from PART FIVE - TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Wales is a small country, with two linguistic cultures, which, as a nation, has survived into the third millennium by the skin of its teeth. About a quarter of its 2.75 million inhabitants – only 5 per cent of the UK population as a whole – were not born in Wales, and accordingly are unlikely to have a strong sense of allegiance to it. While two-thirds of Scots identify themselves as Scottish as opposed to British, in a 1999 survey only 43 per cent of Welsh respondents saw themselves as Welsh first and foremost. Apart from a brief period of industrial prosperity during the early years of the twentieth century, it has remained one of the poorest areas in the UK, its household incomes at 10 per cent below those of the UK generally, and its output per head, in terms of GDP, currently standing at about 82 per cent of the UK average. Since its Anglo-Norman conquest in the thirteenth century, it has had few national institutions to mark its distinctiveness, apart from an indigenous language in steep decline during the twentieth century: the figures for Welsh-language speakers dropped from 54.4 per cent of the Welsh population in 1891 to 18.7 per cent in 1991. The long struggle to save the language from extinction in itself causes internal division in Wales, with some of the non-Welsh speaking majority seeing little purpose in spending scarce resources on keeping alive a culture they have already lost.
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