Welsh language

Welsh (' or ', pronounced , ), is a member of the Brythonic branch of Celtic spoken natively in Wales (Cymru), England by some along the Welsh border, and in the Chubut Valley, a Welsh immigrant colony in the Patagonia region of Argentina.

There are also speakers of Welsh throughout the world, most notably in the rest of Great Britain, the United States and Australia.

Due to the increasing use of the English language the numbers of Welsh speakers had been declining for decades. However, following a number of measures, including the introduction of the Welsh Language Act 1993, Welsh has enjoyed a strong revival in recent years and has an equal status with English in the public sector in Wales. It is the most spoken Celtic language.

See Welsh English for the English language as spoken in Wales.

Status

The 2001 census gives a figure of 20.5% of the population of Wales as Welsh speakers (up from 18.5% in 1991), out of a population of about 3 million; however, the same census shows that 25% of residents were born outside Wales. The number of Welsh speakers throughout the rest of Britain is uncertain, but numbers are higher in the main cities and there are speakers along England's border with Wales. In 1993, S4C, the Welsh-language TV channel published the results of a survey into the numbers of people speaking/understanding Welsh, and this estimated that there were some 133,000 Welsh-speakers living in England, about 50,000 of them in the Greater London area. More Welsh Speakers than Previously Believed

Even among the Welsh-speakers, few, if any, residents of Wales are monolingual in Welsh. However, a large number of Welsh speakers are more comfortable expressing themselves in Welsh than in English. A speaker's choice of language can vary according to the subject domain and the social context (known in linguistics as code-switching).

Although Welsh is a minority language, support for the language grew during the second half of the 20th century, along with the rise of nationalist political organisations such as the political party Plaid Cymru and Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society).

Welsh as a first language is largely concentrated in the less urban north and west of Wales, principally Gwynedd, Denbighshire, Anglesey (), Carmarthenshire, North Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, and parts of western Glamorgan and south-western Powys, although first-language and other fluent speakers can be found throughout Wales.

Welsh is very much a living language. It is used in conversation every day by thousands and seen in Wales everywhere. The Welsh Language Act 1993 and the Government of Wales Act 1998 provide that the Welsh and English languages should be treated on a basis of equality. Public bodies are required to prepare and implement a Welsh Language Scheme. Thus local councils and the Welsh Assembly use Welsh as an official language, issuing official literature and publicity in Welsh versions (e.g. letters to parents from schools, library information, and council information) and all road signs in Wales should be in English and Welsh, including the Welsh versions of place names. The teaching of Welsh is now compulsory in all schools in Wales up to age 16, and this has had a major effect in stabilising and to some extent reversing the decline in the language. It means, for example, that even the children of English monoglot migrants to Wales grow up with a knowledge of the language. However, the vast majority of people in the main population centres of South Wales never use the language in daily life.

The UK government has ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in respect to Welsh.

The language has greatly increased its prominence since the creation of the television channel S4C in November 1982, which broadcasts exclusively in Welsh during peak viewing hours. The main evening television news provided by the BBC can be found here (Real Media).

Given the British Government's current plans (since December 2001) to ensure that all immigrants know English, it remains to be seen if Welsh will be considered a separate case. At present, a knowledge of either Welsh, English or Scottish Gaelic is sufficient for naturalisation purposes and it is believed that this policy will be continued in any proposed changes to the law.

History

Like most languages, there are identifiable periods within the history of Welsh, although the boundaries between these are often indistinct.

Old Welsh

The earliest extant sources of a language identifiable as Welsh go back to about the 6th century, and the language of this period is known as Early Welsh. Very little of this language remains. The next main period, somewhat better attested, is Old Welsh () (9th to 11th centuries); poetry from both Wales and Scotland has been preserved in this form of the language. As Germanic and Gaelic colonisation of Great Britain proceeded, the Brythonic speakers in Wales were split off from those in northern England, speaking Cumbrian, and those in the south-west, speaking what would become Cornish, and so the languages diverged. Both "Canu Aneirin" and "Canu Taliesin" were in this era.

