Jeremy Vine has been forced to apologise after an "insulting" tweet suggested Welsh was akin to a foreign language.

The BBC radio host Jeremy Vine has been criticised after he appeared to suggest people in Wales should speak English instead of their mother tongue.

Earlier this year he interviewed a man from Pontypridd in South Wales who'd declared about Welsh: "I don't want to speak it, 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."

After the aftermath had seemingly died down, Radio 2 produced its review of the year, which tossed the issue back into the limelight.

In an attempt to douse the flames, Vine shared an article by BBC colleague Owen Williams in an attempt to "provide context".

But it had the opposite effect, with proud Welshmen accusing the presenter of bigotry, which he denied.

A further furore then erupted when Jeremy Vine's official Twitter feed responded to a message, which compared speaking the Welsh language in Wales to using French in France, by asking: "Is France in the UK?"