As someone who comes from South Wales and has a few web-sites about South Wales it seems really strange why the BBC always refers to the area as “south Wales” – without the “s” capitalised.
For an example look at this article. This is obviously a set policy for South Wales because they do it consistently and seem to have done so for a number of years.
However, the policy doesn’t seem consistent with other areas – for example they don’t refer to the “north east” of England but the “North East“.
For me and most people who live here this is a strange thing to do – South Wales is a clear, distinct regional area. Yes we do live in the geographic south of Wales but we also live in South Wales!
The BBC itself seems confused – if you visit one of its regional pages then they use every variance of capitalisation going – mixed case – “South Wales”, lower case – “south east Wales” and even all lower case in the title – “south east” though this is obviously down to styling rather than grammar.
I guess that all of the backing I need is in the names of papers obtainable via Google Scholar. If you search for “south wales” there, then every academic paper comes back with South Wales capitalised the correct way.
Why does it bother me? Well it subjugates the region – it makes it appear that it doesn’t exist – when we all know that it does!
So the policy of this website is South Wales with a capital “S” !
Update 4th March 2009: I found a good article here that confirms my view. Come on BBC change your policy!
4 responses so far ↓
1 Paul V. Thomas // Mar 6, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Thank goodness someone else has noticed this infuriating tendency of recent times. It’s my main bugbear at present. It clearly flies in the face of an established convention going back centuries and is being passed off by its defendants as a grammatical rule (which gets me even more indignant). It is absolutely NOT a grammatical rule – capitalisation of north, south etc with place names is a matter of taste and style. The only thing that Fowler for instance insisted upon was consistency in use of capitals. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be hearing about the middle east, the north Atlantic, the south Pole. Eastern Europe is often now eastern Europe (which to me alters its meaning – some vague area somewhere in the east of Europe instead of the specific region which is, historically and culturally, covered by that term ).
Nothing winds me up more than this on the language front. It is true many people capitalise things in English that do not need capitalisation, and I can imagine some editors etc deciding to put a stop to this and create a cleaner, more minimalist English, but as usual when trying to ‘put things right’ these days, people go too far and start meddling with things which need not be changed. It’s interesting that most European languages are very sparing in their use of capitals – even days of the week and names of months and nationalities are spelt with lower-case initials – yet even most of these languages capitalise north, south, east etc when used with places.
I think people are going along with this even though it irks them because so few are confident in their knowledge of grammar, and so they allow themselves to be swept along by others who peddle their personal preferences as grammatical rules and who are in a position to ensure their view prevails. Well, I for one will never spell south wales with a small ‘s’. It will always be South Wales for me and I urge all likeminded people to resist this annoying trend, knowing that they are not breaking any rules in so doing.
2 Paul // Mar 30, 2009 at 10:18 pm
The Paul V. Thomas above is nothing to do with the Paul Thomas who edits this blog. Just coincidence, honestly
3 Paul // Jun 18, 2009 at 11:54 am
I notice that the BBC have recently posted an article with “South Wales” mentioned correctly. Maybe changing their policy? I doubt it! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8106519.stm
4 Paul // Jul 2, 2009 at 1:35 pm
My comment obviously gave them notice. They have changed it back to “south Wales”! How stupid is that. What a stupid policy!
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