Middle Welsh

Middle Welsh (or ) is the label attached to the Welsh of the 12th to 14th centuries, of which much more remains than for any earlier period. This is the language of nearly all surviving early manuscripts of the Mabinogion, although the tales themselves are certainly much older. It is also the language of the existing Welsh law manuscripts. Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible, albeit with some work, to a modern-day Welsh speaker.

Modern Welsh

Modern Welsh can be divided into two periods. The first, Early Modern Welsh ran from the 14th century to roughly the end of the 16th century and was the language used by Dafydd ap Gwilym.

Late Modern Welsh

Late Modern Welsh began with the publication of William Morgan's translation of the Bible in 1588. Like its English counterpart, the King James Version, this proved to have a strong stabilising effect on the language, and indeed the language today still bears the same Late Modern label as Morgan's language. Of course, many minor changes have occurred since then.

19th century

The language enjoyed a further boost in the 19th century, with the publication of some of the first complete and concise Welsh dictionaries. Early work by Welsh lexicographic pioneers such as Daniel Silvan Evans ensured that the language was documented as accurately as possible, and modern dictionaries such as the (the University of Wales Dictionary), are direct descendants of these dictionaries.

However, the influx of English workers during the Industrial Revolution in Wales from about 1800 led to a substantial dilution of the Welsh-speaking population of Wales. English migrants seldom learnt Welsh and their Welsh colleagues tended to speak English in mixed Welsh–English contexts, and bilingualism became almost universal. The legal status of Welsh was inferior to that of English, and so English gradually came to prevail, except in the most rural areas, particularly in north west and mid Wales. An important exception, however, was in the non-conformist churches, which were strongly associated with the Welsh language.

20th and 21st centuries

By the twentieth century, the numbers of Welsh speakers were shrinking at a rate which suggested that it would be extinct within a few generations. The 10-yearly census first started to ask language questions in 1891, by which time 54% of the population still spoke Welsh. The percentage fell with every subsequent census, until reaching an all-time low in 1981 (19%). In 1991 the position was stable (19% as in 1981) and in the most recent census, 2001, it has risen to 21% able to speak Welsh. The 2001 census also recorded that 20% could read Welsh, 18% could write Welsh, and 24% could understand Welsh. Furthermore, the highest proportion of Welsh speakers was among young people, which bodes well for the future of Welsh. In 2001, 39% of children aged 10 to 15 were able to speak, read and write Welsh (many of them having learnt it at school), compared with 25% of 16 to 19 year olds.

It seems that the rise of Welsh nationalism rallied supporters of the language, and the establishment of Welsh television and radio found a mass audience which was encouraged in the retention of its Welsh. Perhaps most important of all, at the end of the twentieth century it became compulsory for all school children to learn Welsh up to age 16, and this both reinforced the language in Welsh-speaking areas and reintroduced at least an elementary knowledge of it in areas which had become more or less wholly Anglophone. The decline in the percentage of people in Wales who can speak Welsh has now been halted, and there are even signs of a modest recovery. However, although Welsh is the daily language in many parts of Wales, English is almost universally understood.

Grammar

Phonology

Consonants

Welsh has the following consonant phonemes:

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Labiovelar	Dental	Alveolar	Alveolar lateral	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive
Affricate
Nasal
Fricative
Trill
Approximant

occurs only in unassimilated loanwords. and occur mainly in loanwords, but also in some dialects as developments from and ; the voiceless nasals , , occur only as a consequence of nasal mutation.

Vowels

Monophthongs	Front	Central	Back
Close
Near-close
Close mid
Open mid
Open

The vowels and occur only in Northern dialects; in Southern dialects they are replaced by and respectively. In Southern dialects, the contrast between long and short vowels is found in stressed syllables only; in Northern dialects, the contrast is found only in stressed word-final syllables (including monosyllabic words).

The vowel does not occur in the final syllable of words (except a few monosyllables).

