Welsh

Welsh (Welsh: *Cymraeg/y Gymraeg*) is a Brittonic language spoken in Wales (Welsh: *cymru*), one of the four countries that make up the United Kingdom. As of 2021, Welsh has around 1,000,000 speakers in countries such as Wales, England, Argentina, the USA, Australia and Canada. Only 29.2% of the Welsh population speaks Welsh, at both an L1 and L2 level.

## Welsh

### Classification

Indo-European > Celtic > Brittonic Celtic

## Phonology

Welsh is characterized by the atypical sounds [ɬ] and several voiceless sonorants. Stress is standardly penultimate, except in the rare situations where it doesn’t.

### Phonetic Inventory

#### Consonants

Sounds in (parentheses) are only used in loanwords, although they may appear in certain dialects, or they are allophones.

The aforementioned lateral fricative and voiceless sonorants are evident here, but another odd sound is the voiceless uvular fricative (here listed under 'dorsal'), odd because it is the only uvular sound. Like English, it has two dental fricatives, however that does not mean that one stole these sounds from the other.

/z/, as said before, is only used in loanwords, but it is frequently realized as /s/ in northern accents. Additionally, /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are only used in loanwords, but in some dialects they have arisen from a juxtaposition of /t/ or /d/ with /j/.The voiceless nasal are typically only found at the beginning of a word, and they arise from nasal mutation. When /χ/ is juxtaposed with /w/ at the beginning of a word, it is frequently realized as /ʍ/.

When /j/ is next to /h/, it devoices, resulting in /ç/. In some northern dialects, the cluster /çj/ is typically used in place of an intervocalic /ɬ/.

The voiceless plosives are typically only distinguished from their voiced counterparts by aspiration, as the voiced plosives are devoiced in most contexts.

The voiced fricatives are typically not pronounced in certain contexts. This seemed to happen so frequently with the velar fricative /ɣ/ that it is no longer in the language. The sound /ʃ/ is used in northern accents when 's' is juxtaposed with /iː/ or /j/, while in the south it is /ɪ/ and /iː/. In southwestern dialects, /χ/ is pronounced as /x/. /r/ is pronounced as /ʁ/ in some places, and to the north, /l/ is velarized consistently.

#### Vowels

Welsh, compared to other languages, has a lot of vowels that, when including long and short forms, tally up to 13.

## Writing

### Romanization

*Main Article: Welsh Romanization*

Welsh is written in a Latin alphabet of 29 letters, of which eight are digraphs treated as separate letters for collation:

"w" and "y" are considered vowels as well as "a", "e", "i", "o", and "u"

The letters "k", "q", "v", "x" and "z" can be used in English loanwords but are often turned into their Welsh forms: "c", "cw", "f", "s" and "s", respectively.

The circumflex (like *â*) is used to make long vowels, however its omission does not necessarily mean the vowel is short. The [[Grave Accent|grave accent] (like *à*) is used to indicate a short vowel where a long vowel would be expected by stress rules. The acute accent (like *á*) over the ultimate syllable indicates stress on it, as well as indicating that the letter *w* should be pronounced as a vowel instead of an expected glide. The diaeresis (like *ä*) indicates that two juxtaposed vowels are separate instead of being a diphthong. The grave, acute, and, to a lesser extent, diaeresis are frequently omitted from casual writing, but the circumflex is typically retained. Accented letters are considered the same as unaccented letters.

The majority of dialects follow the following stress patterns:

* If a vowel is unstressed, it must be short
* If a stressed vowel is not marked by a diacritic, it is long if it is at the end of a word with an open syllable or if before the fricatives and voiced stops
* If a stressed vowel is not marked by a diacritic, it is short if it is in an unstressed (proclitic) word or if before *p*, *t*, *c*, *ng* and most consonant clusters

When *y* is pronounced as /ə/, it is always short regardless of the above rules. When it is a close (or near-close) vowel, it follows the rules.

## Syntax

The canonical Welsh word order is VSO (Verb-subject-object), as opposed to the canonical English word order, SVO (Subject-verb-object)

The present tense is constructed with *bod* ("to be") as an auxiliary verb, with the main noun appearing as a verb after the particle *yn*:

*Mae Megan yn mynd i Lanelli*

Megan is going to Lanelli.

## Example Sentences and Literature

*Mae Megan yn mynd i Lanelli*

Megan is going to Lanelli.

## Other Media

### Videos

The Celtic Languages by Langfocus

About the Welsh Language by JuLingo