Welsh orthography

Template:Short description Template:Use dmy dates Template:IPA notice Welsh orthography uses 29 letters (including eight digraphs) of the Latin script to write native Welsh words as well as established loanwords.

Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)
A	B	C	CH	D	DD	E	F	FF	G	NG	H	I	J	L	LL	M	N	O	P	PH	R	RH	S	T	TH	U	W	Y
Titlecase forms
A	B	C	Ch	D	Dd	E	F	Ff	G	Ng	H	I	J	L	Ll	M	N	O	P	Ph	R	Rh	S	T	Th	U	W	Y
Minuscule forms (also called lowercase or small letters)
a	b	c	ch	d	dd	e	f	ff	g	ng	h	i	j	l	ll	m	n	o	p	ph	r	rh	s	t	th	u	w	y

Welsh orthography makes use of multiple diacritics, which are primarily used on vowels, namely the acute accent (), the grave accent (), the circumflex (, , or ) and the diaeresis (). They are considered variants of their base letter, i.e. they are not alphabetised separately. The Welsh alphabet also lacks Template:Vr (, ), Template:Vr (, ), Template:Vr (, ), Template:Vr (, ), and Template:Vr (, /).

Foreign words

Welsh borrows a number of words from English. Those words are spelled according to Welsh spelling conventions, for example: "bus", "buck", "bucket", "car", "noggin", "gob", "slogan", "flannel", "truant", and "gaol".

Non-native letters in Welsh

The letter Template:Vr has only recentlyTemplate:When been accepted into Welsh orthography: for use in words borrowed from English which retain the sound, even when it originally was not represented by Template:Vr in English orthography, as in ("garage"), ("giraffe"), and ("fridge"). Older borrowings of English words containing resulted in the sound being pronounced and spelled in various other ways, resulting in occasional doublets such as and ("Japan").Template:Efn

The letters Template:Vr are not part of the Welsh Alphabet. However, these letters are used in foreign proper names and their derivatives: , . They are also sometimes used in technical and other specialized terms, like kilogram, queer, volt and zero, but in all cases can be, and often are, nativised: , , and .

History

File:Welsh alphabet card italic C19th.jpg

A 19th-century Welsh alphabet printed in Welsh, without Template:Vr or Template:Vr

The earliest samples of written Welsh date from the 6th century and are in the Latin alphabet (see Old Welsh). The orthography differs from that of modern Welsh, particularly in the use of Template:Vr to represent the voiced plosives non initially. Similarly, the voiced fricatives were written Template:Vr.

By the Middle Welsh period, this had given way to quite a bit of variability: Although Template:Vr were now used to represent , these sounds were also often written as in Old Welsh, while could be denoted by Template:Vr. In earlier manuscripts, moreover, fricatives were often not distinguished from plosives (e.g. Template:Vr for , now written Template:Vr). The grapheme Template:Vr was also used, unlike in the modern alphabet, particularly before front vowels. The disuse of this letter is at least partly due to the publication of William Salesbury's Welsh New Testament and William Morgan's Welsh Bible, whose English printers, with type letter frequencies set for English and Latin, did not have enough Template:Vr letters in their type cases to spell every as Template:Vr, so the order went "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth"; this was not liked at the time, but has become standard usage.

In this period, Template:Vr (capital Template:Vr) was also used interchangeably with Template:Vr, such as the passage in the 1567 New Testament: , which contains both Template:Vr and Template:Vr. Elsewhere, the same word is spelt in different ways, e.g. and .

The printer and publisher Lewis Jones, one of the co-founders of , the Welsh-speaking settlement in Patagonia, favoured a limited spelling reform which replaced Welsh Template:Vr and Template:Vr with Template:Vr and Template:Vr, and from circa 1866 to 1886 Jones employed this innovation in a number of newspapers and periodicals he published and/or edited in the colony. However, the only real relic of this practice today is the Patagonian placename Trevelin ("mill town"), which in standard Welsh orthography would be .

In 1928, a committee chaired by Sir John Morris-Jones standardised the orthography of modern Welsh.

In 1987, a committee chaired by Professor Stephen J. Williams made further small changes,Template:Which introducing Template:Vr. Not all modern writers adhere to the conventions established by these committees.

Letter names and sound values

"N" and "S" indicate variants specific to the northern and southern dialects of Welsh. Throughout Wales an alternative system is also in use in which all consonant letters are named using the corresponding consonant sound plus a schwa (e.g. for ). In this system the vowels are named as below.

Letter	Name	Corresponding sounds	English approximation
a			father (long)
b			bat
c			case
ch			No English equivalent; similar to loch in Scottish, but pronounced further back.
d			day
dd			these
e			bed (short) / closest to hey (long)
f			of
ff			four
g			gate
ng			thing
h			hat
i	, (S)		bit (short) / machine (long) / yes (as consonant; before vowels)
j			jump (only found in loanwords, usually from English but still in wide use such as ('jelly', ) and ('jeans', )
l			lad
ll			not present in English; a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative. A bit like what the consonant cluster "hl" would sound like.
m			mat
n			net
o			Short, like "bog" in RP; long like dawn in RP or stove in Scottish English
p			pet
ph			phone
r			Rolled R
rh			Voiceless rolled R
s			sat
t			stick
th			thin
u	(N), (S)	(N), (S)	for Southern variants: bit (short) / machine (long); in Northern dialects not found in English. Identical to "î" and "â" in Romanian, and similar to the "e" in English roses.
w			push (short) / pool (long) / wet (as consonant)
y		(N), (S)	for Southern variants: bit (final syllable, short) / machine (final syllable, long) above (other places, short) / roses , found in certain dialects of English that differentiate "Rosa's" and "roses", for example, General American.