Diphthongs	Second component is front	Second component is central	Second component is back
First component is close
First component is mid
First component is open

The diphthongs containing occur only in Northern dialects; in Southern dialects is replaced by , are merged with , and are merged with .

Stress

Stress in polysyllabic words occurs most commonly on the penultimate syllable, more rarely on the final syllable.

The positioning of the stress means that related words or concepts (or even plurals) can sound quite different, as syllables are added to the end of a word and the stress moves correspondingly, e.g.:

— — an article or essay
— — writing
— — a secretary
— — a female secretary

(Note also how adding a syllable to ' to form ' changes the pronunciation of the second "y". This is because the pronunciation of "y" depends on whether or not it is in the final syllable.)

The connection between the Welsh word ' and the Latin ' "I write", from which it is derived, is fairly clear, taking diachronic sound shifts into account.

Orthography

Alphabet

Letter	Name of letter	Corresponding sounds
a
b
c
ch
d
dd
e
f
ff
g
ng
h	', '
i
l
ll
m
n
o
p
ph
r
rh	', '
s
t
th
u		(N), (S)
w
y		(N), (S)

h indicates voicelessness in mh, nh, and ngh.
ph occurs occasionally in words derived from Greek (e.g. '), although many words of Greek origin are spelt with ff (e.g. '). More commonly the spelling marks the result of aspirate mutation (e.g. ei phen-ôl)
y indicates in unstressed monosyllabic words (e.g. ' "the", ' "my") or non-final syllables, but (N) or (S) everywhere else.
The digraphs (letters consisting of two characters) are treated as a single letter (with the collation order as listed above), although the same combinations of characters can sometimes also arise as a juxtaposition of two separate letters. For example, the digraph ng representing is alphabetised between g and h (alphabetical order ', ', ), but when ng is two letters representing it is alphabetised between nf and nh (alphabetical order ', ', ).
si indicates when followed by a vowel
di and ti sometimes indicate and respectively when followed by a vowel. Otherwise and are spelled j and ts, but only in loanwords like ' "jug" and ' "watch".

Spelling the diphthongs

Orthography	Northern dialects	Southern dialects
ae
ai
au	but as plural ending	but as plural ending
aw
ei
eu
ew
ey
iw
oe
oi
ou
uw
wy
yw

Diacritics

Welsh makes use of a number of diacritics.

The circumflex is used to mark long vowels. Thus â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, ŷ are always long, but a, e, i, o, u, w, y are not necessarily short. Not all long vowels are marked with a circumflex. A useful rule of thumb is that they are used particularly in monosyllabic words where the vowel is followed by -l, -n or -r. There are many exceptions to this, however.

The grave accent is sometimes used to mark vowels that should be short, when a long vowel would normally be expected, e.g. ' (a cough), ' (a pass/permit or a lift in a car); ' (smoke), ' (a mug).

The acute accent is sometimes used to mark a stressed final syllable in a polysyllabic word. Thus the words ' (to empty) and ' (decline) have final stress. However, not all polysyllabic words with final stress are marked with the acute accent.

The diaeresis indicates that a vowel letter is to be pronounced fully, not as a semivowel, e.g. (to copy) — pronounced , not *.

The grave and acute accents in particular are very often omitted in casual writing, and the same is true to a lesser extent of the diaeresis. The circumflex, however, is usually included.

Predicting vowel length from orthography

As mentioned above, vowels marked with the circumflex are always long, and those marked with the grave accent are always short. If a vowel is not marked with a diacritic, its length must be determined by its environment.

