A further development was the publication of some of the first complete and concise Welsh dictionaries. Early work by Welsh lexicographic pioneers such as Daniel Silvan Evans ensured that the language was documented as accurately as possible. Modern dictionaries such as the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru the University of Wales Dictionary , are direct descendants of these dictionaries. Despite these outward signs of health, it was during the nineteenth century that English replaced Welsh as the most widely spoken language within the country.
Wales, particularly the South Wales Coalfield , experienced significant population growth and in-migration primarily from England and Ireland which changed the linguistic profile of some areas though other areas would remain Welsh-speaking despite the changes. Welsh held no official recognition and had limited status under the British state. Learning English was enthusiastically encouraged, in contrast, Welsh was not taught or used as a medium of instruction in schools, many of which actively discouraged the use of Welsh using measures such as the Welsh Not [5].
Welsh was increasingly restricted in scope to the non-conformist religious chapels, who would teach children to read and write in Sunday schools. Individuals such as Matthew Arnold championed the virtues of Welsh literature whilst simultaneously advocating the replacement of Welsh as the everyday language of the country with English, and many Welsh-speakers themselves such as David Davies and John Ceiriog Hughes advocated bilingualism, if not necessarily the extinction of Welsh.
By the end of the nineteenth century English came to prevail in the large cities of South East Wales. Welsh remained strong in the north west and in parts of mid Wales and south-west Wales. Rural Wales was a stronghold of the Welsh language - and so also were the industrial slate-quarrying communities of Caernarvonshire and Merionethshire. By the 20th century, the numbers of Welsh speakers were shrinking at a rate which suggested that the language would be extinct within a few generations.
According to the census, out of a population of just under 2. This was a decrease from the census with The distribution of those speaking the language however was unevenly distributed with five counties remaining overwhelmingly and predominantly Welsh speaking:. Outside these five counties, a further two areas were noted as having a majority who spoke Welsh, those being:.
The census recorded that of the population of Wales including Monmouthshire, Denbighshire was the only other county where a majority could still speak Welsh, here, As for larger urban areas, Aberdare was the only one where a majority could still speak Welsh, here In Cardiff, Wales' capital, 5. At a district level, Llanfyrnach rural district in Pembrokeshire had the highest percentage of Welsh speakers; at Bethesda urban district in Carnarvonshire was the most Welsh speaking urban district in Wales; It was then sent to the Old Bailey in London, where the "Three" were convicted and sentenced to nine months imprisonment.
On their release from Wormwood Scrubs they were greeted as heroes by a crowd of 15, people at a pavilion in Caernarfon. With the advent of broadcasting in Wales , Plaid Cymru protested against the lack of Welsh-language programmes in Wales and launched a campaign to withhold licence fees.
Pressure was successful, and by the mids more Welsh-language programming was broadcast, with the formal establishment of a Welsh regional broadcasting channel by According to the census, out of a population of just over 2. Following the arrests of D. Following the jury's indecision on the matter, it was decided that the case should be moved to the Old Bailey, causing outrage throughout Wales; this, along with the lack of status for the Welsh language in the legal system, sparked action.
At Cardiff Eisteddfod in a petition was launched by Undeb Cymdeithasau Cymru The union of Welsh societies calling for recognition of the Welsh language in the courts. Their presentation of the petition to parliament in lead to the passing of the Welsh courts act of and thus the validation of pleas in the Welsh language. In , a private bill sponsored by Liverpool City Council was brought before the UK parliament to develop a water reservoir from the Tryweryn Valley , in Meirionnydd in Gwynedd.
The development would include the flooding of Capel Celyn Holly Chapel , a Welsh-speaking community of historic significance. Despite universal and bi-partisan objections by Welsh politicians 35 out of 36 Welsh MPs opposed the bill, and one abstained the bill was passed in The events surrounding the flooding highlighted the status of the language in the s and s. In Saunders Lewis gave a radio speech entitled Tynged yr iaith The Fate of the Language in which he predicted the extinction of the Welsh language unless direct action was taken.
Lewis' intent was to motivate Plaid Cymru to take more direct action to promote the language; however it led to the formation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg the Welsh Language Society later that year at a Plaid Cymru summer school held in Pontardawe in Glamorgan. With concern for the Welsh language mounting in the s, the Welsh Language Act was passed, giving some legal protection for the use of Welsh in official government business.
The Act was based on the Hughes Parry report , published in , which advocated equal validity for Welsh in speech and in written documents, both in the courts and in public administration in Wales. In contrast to English practice, "w" and "y" are considered vowel letters in Welsh along with "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u". The letters "k", "q", "v", "x", and "z" are used in some technical terms, like kilogram , volt and zero , but in all cases can be, and often are, replaced by Welsh letters: This change was not popular at the time.
The most common diacritic is the circumflex , which disambiguates long vowels , most often in the case of homographs, where the vowel is short in one word and long in the other: Welsh morphology has much in common with that of the other modern Insular Celtic languages , such as the use of initial consonant mutations and of so-called " conjugated prepositions " prepositions that fuse with the personal pronouns that are their object.
