Networked Territories of Language and Nation

This chapter analyses networked territories of language and nation, noting the shift from academic focus on the histories and times of nations to a geographical attention on landscapes, the importance of specific sites and places, and the significance of territory. Jones uses this more networked interpretation of national territories to examine the territorial extent of a sense of Welshness that is defined according to Welsh language ability. He proceeds by detailing the dominant geographical imaginations that exist in relation to Welsh linguistic territory, which tend to conceive uncritically of a homogenous and definable territorial entity. He then highlights some of the ways in which these visions of a homogenous and uniform linguistic territory can be complicated by drawing on more networked understandings of social and spatial relations.