When I left home for university in Manchester, a lot of people warned me about hiraeth. They told me I would miss Wales, my family, my friends, and the familiar landscape of home. I half expected to spend the journey crying as the sight of my dad’s red car disappeared into the distance. What I didn’t expect was to discover that I had been feeling hiraeth my entire life.
It has been said time and time again that hiraeth cannot be translated; that it describes a longing for Wales that runs deeper than ordinary homesickness. But the Wales I found myself longing for was not entirely geographical. In fact, the Welshness I craved hadn’t existed in my lifetime. What I missed was the possibility of living entirely through Welsh. A world where Welsh was not something to defend, explain or consciously seek out, but simply the language through which life unfolded. The strange thing is that I had spent years searching for that world while still living in Wales. Moving away didn’t create the feeling, it just made it more normal.
The truth is that a fully Welsh world doesn’t exist anywhere now, not even in Wales. There was a time when whole communities lived almost entirely through Welsh, but those worlds have largely disappeared. Welsh is present, loved and lived, but it exists alongside something bigger, louder and more dominant. A large part of that is not just cultural reality, it’s political design. Broadcasting isn’t devolved, decisions about Welsh media are still made outside of Wales, by people who don’t live in the linguistic landscape they’re shaping. Even in Welsh-speaking communities, most of us spend our lives moving between languages. We check who is in the room before we speak, we translate ourselves, we adapt. The idea of a place where Welsh is simply the unquestioned default is extremely difficult to find.
And yet I had experienced that world before. Not on a street or in a town, but in the media.
Looking back, I think I spent much of my life searching for a bychanfyd Cymraeg long before I had the language to describe it. Bychanfyd Cymraeg means a small Welsh world – spaces, real or imagined where Welsh feels like the natural centre of things. I found pieces of it everywhere: in youth clubs, Eisteddfod fields, Pantycelyn corridors and, back in the day, Welsh-language Twitter. But I found its most complete form in places that had been deliberately constructed. In Pobol y Cwm and Rownd a Rownd, in papurau bro, in Radio Cymru. In the strange and wonderful corners of the Welsh-language internet.
"We often talk about the media as though it reflects communities. For minority language communities, I think it often does something more than that, it can create them."
Writer
We often talk about the media as though it reflects communities. For minority language communities, I think it often does something more than that, it can create them. In my time here, I have realised that Manchester is full of visible diasporas. Irishness for example lives in pubs, it’s a culture that you can walk into. Welshness feels different. The institutions that once anchored Welsh communities in English cities have largely disappeared or changed purpose. There is no obvious Welsh quarter of Manchester, no Welsh high street, no place where I can reliably stumble into Welsh conversation.
Instead, the Welsh worlds I inhabit are often mediated ones. I listen to Radio Cymru while walking to lectures. I read Golwg360 on my phone between seminars. There’s even a tiny bychanfyd Cymraeg living in my headphones on every bus journey, Spotify playlists full of Welsh artists that feel like a reminder that if we want Welsh spaces to exist, we have to keep making them. I join online meetings with people scattered across Wales. Sometimes, I even listen to a Welsh podcast recorded in Australia, Rhaglen Cymru, a reminder that the bychanfyd Cymraeg stretches far beyond the borders of Wales. I follow Facebook groups that somehow manage to be simultaneously chaotic, supportive and deeply Welsh. These spaces are often treated as substitutes for community, as though they are somehow less real than physical gathering places. I have come to think the opposite. For many Welsh speakers, these spaces are community.
Take Rhwydwaith Menywod Cymru, a Facebook group that might genuinely be one of the most Welsh places on the internet. Scroll through it and you will find questions that sound as though they belong in a sitcom. Somebody is looking for a lost dog. Somebody else wants advice about making bara brith. Someone is trying to remember a Welsh word they have forgotten. The discussions are funny, nosy, practical and entirely ordinary. Which is exactly why they matter. Welsh exists there not as a cultural treasure requiring preservation, but as a language people use to get on with their lives.
The same is true of Welsh journalism. In a previous piece for Inclusive Journalism Cymru, I wrote about papurau bro and the way they transform ordinary lives into stories worth recording. I think they do something else too. They create a local universe where Welsh is assumed. A universe where the language is capable of containing everything: football results, school concerts, planning disputes, funerals, fundraisers and village gossip. Reading a papur bro often feels like stepping briefly into a version of Wales where Welsh occupies the centre rather than the margins.
That is also what fascinates me about programmes like Pobol y Cwm and Rownd a Rownd. They are not simply dramas. They are acts of world-building. Their fictional communities offer something many Welsh speakers rarely experience consistently in everyday life: a social world conducted entirely through Welsh. Nobody apologises for speaking it. Nobody switches languages halfway through a conversation. Nobody is forced to justify its existence. The result is not necessarily realism, but something equally valuable: possibility.
But possibility shouldn’t be limited to two soaps and a handful of programmes. A single Welsh-language channel cannot realistically carry the full weight of a nation. If anything, the existence of these fictional worlds shows how urgently we need more space, more genres, more experimentation, more risk-taking, and, frankly, more than one channel.
Perhaps that is why these media spaces become particularly important when people leave Wales. They allow us to inhabit versions of Welsh life that can feel strangely difficult to access even within Wales itself.
Covid revealed this in ways I don’t think many of us anticipated. Welsh media and Welsh civic life suddenly became more accessible than ever. Meetings moved online. Events became hybrid. Communities that had once been tied to geography became portable. Even now, I regularly join Cymdeithas yr Iaith meetings from Manchester. I sit with a cup of tea and listen to voices from Caernarfon, Cardiff, Aberystwyth and beyond. We are scattered across different places, but for an hour or two we occupy the same linguistic space.
For a minority language, that matters enormously. The ability to create spaces where Welsh is ordinary is not decorative. It is infrastructure. Languages survive through use. Through local news stories, Facebook arguments, radio phone-ins, television dramas and community newspapers. Through the countless mundane interactions that allow a language to function not as a symbol, but as a living social reality. Digital spaces matter tremendously, but they can’t replace the need for real Welsh-speaking communities. The bro Gymraeg, the places where Welsh is lived publicly and generationally remain essential to the long-term survival of the language.
So yes, this piece is shaped by hiraeth. But not the hiraeth I expected to find when I moved away from home. What I discovered was not a longing for Wales itself, but for a version of Welsh life that exists most fully in the spaces we create for one another. The Welsh media doesn’t simply connect the diaspora to Wales. It connects Wales to itself. It builds the bychanfyd Cymraeg that so many of us spend our lives searching for.
And perhaps that is why, on a Saturday morning in Manchester with Radio Cymru playing quietly in the background, I don’t feel quite so far away.
Mirain is a Law student from Swansea, who is now studying in Manchester. You can follow her on Instagram.