Notes

Diphthongs

Orthography	Northern dialects	Southern dialects	English (approximation only)
ae			eye
			may
ai			eye
au	,	,	eye. Realised as bet (south) and cat (north) in plural endings.
aw			how
ei			As in eight
eu			As in height
ew			Roughly like Edward with the d removed: E'ward, or Cockney pronunciation of -ell in words like well, hell.
ey			Two distinct vowels.
iw			similar to Cockney pronunciation of -ill in words like bill, fill
oe			boy
oi			boy
ou			boy
ow			goal
uw			Southern : see "iw" above. Northern : not present in English.
wy			not present in English; closest to gooey
yw			see "uw" above

Notes

Diacritics

Welsh makes use of a number of diacritics.

The circumflex (ˆ) is mostly used to mark long vowels, so â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, ŷ are always long. However, not all long vowels are marked with a circumflex, so the letters a, e, i, o, u, w, y with no circumflex do not necessarily represent short vowels; see Template:Section link.

The grave accent (`) is sometimes used, usually in words borrowed from another language, to mark vowels that are short when a long vowel would normally be expected, e.g. (a cough), (a pass/permit or a lift in a car); (smoke), (a mug).

The acute accent (´) is sometimes used to mark a stressed final syllable in a polysyllabic word. Thus the words (to empty) and (decline) have final stress. However, not all polysyllabic words with final stress are marked with the acute accent ( "Welsh" and "forward/onward", for example, are written with none). The acute may also be used to indicate that a letter w represents a vowel where a glide might otherwise be expected, e.g. (two syllables) "manly", as opposed to (one syllable) "root".

Similarly, the diaeresis (¨) is used to indicate that two adjoining vowels are to be pronounced separately (not as a diphthong). However, it is also used to show that the letter i is used to represent the cluster which is always followed by another vowel, e.g. (to copy) pronounced , not .

The grave and acute accents in particular are very often omitted in casual writing, and the same is true to a lesser extent of the diaeresis. The circumflex, however, is usually included. Accented vowels are not considered distinct letters for the purpose of collation.

Predicting vowel length from orthography

As mentioned above, vowels marked with the circumflex are always long, and those marked with the grave accent are always short. If a vowel is not marked with a diacritic, its length must be determined by its environment; the rules vary a bit according to dialect.

In all dialects, only stressed vowels may be long; unstressed vowels are always short.

An unmarked (stressed) vowel is long:

• in the last syllable of a word when no consonant follows: (good).
• before voiced stops b, d, g and before all fricatives (except for ll) ch, dd, f, ff, th, s: (son), (favourite), (thing), (night).

An unmarked vowel is short:

• in an unstressed (proclitic) word: .
• before voiceless stops p, t, c (gate), (sheepfold) and before all consonant clusters (except for those that start with s or ll) (saint), (hedge), (April).

The vowel y, when it is pronounced , is always shortTemplate:Contradictory inline even when it appears in an environment where other vowels would be long: (whole) . When pronounced as a close or near-close vowel ( or in the North, or in the South), y follows the same rules as other vowels: (day) (North) ~ (South), (wind) (North) ~ (South).

Before l, m, n, and r, unmarked vowels are long in some words and short in others:

vowel		long				short
i				(wine)				(scarcely)
e				(old)				(head)
y				(man)				(white)
w				(bank up a fire)				(often)
e				(holly)				(heart)

(The last four examples are given in South Welsh pronunciation only since vowels in nonfinal syllables are always short in North Welsh.)

Before nn and rr, vowels are always short: (ash trees), (to win), (stone).

In Northern dialects, long vowels are stressed and appear in the final syllable of the word. Vowels in non-final syllables are always short. In addition to the rules above, a vowel is long in the North before a consonant cluster beginning with s: (witness). Before ll, a vowel is short when no consonant follows the ll: (better) It is long when another consonant does follow the ll: (hair).

In Southern dialects, long vowels may appear in a stressed penultimate syllable as well as in a stressed word-final syllable. Before ll, a stressed vowel in the last syllable can be either long (e.g. "better" ) or short (e.g. "hole" ). However, a stressed vowel in the penult before ll is always short: (clothes). Before s, a stressed vowel in the last syllable is long, as mentioned above, but a stressed vowel in the penult is short: (measure) . Vowels are always short before consonant clusters: (saint), (hair), (witness).

Digraphs

File:Lldigraph.png

The Middle-Welsh LL ligature.
Unicode: U+1EFA and U+1EFB.

While the digraphs ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh, th are each written with two symbols, they are all considered to be single letters. This means, for example that (a town in South Wales) is considered to have only six letters in Welsh, compared to eight letters in English. Consequently, they each take up only a single space in Welsh crosswords. Ll itself had actually been written as the ligature Template:Not a typo in Middle Welsh.

Sorting is done in correspondence with the alphabet. For example, comes before , which comes before , which comes before . Automated sorting may occasionally be complicated by the fact that additional information may be needed to distinguish a genuine digraph from a juxtaposition of letters; for example comes after (in which the stands for ) but before (in which n and g are pronounced separately as ).

Although the digraphs above are considered to be single letters, only their first component letter is capitalised when a word in lower case requires an initial capital letter. Thus:

, etc. (place names)

, etc. (personal names)

(other sentences starting with a digraph)

The two letters in a digraph are only both capitalised when the whole word is in uppercase:

(as on a poster or sign)

The status of the digraphs as single letters is reflected in the stylised forms used in the logos of the National Library of Wales (logo) and Cardiff University (logo).

See also

• Bardic Alphabet
• Welsh Braille

External links

• Type Welsh characters online
• Type Welsh accents in Word
• Welsh pronunciation course with audio