WELSH

WELSH
1. An adjective relating to Wales, a principality in south—western Britain and part of the United Kingdom. It also relates to its people, and is used elliptically for the nation: the Welsh.

2. The Celtic language of Wales, known to its speakers as Cymraeg. Welsh and Breton are the only surviving members of the ancient British or Brythonic subdivision of the Celtic language family. The original British language was highly inflected, but its descendant, Modern Welsh, has lost some of these inflections. Once the principal language of Wales and a literary language since the 6c, Welsh has been in decline since the accession of the partly Welsh Henry Tudor ( Henry VII) to the English throne in 1485. There are now few monolingual speakers of Welsh, and some 500,000 of the people of Wales are bilingual: that is, 25% of the population. The condition of Welsh at the end of the 20c is relatively stable, and it is being learnt by non-Welsh-speaking Welsh people and others, including immigrants from England. It is taught in all schools and is a medium of instruction in some. In the northern county of Gwynedd it is a language of local government and appears with English on road signs. Language activists, however, consider that much remains to be done.

The spoken language consists of several dialects, and has had a significant influence on the English language as used in Wales, but has had little impact on English at large. The most characteristic sounds of Welsh are the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative (spelt ll as in Llanelli), the voiceless alveolar roll /r̥/ (spelt rh as in Rhondda), and the velar fricative (represented as in Scots and German by ch, as in Llywarch). As in all Celtic languages, grammatical mutations occur, as in the noun ci (dog), where the initial sound is affected by the modifier, as in dy gi your dog, fy nghi my dog, ei chi her dog, and tri chi three dogs. See BORROWING CELTIC LANGUAGES, CUMBRIC, WELSH ENGLISH.