The Welsh language, Cymraeg, has always been fascinating to me. I grew up around it, but not immersed in it, so it was always just something slightly beyond my comprehension in my environment. I’ve spoken a little since I was a kid, but only recently started properly diving into it as a proper learner project. I thought it’d make a good first language to test my new Language of the Week format.

The basics

The language has seen much struggle over the centuries, facing oppression by Saxon invaders continuing into the Kingdom of England. The language was only made official in Wales in 2011. If you’d like to learn more about the history of oppression in Wales, you can read Efa Bowen’s “Cofiwch Dryweryn”: A Welsh History of Oppression.

Image: The extent of Brittonic peoples in Western Europe in the 6th century CE. By Rubén Tarrío. (CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Why is this language interesting?

When I look at the Welsh language, I see centuries of echoes of a people who have never given up their culture and way of life, even as outside forces around them have changed. Welsh shows heavy vocabulary borrowing from Latin (it makes up 10-15% of the language’s words), with a lot of basic day-to-day terms coming from there, eg. eglwys, church; ffenestr, window, ysgrifennu, to write. Welsh has shown a strong historical ability to take foreign vocabulary without it impacting the “sound” of the language – words borrowed are almost always crammed into Welsh’s relatively limiting phonological and stress rules and are assimilated into the language completely.

Welsh has also kept a very distinct sound compared to the other Celtic languages. Cornish, Breton, and Irish have all been heavily influenced by their larger neighbours in English and French, but Welsh phonology still contains lots of sounds that are unique to it (at least in Western Europe), with rh and ll being the two key examples I’d like to focus on.

The sound of a language

Most languages have a few key sounds that distinguish them. English’s R sound, for example, doesn’t appear in many other languages in Western Europe, and only in Dutch if we exclude the Celtic languages that English has influenced. Welsh is no different, but the sounds that make it unique are almost uniquely difficult for non-native speakers in Western Europe to learn – rh and ll.

Rh, or to use its IPA form, r̥, is a “voiceless alveolar trill”, ie. an unvoiced rolled r. The voiced form of the rolled r appears very commonly in Europe, from Spain to Slovenia, but the voiceless form generally only appears allophonically (as an alternative form of another sound), and only in a few languages. Welsh is one of only 3 languages in Europe to distinguish this sound from its voiced counterpart. Also interesting to note is that the only other languages in the British Isles that use the rolled r are Scots and Scottish Gaelic, which further distinguishes Welsh from other languages spoken in Northwestern Europe.

Welsh’s ll, the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, is even rarer, mostly found in native North American languages such as Navajo and Inuktitut. Within Europe, it appears very occasionally in some dialects of Norwegian and Swedish, but that’s all. Given it’s so different from most sounds used in Welsh’s neighbouring languages, many non-native speakers also really struggle to pick up this sound.

What’s in a spelling?

I’m now going to briefly touch on Welsh spelling, which gets an undeserved reputation for being difficult to read. However, once you get into the habit of reading w and y as vowels (because they are in Welsh) and learn the digraphs (ch, dd, ff, ll, ng, ph, rh, th), the language becomes extremely intuitive to read. Welsh is very phonetically consistent, there aren’t tonnes of hidden rules with billions of exceptions as you’d find in English, so it’s a lot easier to “spell out” words and get a working pronunciation out of the other side, even if it’s not perfect. While Welsh spelling isn’t quite as intuitive as, for example, Spanish’s, it’s hardly a difficult system to learn compared to the dizzying horrors of English, French, or especially Tibetan (which uses lots of silent letters and digraphs to encode information that may or may not correlate to pronunciation).

Conclusion

Welsh is a language that is near and dear to my heart. I love it to no end for its unique sound, its history, and its speakers. I hope I’ve managed to convey some of that affection in this post.

This series will continue weekly (or not) until I lose the hyperfixation to write about languages. The first two sections of each article should be mostly the same, and then I’ll go down whatever tangent I so please. Thanks for reading!