The Welsh are “foreigners”. That, at least, is the root of their name in English. When the Anglo-Saxons first crossed the North Sea to Britain they called the locals “wealas”.

Germans of various kinds keep using riffs on this old word for those who speak another language. Even now the French-speakers of Belgium are “Walloons” and those of Switzerland are “Welsch”.

This is, I guess, what some folk would today call “othering”. And, of course, it predates the slow and complicated development of the modern Welsh nation.

Do Scots – who almost all speak Germanic languages – think of the Welsh as “foreigners”? Definitely not.

In fact, the idea of an affinity with the people of Wales is so strong it crosses Scotland’s great constitutional divide.

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This was one of the most striking findings from a fascinating survey commissioned by Our Scottish Future, the think-tank set up by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Pollsters asked Scottish residents whether they felt a “common bond" with the Welsh. Some 57% of respondents said they did, 22% said they did not.

What really caught my eye was how similar the answers to this question were right across our politics. The share of Scots who feel that “common bond” with the Welsh is 60% for 2021 SNP voters, 54% for Tories, and 64% for Labour; it is 59% for the people pollsters scored as most unionist and 58% for those is found to be most nationalist. It was marginally lower for the folk the think tank calls “Middle Scotland”, at 54%.

Amazing, no? Something, at last, that our Yes and No tribes can agreed about? Maybe. I suspect the reasons why unionists and nationalists sense affinity with the Welsh are very different. For the former, they will be fellow Brits; for the latter, “Celtic cousins”.

Compare these results with those to a similar question about a common bond with the English. Well, overall it is much weaker. Only 33% of all Scots said they felt such a connection. Most, 52%, said they did not. This, as if it needs to be said, after more than three centuries of political union: wow.

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But trowel a little deeper in to the numbers, and real differences emerge across Scottish politics and demographics. The share of respondents who felt a common bond with the English ranged from just 27% for 18-24-year-olds to 39% for the over-65s; it went from 22% for 2021 SNP voters to fully 52% for Tories.

This makes sense. There are no iron rules for how people vote. But we know - thanks to the gold-standard Scottish Election Study - that older people and those who were born in the rest of the United Kingdom trend more than average towards the Conservatives.

The Brown think tank stressed that its poll showed disaffinity with London but a stronger sense of common bonds with provincial northern England. Hey, we could just be talking about “London” and “England” being used as proxies for “elites”. And, of course, we are all used to hearing Scots, usually from industrial central belt, expressing solidarity with Geordies or Scousers.

This is all a bit weird: not least because on some of the big ticket defining issues of our age, like Brexit, Scottish views have been far closer to those of Londoners than Northerners or the Welsh.

But I want to stop a minute and ask a different question. The Our Scottish Future survey interrogated Scots on how they “felt” about common bonds. But it did not try to find out how much its respondents knew about these other parts of the UK.

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Me? I think real affinity comes from real knowledge, and that this is testable.

Are Scots really closer to the Welsh than the English? I doubt it. Actually, I think we show a remarkable lack of curiosity about our “Celtic cousins”. For what it is worth, I think we should know about Wales; I just do not believe we do, not that many of us anyway.

Try and quiz yourself. When was the last time you scrolled through a Welsh paper or watched a Welsh news broadcast? Now, there will be people reading this with friends and family in or from Wales or a special interest who are up to speed on all things Welsh. I think you are a minority: most of us only engage with Wales and Welshness through a UK prism. And even then rarely.

This is not necessarily our fault. Wales and the Welsh can be marginalised in British media and culture, just as Scotland and the Scots are, just as Northern Ireland and its communities are. There is an asymmetry of knowledge across these islands. Most people in the three supposedly Celtic nations consume arts and culture and news from the English “centre”, but not usually from each other.

Sure, there are cultural products that break through, say, Derry Girls or Gavin and Stacey. But here in Scotland we consume far more content from England or America than from countries with whom we declare “common bonds” Far more. And more of us have family, educational or working links with England than with Wales, just because England is bigger and nearer.

All of this generates real cultural and linguistic affinities some of us do not seem able to acknowledge, at least not in the latest poll, at least not politically. But they are real enough.

I am not making an argument for the current union, or against it. But we should acknowledge that even Scottish nationalists are enveloped in a single historical and cultural space, one dominated by England and English, and so many of their references and pre-occupations reflect this. Should we try to peek outside the Anglosphere? Yes, very much so. But with modern language learning crashing, this will not be easy.

The Welsh do not call themselves foreigners. In their own language they are Cymry, fellow countrymen. For us, they remain fellow citizens. They are worth more than vague feelings of a common bond.