Welsh language

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 many 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). Although a minority language, and thus threatened by the dominance of English, support for the language grew during the second half of the twentieth century, coterminously with the rise of Nationalist political organisations such as Plaid Cymru and Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society).

Welsh is very much a living language. It is used in conversation everyday, 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, council information) and all road signs in Wales are in English and Welsh, including the Welsh versions of place names (sometimes made after the English names).

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.

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.