An unmarked vowel is long:

in a stressed monosyllabic word when no consonant follows, e.g. (good)
before b, ch, d, dd, g, f, ff, s, th, e.g. ' (son), ' (favourite), (thing)
before l, n, r (in the case of i, u), e.g. ' ("behind), ' (picture), (long)
in Northern dialects, before clusters of two consonants when the first one is ll or s, e.g. ' (hair), ' (witness)

An unmarked vowel is short:

in an unstressed (proclitic) word, e.g. (and)
before p, t, c, m, ng, e.g. ' (step), ' (ship)
before l, n, r (in the case of a, e, o, w, y), e.g. ' (tall), (curtain), ' (fur)
in Southern dialects, before clusters of two consonants, e.g. ' (saint), ' (hair), (witness)
in Northern dialects, before clusters of two consonants when the first one is n or r, e.g. ' (saint), ' (hedge)
in Northern dialects, in any syllable that is not both stressed and word-final
in Southern dialects, in any unstressed syllable

Morphology

Welsh morphology has much in common with that of the other modern Insular Celtic languages, such as the use of initial consonant mutations, and the use of so-called "conjugated prepositions" (prepositions that fuse with the personal pronouns that are their object). Welsh nouns belong to one of two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, but are not inflected for case. Welsh has a variety of different endings to indicate the plural, and two endings to indicate the singular of some nouns. In spoken Welsh, verb inflection is indicated primarily by the use of auxiliary verbs, rather than by the inflection of the main verb. In literary Welsh, on the other hand, inflection of the main verb is usual.

Counting system

The traditional counting system used by the Welsh language is vigesimal, i.e. based on twenties, as in French, where numbers from 11–14 are "x on ten", 16–19 are "x on fifteen" (though 18 is more usually "two nines"); numbers from 21–39 are "1–19 on twenty", 40 is "two twenties", 60 is "three twenties", etc.

There is also a decimal counting system, favoured by younger people, more common in South Wales, and which appears to be commonly used in Patagonian Welsh, where numbers are "x tens y", e.g. thirty-five in decimal is (three ten five) while in vigesimal it is (fifteen (itself "five-ten") on twenty).

A further complication is that while there is only one word for "one" (') there are masculine and feminine forms of the numbers "two" (' and '), "three" (' and ') and "four" (' and ), which must agree with the grammatical gender of the objects being counted, though this rule is less strictly observed with the decimal counting system.

Number	Vigesimal system	Decimal system
1
2	(m), (f)
3	(m), (f)
4	(m), (f)
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18	("two nines")
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
etc.
40	("two twenties")
41
50	("half a hundred")
51
60
61
70		saith deg
71
80
81
90
91
100
200
300
400
500
600
1000
2000
1,000,000
1,000,000,000

Notes:

The words ' (ten), ' (twelve) and ' (fifteen) often become ', ' and ' respectively when before a word beginning with 'm', e.g. ' (ten minutes), ' (twelve miles), (fifteen years).

The numbers ' (five), ' (six) and ' (hundred) drop the final consonant when they stand immediately in front of a noun, e.g. ' (five bottles), ' (six spoons), ' (a hundred pounds).

Larger numbers tend to use the decimal system, e.g. 1,965 '. An exception to this rule is when referring to years, where after the number of thousands, the individual digits are spoken, e.g. 1965 '. This system appears to have broken down for years after 2000, e.g. 2005 is .

The number miliwn is feminine, and biliwn is masculine. It is necessary for the gender of these to be different as, for instance, they can both mutate to 2 filiwn. Two million is therefore dwy filiwn, and two billion is dau filiwn.

Other features of Welsh grammar

Possessives as object pronouns : The Welsh for "I like Rhodri" is "'" ("I am liking ^* Rhodri"), but "I like him" is "'" — literally, "I am his liking him"; "I like you" is "" ("I am your liking you"), etc.
Significant use of auxiliary verbs : While English can either use verbs directly (e.g. "I go") or with the aid of an auxiliary verb ("I am going", here using "to be" as the auxiliary), non-literary Welsh inclines very strongly towards the latter use. In the present tense, all verbs are used with the auxiliary "'" (to be), so "'" is literally "I am going", but also means simply "I go". In the past and future tenses, there are inflected forms of all verbs (which are invariably used in the written language), but it is more common nowadays in speech to use the verbal noun (', loosely equal to the infinitive in English) together with the inflected form of "'" (to do), so "I went" can be "'" or "'" and "I will go" can be "'" or "'". There is also a future form using the auxiliary ', giving "'" (perhaps best translated as "I will be going") and an imperfect tense (a continuous/habitual past tense) also using ', with ' meaning "I used to go/I was going".
Affirmative markers : ' or ' is often placed before inflected verbs to show that they are declarative. In the present and imperfect of the verb ' (to be), ' is used instead. Mi is mainly restricted to colloquial Northern Welsh, with fe predominating in the South and in the formal or literary register. Such marking of the declarative is, in any case, rather less common in higher registers.

