Jeremy Vine has been accused of ‘insulting’ the Welsh after a listener suggested people in Wales should speak English instead of their mother tongue.

Jeremy Vine has been accused of ‘insulting’ the Welsh after a listener suggested people in Wales should speak English instead of their mother tongue.

Earlier this year the BBC star interviewed a man from Pontypridd in South Wales who said: ‘I don’t want to speak [Welsh], it’s a horrible language.

‘If you go into any pub in west Wales, or North Wales, they’re all there speaking English. As soon as they hear my accent, they start changing into Welsh, so we can’t understand them.’

 

But Vine came under fire when the comment resurfaced during his ‘review of the year’ show on Radio 2.

A Twitter user criticised the review for giving air time ‘to the tired old trope about walking into a pub and people switching to English’, branding it ‘nonsense.’

When some people compared speaking the Welsh language in Wales to using French in France, Vine responded on Twitter: ‘Is France in the UK?’

The tweet has since been deleted.

Replying to a Twitter user who suggested he apologised or explained, Vine said: ‘My tweet was misconstrued! [ . . . ]

Read Full Story: BBC presenter Jeremy Vine under fire for Welsh language debate | Daily Mail Online