Welsh nouns belong to one of two grammatical genders , masculine and feminine, but they are not inflected for case. Welsh has a variety of different endings and other methods to indicate the plural, and two endings to indicate the singular technically the singulative of some nouns. In spoken Welsh, verbal features are indicated primarily by the use of auxiliary verbs rather than by the inflection of the main verb.
In literary Welsh, on the other hand, inflection of the main verb is usual. The canonical word order in Welsh is verb—subject—object VSO. Colloquial Welsh inclines very strongly towards the use of auxiliaries with its verbs, as in English. The present tense is constructed with bod "to be" as an auxiliary verb , with the main verb appearing as a verbnoun used in a way loosely equivalent to an infinitive after the particle yn:. There, mae is a third-person singular present indicative form of bod , and mynd is the verbnoun meaning "to go".
The imperfect is constructed in a similar manner, as are the periphrastic forms of the future and conditional tenses. In the preterite , future and conditional mood tenses, there are inflected forms of all verbs, which are used in the written language. However, speech now more commonly uses the verbnoun together with an inflected form of gwneud "do" , so "I went" can be Mi es i or Mi wnes i fynd "I did go". Mi is an example of a preverbal particle; such particles are common in Welsh, though less so in the spoken language. Welsh lacks separate pronouns for constructing subordinate clauses; instead, special verb forms or relative pronouns that appear identical to some preverbal particles are used.
The Welsh for "I like Rhodri" is Dw i'n hoffi Rhodri word for word, "am I in [the] liking [of] Rhodri" , with Rhodri in a possessive relationship with hoffi. With personal pronouns, the possessive form of the personal pronoun is used, as in "I like him ": Dw i'n hoffi ti "Am I liking you".
In colloquial Welsh, possessive pronouns, whether they are used to mean "my", "your", etc. It should be noted that the "reinforcement" or, simply, "redoubling" adds no emphasis in the colloquial register. While the possessive pronoun alone may be used, especially in more formal registers, as shown above, it is considered incorrect to use only the personal pronoun. Such usage is nevertheless sometimes heard in very colloquial speech, mainly among young speakers: Ble 'dyn ni'n mynd? Your house or my house? The traditional counting system used in the Welsh language is vigesimal , i.
Welsh numbers from 11 to 14 are " x on ten" e. This form continues to be used, especially by older people, and it is obligatory in certain circumstances such as telling the time, and in ordinal numbers.
There is also a decimal counting system, which has become relatively widely used, though less so in giving the time, ages, and dates it features no ordinal numbers. This system is in especially common use in schools due to its simplicity, and in Patagonian Welsh. Whereas 39 in the vigesimal system is pedwar ar bymtheg ar hugain "four on fifteen on twenty" or even deugain namyn un "two score minus one" , in the decimal system it is tri deg naw "three tens nine". Although there is only one word for "one" un , it triggers the soft mutation treiglad meddal of feminine nouns, where possible, other than those beginning with "ll" or "rh".
There are separate masculine and feminine forms of the numbers "two" dau and dwy , "three" tri and tair and "four" pedwar and pedair , which must agree with the grammatical gender of the objects being counted.
Dealing with little or no fluent welsh is an article about the welsh language, love and start your online dating back approximately 4, welsh speakers. English. However, it's not just language that will have your date falling in love. Wales has a whole host of native romantic traditions that set it apart from the rest of the UK.
The objects being counted appear in the singular, not plural form. Currently, there is no standardised or definitive form of the Welsh language, with significant differences in dialect marked in pronunciation, vocabulary and in points of grammar. An example of a pronunciation difference is the tendency in some southern dialects to palatalise the letter "s", e. Although popular understanding often splits Welsh into northern Gogledd and southern De Welsh, in reality significant variation exists within these areas.
The traditional classification of four Welsh 'languages', remains the most academically useful:. A fifth 'language' is Patagonian Welsh , which has developed since the start of Y Wladfa the Welsh settlement in Argentina in ; it includes Spanish loanwords and terms for local features, but a survey in the s showed that the language in Patagonia is consistent throughout the lower Chubut valley and in the Andes. Dialectal classifications exist within the 'languages' such as the Cofi dialect. Introducing the Dialects [84] was accompanied by a cassette containing recordings of fourteen different speakers demonstrating aspects of different area dialects.
The book also refers to the earlier Linguistic Geography of Wales [85] as describing six different regions which could be identified as having words specific to those regions. In the s, there was an attempt to standardise the Welsh language by teaching Cymraeg Byw "Living Welsh" — a colloquially-based generic form of Welsh.
Modern Welsh can be considered to fall broadly into two main registers —Colloquial Welsh Cymraeg llafar and Literary Welsh Cymraeg llenyddol. The grammar described here is that of Colloquial Welsh, which is used in most speech and informal writing. Literary Welsh is closer to the form of Welsh standardised by the translation of the Bible and is found in official documents and other formal registers, including much literature.
As a standardised form, literary Welsh shows little if any of the dialectal variation found in colloquial Welsh. In addition, more archaic pronouns and forms of mutation may be observed in Literary Welsh.