- Official language in
- United Kingdom
- Script
- Latin
- Speakers
- 538K (2021)
Where it's spoken
Welsh (Cymraeg) is a Celtic language spoken in Wales. Under a Welsh-language measure enacted by the National Assembly for Wales, the Welsh language has official status in Wales; the same measure states that this does not affect the status of the English language in Wales, so English continues to be used alongside it. At the most recent census, an estimated 17.8% of Wales's usual residents aged three or older reported being able to speak Welsh.
Sources
- Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011, Section 1 ("Official status of the Welsh language") — s.1(1) and s.1(4)
- Welsh Government, "Welsh language in Wales (Census 2021)" [HTML] — Census Day 2021 estimate, usual residents aged 3+
- Canolfan Peniarth (Prifysgol Cymru Y Drindod Dewi Sant / University of Wales Trinity Saint David) — "The Mutations" (dysgu Cymraeg course resource, unit CYCS7018) — "the Celtic languages (which include Irish, Scots Gaelic, Breton, Manx and Cornish as well as Welsh)"
Script & pronunciation
Welsh is written in the Latin alphabet, with several two-letter combinations counted among its letters rather than read as sequences of two separate ones: a historical and comparative grammar of Welsh traces this alphabet, digraphs included, to a form fixed by the early seventeenth century. This app's card for "thank you," Diolch, ends in the digraph ch; its card for "I can't speak Welsh," Dw i ddim yn gallu siarad Cymraeg, contains dd (in ddim) and ll (in gallu) — each a single Welsh letter with one fixed sound, unlike either letter read on its own in English. The single letters f and c also keep one value each: the same grammar gives f the sound of English v and ff the sound of English f, and gives c always the sound of English k, never s. This app's card asking for a phone number, "Ga i gael dy rif ffôn di?," shows both: rif ("number") has a single f, and ffôn ("phone") has ff. Its card about bringing an assistance dog inside, "A gaf i ddod â'm ci cymorth i mewn?," shows ci ("dog") pronounced with a k sound rather than an s sound. A circumflex accent marks a long vowel, as in this app's card for "clean," glân.
Sources
- Morris-Jones, John (1913). "A Welsh Grammar, Historical and Comparative." Oxford: Clarendon Press — §7.ii (alphabet); §17.i, iii, iv (c, ff/ph, f); §13 (tôn/tonn, circumflex)
Grammar essentials
Welsh's basic word order is verb-initial: an academic account of the history of Welsh syntax describes this as the usual word order in modern Welsh, and describes the rise of a dominant verb-subject-object pattern as the major development in the history of Welsh main clauses. This app's card asking where the toilet is, "Ble mae'r toiled?," places the verb mae ("is") straight after the question word. Welsh also has initial consonant mutation, in which a word's first consonant changes according to its grammatical context: in the soft mutation, for example, the c of Cymru ("Wales") changes to g after the preposition i ("to"), giving Gymru. A Welsh-language teaching resource published by a Welsh university centre gives exactly this example, which is also this app's greeting card, "Croeso i Gymru!" ("Welcome to Wales!"). Welsh places adjectives after the noun they describe, the reverse of English order — a study of Welsh noun-phrase structure describes this noun-adjective order as characteristic of Welsh. This app's card for a headache, "Mae pen tost gyda fi" ("I have a headache"), is literally "sore head," pen ("head") followed by tost ("sore"). In spoken Welsh, negation is chiefly carried by the word ddim: the same historical account describes ddim as having become the primary marker of negation in spoken Welsh, positioned after the subject. This app's card for "I can't speak Welsh," "Dw i ddim yn gallu siarad Cymraeg," places ddim right after the subject pronoun i ("I") and before the rest of the verb phrase.
Sources
- Borsley, Robert D.; Tallerman, Maggie; Willis, David (2007). "The Syntax of Welsh." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press — Chapter 9, "Historical syntax" (preprint) — pp.1-2 (verb-initial word order); p.18 (negation ddim)
- Canolfan Peniarth (Prifysgol Cymru Y Drindod Dewi Sant / University of Wales Trinity Saint David) — "The Mutations" (dysgu Cymraeg course resource, unit CYCS7018) — Soft mutation example: Cymru → Gymru after "i"
- Willis, David. "Against N-raising and NP-raising Analyses of Welsh Noun Phrases." Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge (unpublished manuscript) — §1 Introduction (noun-adjective order)
Politeness & etiquette
Welsh distinguishes two ways of saying "you": ti, used with someone the speaker knows well or with a child, and chi, used on less familiar occasions, according to an online introductory Welsh course. This app's card asking where someone is from, "O ble wyt ti'n dod?" ("Where are you from?"), uses the informal ti; its card for meeting someone, "Braf cwrdd â chi" ("Nice to meet you"), uses the formal chi.