The ancestral language of Welsh people is Welsh Gaelic. Nowadays 750,000 people claiming a self-reported competence in Welsh (21.7% of the population of Wales).
Typically Welsh surnames are given names ending in "-s", such as Williams, Davies, Jones, Edwards, Roberts, Hughes, Lewis, or Evans, but also names like Owen, Lloyd, Morgan, Vaughan, Jenkins or Griffith(s).
Welsh people descend from the Celto-Romans that lived in what is now England and Wales in Roman times. This population was displaced and confined to the hilly regions in the west of Great Britain by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the 5th and 6th centuries. The English name for Wales originates from the Germanic word Walha, meaning "stranger" or "foreigner", which is related to the word "Gaul". The French and Italian word for "Wales" is "Galles" ("Gales" in Spanish), and the original Britions spoke a Celtic language (the ancestor of Welsh) whose closest surving relative is Breton, spoken in Little Brittany, France, and which was spoken throughout Gaul in ancient times. The Welsh could therefore be called "British Gallo-Romans". Indeed, the Roman genetic heritage is still obvious from the predominance of dark eyes in Wales and Cornwall, as opposed to the Celtic and Germanic fair eyes (note that fair eyes are strongly dominant in Ireland and Scotland, which were never part of the Roman Empire).
Wales is the land of mythical King Arthur, the famous Romano-British leader fighting against the invading Anglo-Saxons.
Wales was incorporated to and ruled by England from 1284, and officially annexed to England by the Wales Acts between 1535 and 1542. Since 1301, the Crown Prince of England has been referred to as the Prince of Wales to symbolise this union between the two countries.
People & Celebrities
Famous Welsh actors and actresses include Richard Burton, Anthony Hopkins, Timothy Dalton, Catherine Zeta-Jones, as well as Monty Python comedian and film director Terry Jones.
Among other well-known Welsh people, let's cite geographer George Everest (after whom Mount Everest was named), explorer Henry Morton Stanley, former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, singer Tom Jones, designer Laura Ashley, or classical singer Charlotte Church.
In the 2000 Census, 1.7 million Americans reported Welsh ancestry (although the true figure is most likely higher given the high occurrence of Welsh surnames in the USA). US States with the highest percentage of people of Welsh descent are Utah (around 20%), Ohio, Vermont and New York.
Notable Americans of (at least partial) Welsh descent include presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, but also William Penn (who founded Pennsilvania), Jack Daniel (founder of the homonymous whiskey), J. P. Morgan (bank & securities), architect Frank Lloyd Wright, aviator and film producer Howard Hughes (whose life was immortalised in the Academy Award-winning movie "The Aviator"), senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Hollywood actor Tom Cruise.
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