Welsh language

[[pl:J%EAzyk walijski]]

Welsh (y Gymraeg) is a Brythonic branch of Celtic spoken natively in the part of Britain known as Wales (Cymru), and in Trevelin, a Welsh immigrant colony in the Patagonia region of Argentina. There are also some speakers of Welsh in England, the US, and Australia.

Status

The usual estimate given for the number of Welsh speakers in Wales is 20% (out of a population of about 3 million), however it appears that about a third of the population of Wales has immigrated within the last 30 years.

Even among the Welsh-speakers, few if any residents of Wales are monolingual in Welsh.

Although Welsh is a minority language, and thus threatened by the dominance of English, support for the language grew during the second half of the twentieth 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 restricted to the less urban north and west of Wales, principally Gwynedd, Merioneth, Anglesey (Mon) and Ceredigion.

Welsh is very much a living language. It is used in conversation every day, and seen in Wales everywhere. Local government (including the Welsh assembly) uses Welsh as its official language, public bodies issue 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 are in English and Welsh, including the Welsh versions of place names (some of which are recent inventions based on the English names).

The language has greatly increased its prominence since the creation of the television channel S4C in November 1982, which broadcasts exclusively in Welsh in peak viewing hours. The main evening television news provided by the BBC can be found here http://www.bbc.co.uk/cymru/live/newyddion.ram (Real Media)

Given the British Government's current plans (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 and development

One possible source for research http://users.comlab.ox.ac.uk/geraint.jones/about.welsh/

Grammar

As well as sharing many of the characteristics of other Indo-European languages (such as a masculine and feminine grammatical gender), Welsh has a number of distinctive grammatical features, shared by other Celtic languages. Here are a few:

• Initial consonant mutation. The first letter of a word in Welsh may change depending on grammatical context. For example, the word for "stone" is "carreg", but "the stone" is "y garreg" (soft mutation), "my stone" is "fy ngharreg" (nasal mutation) and "her stone" is "ei charreg" (aspirate mutation). The examples show usage in the standard language; usage of the nasal and aspirate mutations varies in spoken Welsh.
• Inflected (or conjugated) prepositions. Most prepositions in Welsh change their form when followed by a pronoun. For example, "to Eleri" is "i Eleri", but "to him" is "iddo fe" and "to her" is "iddi hi".
• No indefinite article. So "cath" can mean "cat" or "a cat".
• Genitive construction.' The genitive in Welsh is formed by putting two noun phrases next to each other, the owner coming second. This is almost analogous to a silent English "of". So English "The cat's mother," or "mother of the cat," becomes Welsh "mam y gath" - literally, "mother the cat"; "the man's car's windows" is "ffenestri car y dyn" - literally, "windows car the man".
• Possessives as object pronouns. The Welsh for "I like Rhodri" is "Dw i'n hoffi Rhodri" ("I am liking Rhodri"), but "I like him" is "dw i'n ei hoffi fe" - literally, "I am his liking him"; "I like you" is "dw i'n dy hoffi di" ("I am your liking you"), etc.

Pronunciation Guide

a	As in father.
c	As in cat.
ch	As in German.
dd	As th in that: ddogfen (document) DHOG-ven.
f	As in of.
ff	As in off.
g	As in get, gone.
ll	Voiceless l sound, found also in Navajo, where it is written as crossed l and in some (north-west) caucasian languages where it is spelled l followed by the hard sign (cyrillic alphabet).
mh	m followed by aspiration.
nh	n followed by aspiration.
ngh	ng followed by aspiration.
rh	r followed by aspiration.
u	Same as i (in southern dialects), or as an unrounded u (northern dialects).
w	As oo in soon. Also forms diphthongs: well, pwy, brown (which rhymes with English grown, not brown).
y	As either vowel in sunny, depending on position in the word.