A petition calling for a travel website to accept reviews in Welsh has been set up after an Aberystwyth man’s restaurant review was responded to in Swedish.

Sion was astonished when he found he was unable to post a review in Welsh on the website, and was shocked to receive a response in Swedish.

Now Sion’s friend, Bryn Howell-Pryce, has started a petition, calling on the website to host reviews written in Welsh.

Explaining why he set up the petition, Bryn, who has learnt Welsh, said: “There is a very strong desire amongst many first-language Welsh speakers that they should be able to live their lives through the medium of Welsh and it is quite natural to them that, if for example they give a review of a restaurant in a Welsh-speaking part of Wales, they would write the review in their natural tongue.

“Secondly, there is a more general failure amongst the wider English-speaking community, to recognise that there is a part of the United Kingdom where a language other than English is spoken and where whole communities speak nothing but Welsh for the majority of the time.

Bryn added: “Having had to learn the language and realise how important it is, not just to preserve it, but to strengthen it, I felt that persuading a large company like TripAdvisor to recognise Welsh on its website, would be a step towards this.”

TripAdvisor has been asked to comment on the petition.

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