Welsh in Conwy: the names, the numbers and the spellings that matter

You can visit Conwy without a word of Welsh and nobody will make you feel awkward about it. But this is a bilingual county, not a bilingual gesture, and ten minutes of attention will change how the place feels to you.

The numbers, honestly

At the 2021 census, 25.9 per cent of Conwy County Borough residents aged three and over said they could speak Welsh, down from 27.4 per cent in 2011, which is around 1,600 fewer speakers over the decade. That is a county figure and it hides a lot: the coastal resort towns pull it down, the Conwy Valley pulls it up, and the actual proportion you will hear on the High Street on a given morning sits somewhere in between. What it means practically is that signage, council business, the library on Town Ditch Road and a decent share of shop conversation run in both languages by default. Welsh here is somebody's home language, not decoration.

Conwy, not Conway

The single most useful thing to get right. The town's name is Conwy. It was spelled Conway in English for centuries, and the borough council voted to change the official spelling, taking effect on 1 August 1972. You will still see Conway on old signs, in old books and in the occasional out-of-date listing, and you will see it in the name of some businesses that predate the change. Writing Conway now, in 2026, about the town, reads exactly the way you would expect.

The river is Afon Conwy. Afon is the Welsh for river, so "the Afon Conwy river" is saying river twice; just Afon Conwy, or the River Conwy, but not both at once.

Names you will actually meet

Popty is the word on the front of the bakery on Castle Street. It has not been translated because it does not need to be: popty is what a bakery is called. Mynydd y Dref, the hill behind the town, means the mountain of the town, which is precisely what it is. Castell Conwy is the castle, and Cadw uses that form on its own signage and web pages, so you will see the site listed under both. Plas Mawr means great hall or great house. Gyffin is the village immediately south of the walls where the free car park is. Dwygyfylchi and Penmaenmawr are over the Sychnant Pass to the west, and Deganwy and Llandudno are across the water.

Canolfan Ddiwylliant Conwy is the Conwy Culture Centre on Town Ditch Road: canolfan is centre, diwylliant is culture, and the second word softens its first letter after a feminine noun, which is the sort of thing that makes Welsh look inconsistent to a newcomer and is in fact entirely regular.

Eryri, and why the signs changed

The national park to the south has been known in English as Snowdonia and in Welsh as Eryri for as long as either language has had a word for it. What has changed is which one the authority leads with. Eryri National Park Authority approved a proposal in November 2024 to use Eryri exclusively in its official logo, and it prioritises the Welsh names Eryri and Yr Wyddfa in its communications, with the rollout phased across signage, vehicles, interpretation panels, uniforms and digital platforms. So Eryri for the park and Yr Wyddfa for the summit is current usage, not an affectation, and it is what the signs are moving to. Snowdonia is not a slur and nobody will correct you, but if you are writing it down, Eryri is the form the park itself now uses.

Conwy town is not inside the national park, incidentally. The Carneddau behind it are the park's northern range, which is why the hills you see from the town walls look like mountains and the town does not carry a park designation.

A few letters, if you want them

Welsh spelling is far more regular than English, and three or four rules cover most of the names you will read on a road sign here. Double d, as in Mynydd, is one sound, the th of "this". Double f, as in Gyffin, is an f as in "fun", while a single f, as in Afon, is a v. Double l, as in Llandudno, is a sound English does not have and which nobody expects a visitor to produce on demand. W is usually a vowel rather than a consonant, which is why Conwy has two syllables and not one and a half, and y changes value depending on where it sits in the word.

None of that is required of you. But knowing that w is a vowel is the difference between reading Conwy as a Welsh word and reading it as a misspelling of an English one, and that difference is most of what this section is for.

If you want to hear more of it

The Culture Centre on Town Ditch Road is council-run, bilingual by default, and the least performative place in the town to sit and listen. The Honey Fair in September is a working local event rather than a visitor one, and it sounds like it. And the further up the Conwy Valley you go from Llanrwst onward, the more the balance shifts. Conwy town itself sits at the meeting point of a Welsh-speaking hinterland and an English-speaking coast, which is the honest description and also the interesting one.