s name. Noel Mooney, of the Football Association of Wales, said: ‘The team should always be called Cymru, that’s what we call it here.’
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