IIRC the contenders were P. Sylvestris and Sitka. There isn't a sawmill on the planet that willingly works with sappy, stringy, sticky Scots Pine so Sitka won. Let's be honest it is a bit of a wunderkind. Subsequently, 2 generations of foresters and the weight of the FC was entirely Sitka-centric.
So, even when the FC had access to better land, post WWII, it grew Sitka. You can walk through Hook Park in Devon and see the Oak stumps from the native woodland it cleared to make way for Sitka and the "experimental" (for the time) Beech monocultures.
I don't know about the linguistics, but there's certainly a full century of central economic planning and ingrained silvicultural "knowledge" to contend with.