Welshis a Celtic language spoken primarily in Wales, with a concentration of speakers in Patagonia. There are approximately 700,000+ speakers of the language worldwide, with the 2011 UK Census demonstrating that 19% of people 3 and older can speak the language. It is the official language of Wales, making it the only du jure official language in the United Kingdom; among the Welsh national assembly, it is a de facto language along with English.

History

The first period of Welsh for which there is a decent amount of documentation is what is known as the Old Welsh period. During this time, spanning roughly from the 9th to the 11th centuries CE, Welsh was spoken across a wide swath of Great Britain. This form of the language is preserved in poetry from both Wales and Scotland. Some of the most famous Welsh works, the Canu Aneirin and the Canu Taliesin both date from this period. It was during this period that the speakers of Welsh were split off from those of Cumbric and Cornish, leading to those languages starting to diverge.

The next period of Welsh is called the Middle Welsh period, which lasted from the 12th to the 14th centuries. The famous Welsh work of the Mabinogion was written during this period, although the tales themselves are clearly much more ancient.

Finally, the Modern Welsh period began in the 15th century and still continues. It can be divided into two periods, Early Modern Welsh, spanning the 15th and the 16th century, and Late Modern Welsh, which started with the publication of the Bible in Welsh. It was during the Late Modern Welsh period that the language started to fall into decline, as more and more speakers switched to English.

Linguistics

As a Brittonic language, Welsh is closely related to Breton. It is more distantly related to languages such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic. Even more distantly, it is related to languages as distinct as Hindi, Russian and English.

Classification

Welsh's full classification is as follows:

Indo-European > Celtic > Insular Celtic > Brittonic > Western > Welsh

Phonology and Phonotactics

Welsh has a seven vowel system, with six of them being contrasted for length, giving a system with 13 phonemic vowels (a long shcwa can exist as an allophone, but is not contrastive). Some of these distinctions exist only in certain dialects, and so several dialects have fewer unique vowels.

Welsh has 26 consonant phonemes, with five more found as allophones or loan words. Among these is the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [ɬ], a sound foreign to English and rare among European languages more generally as well as voiceless nasals and liquids.

Stress in polysyllabic words occurs most commonly on the penultimate syllable, more rarely on the final syllable. Stress on penultimate syllables is characterised by a low pitch, which is followed by a high pitch on the (unstressed) word-final syllable. In words where stress is on the final syllable, that syllable also bears the high pitch. This high pitch is a remnant of the high-pitched word-final stress of early Old Welsh (derived from original penultimate stress in Common Brittonic by the loss of final syllables); the stress shift from final to penultimate occurred in the Old Welsh period without affecting the overall pitch of the word.

Morphology and Syntax

Welsh can be divided into two fairly distinct forms -- literary Welsh or Colloquial Welsh. Colloquial Welsh will be described here.

Welsh nouns decline for two genders, masculine and feminine. Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, with the first being the usual distinction between singular and plural leaving the singular unmarked, with a few words retaining a dual form. The other system of number, the singulative, forms the singular from the unmarked plural; this mainly occurs with things that appear in groups.

Welsh has seven distinct personal pronouns, with variant forms arising in different dialects. These are split across three persons and two numbers, with a secondary split being between the masculine and feminine in the third person singular. Unlike most languages that require dummy pronouns, Welsh uses the feminine pronoun instead of the masculine in this spot. The Welsh personal pronouns can be seen on the table below. Where they are distinct, the literary Welsh pronouns are set off in parentheses. Furthermore, Welsh has a T-V distinction, with chi being used as a formal second person pronouns as well as the plural.

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	mi, i, fi	ni
2nd	ti, di	chi (chwi)
3rd masc	e/fe o/fo (ef)	nhw (hwy)
3rd fem	hi	nhw (hwy)

Welsh has special emphatic forms of the personal pronouns. These are perhaps more correctly termed 'connective or distinctive pronouns' since they are used to indicate a connection between or distinction from another nominal element. Full contextual information is necessary to interpret their function in any given sentence. They can be seen in the table below.

Person	Singular	Plural
1st	minnau, innau, finnau	ninnau
2nd	tithau	chithau
3rd m	fyntau (yntau)	nhwythau (hwythau)
3rd f	hithau	nhwythau (hwythau)

In Colloquial Welsh, most verb tenses are formed using an auxiliary verb, generally bod ('to be'). Out of the seven tense-mood combinations, there are four that make use of bod as an auxiliary: the present, future, imperfect and conditional. Despite this, there are still inflected forms for the preterite, future and conditional, as seen below with the verb talu ('to play') for the first person singular.

Tense	Form
Preterite	talais
future	talaf
conditional	talwn

Bod 'to be' is highly irregular. In addition to having inflected forms of the preterite, future, and conditional, it also maintains inflected present and imperfect forms which are used frequently as auxiliaries with other verbs. Bod also distinguishes between affirmative, interrogative, and negative statements for each tense. Along with this, the verb is highly irregular and has different forms in both the two main dialects of Welsh, especially in the present tense.

Miscellany

There are two main dialects of Welsh: Northern and Southern.
Crwth, a Welsh instrument whose name has been borrowed into English, is often give (erroneously, as <w> represents a vowel in Welsh) as a word with no vowels.
Wales also has town names like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxO0UdpoxM

Samples

Spoken Sample

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCjLWzRUZik

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBl7ZFI-QP8

https://youtu.be/7H2_rLHN9Xk

Written Sample

Genir pawb yn rhydd ac yn gydradd â'i gilydd mewn urddas a hawliau. Fe'u cynysgaeddir â rheswm a chydwybod, a dylai pawb ymddwyn y naill at y llall mewn ysbryd cymodlon.

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History

Linguistics

Miscellany

Samples

Previous LotWs

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