Dialects

Like any natural language, Welsh has a number of different dialects.

These are very evident in the spoken, and to a lesser extent the written, language. A convenient, if slightly simplistic, classification is into North Walian and South Walian forms (or "'" and "'" based on the word for North, ', and the South Walian word for "them over there"). The differences between dialects encompass vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar, although particularly in the last regard the differences are in fact relatively minor. Much more fine-grained classifications exist beyond north and south, the book 'Thomas, B. and Thomas, P. W. , published by Gwasg Taf, ISBN 0-948469-14-5. Out of print about Welsh dialects, refers to the earlier Linguistic Geography of Wales Thomas, A. R. 1973 Linguistic Geography of Wales as describing six different regions which could be identified as having words specific to those regions; the cassette accompanying their book includes recordings of fourteen different speakers demonstrating aspects of different dialects.

Another dialect is Patagonian Welsh, which has developed since the start of the Welsh settlement in Argentina in 1865; it includes Spanish loanwords and terms for local features.

An example of the difference between North and South Walian usage would be the question "Do you want a cup of tea?" In the North this would typically be "'", while in the South the question "'" would be more likely. An example of a pronunciation difference between Northern and Southern Welsh is the tendency of Southern dialects to "lisp" the letter "s", e.g. , a month, would tend to be pronounced in the north, and [mi:ʃ in the south.

In fact, the difference between dialects of modern spoken Welsh pale into insignificance compared to the difference between the spoken and literary languages. The latter is significantly more formal and is the language of Welsh translations of the Bible, amongst other things (although the — New Welsh Bible — is significantly less formal than the traditional 1588 Bible). Gareth King, author of a Welsh grammar, observes that "The difference between these two is much greater than between the virtually identical colloquial and literary forms of English" and goes so far as to state "that there are good grounds for regarding them as separate languages". He comments that whilst colloquial Welsh is a mother tongue requiring no special learning to acquire, literary Welsh is the mother tongue of no-one, and must be taught to people.King, G. Modern Welsh: a comprehensive grammar, published by Routledge, ISBN 0-415-09269-8 p3

Although the question "Do you want a cup of tea?" is not likely to occur in literary Welsh usage, if it did it would be along the lines of ""

Amongst the characteristics of the literary, as against the spoken, language are a higher dependence on inflected verb forms, a shift in the usage of some of the tenses, a reduction in the explicit use of pronouns (since the information is usually conveyed in the verb/preposition inflections) and a greatly reduced tendency to substitute English loanwords for native Welsh words.

Welsh in education

The decade around 1840 was a period of great social upheaval in Wales, manifested in the Chartist movement, which culminated in 20,000 people marching on Newport in 1839 resulting in a riot when 20 people were killed by soldiers defending the Westgate Hotel, and the Rebecca Riots when tollbooths on turnpikes were systematically destroyed. This unrest brought the state of education in Wales to the attention of the English establishment, as social reformers of the time considered education as a means of dealing with social ills, The Times newspaper being prominent among those who considered that the lack of education of the Welsh people was the root cause of most of the problems, although the population was generally literate in Welsh because of the activities of Sunday Schools and the need to read the Bible. In July 1846, three commissioners, R. R. W. Lingen, Jellynger C. Symons and H. R. Vaughan Johnson, were appointed to inquire into the state of education in Wales; the Commissioners were all Anglicans, and hence unsympathetic to the Non-conformist majority in Wales, and were monoglot English-speakers.

The Commissioners presented their report to the Government on 1 July 1847 in three large blue-bound volumes. This report quickly became known as (The Treachery of the Blue Books) as, apart from documenting the state of education in Wales, the Commissioners were also free with their comments disparaging the language, Non-conformity, and the morals of the Welsh people in general. An immediate effect of the report was for a belief to take root in the minds of ordinary people that the only way for Welsh people to get on in the world was through the medium of English, and an inferiority complex developed about the Welsh language whose effects have not yet been completely eradicated. The historian Professor Kenneth O. Morgan referred to the significance of the report and its consequences as "the Glencoe and the Amritsar of Welsh history".

In the later 19th century virtually all teaching in the schools of Wales was in English, even in areas where the pupils barely understood English. Some schools used the Welsh Not, a piece of wood, often bearing the letters "WN", which was hung around the neck of any pupil caught speaking Welsh. The pupil could pass it on to any schoolmate heard speaking Welsh, with the pupil wearing it at the end of the day being given a beating. Towards the beginning of the 20th century this policy slowly began to change, partly owing to the efforts of Owen Morgan Edwards when he became chief inspector of schools for Wales in 1907.

The Aberystwyth Welsh School () was founded in 1939 by Sir Ifan ap Owen Edwards, the son of O.M. Edwards as the first Welsh Primary School. The headteacher was Norah Isaac. is still a very successful school and now there are Welsh language Primary Schools all over the country.

Ysgol Glan Clwyd was established in Rhyl in 1955 as the first Welsh language school to teach to a Secondary level.

Welsh is now widely used in education. All Welsh universities teach some courses in Welsh (most notably the University of Wales, Bangor and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth) but are primarily English language.

Under the National Curriculum, school children in Wales must study Welsh up to the age of 16. According to the Welsh Language Board ^*, over a quarter of children in Wales attend schools which teach predominantly through the medium of Welsh. The remainder study Welsh as a second language in English-medium schools. Specialist teachers of Welsh called support the teaching of Welsh in the National Curriculum.

Welsh in information technology

Welsh has a substantial presence on the Internet, but this is strongly biased towards public bodies: the ratio of search engine hit frequencies for Welsh words to their English equivalents tends to be about 0.1% for formal terms such as ' (education), ' (society) or ' (government), but only about 0.01% for everyday terms such as ' (cow), ' (sleet) or ' (knife).

However, there are many Welsh language blogs, many of which are listed on the sites Y Rhithfro and Blogiadur.

The Welsh Language Board released online resources in March 2006 suggesting numerous Welsh words for IT terms, as well as words in finance, retail, education, human resources and other subjects.

The BBC website has a Welsh language section called BBC Cymru'r Byd, which includes news articles in Welsh.

Microsoft Windows XP is available in Welsh: free CD packs can be ordered from the Welsh Language Board. Numerous Linux distributions are also available in Welsh.

Welsh in warfare

Secure communications are often difficult to achieve in wartime. Cryptography can be used to protect messages, but this can be a time-consuming process and may not be feasible if the message is urgent. Instead, Navajo code talkers were used by the Americans during World War II. It has been rumoured that British forces used Welsh in a similar manner.

More recently, Welsh regiments serving in Bosnia used Welsh for emergency communications that needed to be secure.

References

External links

About the language

Dictionaries

Welsh–English & English-Welsh Dictionary from the University of Wales, Lampeter
: University of Wales Dictionary of the Welsh Language, a historical dictionary of Welsh (with a second edition in progress, including an embryonic on-line version)
The BBC's online Welsh learners site and Dictionary

Learning the language

Learn Welsh from the BBC
A Welsh Course by Mark Nodine
Learn Welsh with S4C
E-Wlpan, Swansea University
Welsh for Adults, University of Bangor: lists Welsh class venues throughout North Wales.

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