لغة ويلزية

الويلزية
Cymraeg, y Gymraeg
النطق	[kəmˈraːɨɡ]
المنطقة	United Kingdom (Wales, England), Argentina (Chubut Province)
العرق	Welsh
الناطقون الأصليون	Wales: 883,600 (29.1% of the population of Wales, 2020; including both L1 and L2 speakers) England: 110,000 (2001, estimated) Argentina: 1,500-5,000 Canada: L1,<3,885
عائلة اللغات	الهندو-اوروپية Celtic Insular Celtic Brittonic Western الويلزية
الصيغ المبكرة	Common Brittonic Old Welsh Middle Welsh
اللهجات	Patagonian Welsh
نظام الكتابة	Latin (Welsh alphabet) Welsh Braille
الوضع الرسمي
لغة رسمية في	ويلز (de jure)
لغة أقلية معترف بها في	الأرجنتين
ينظمها	Aled Roberts, the Welsh Language Commissioner (since 1 April 2019) and the Welsh Government (Llywodraeth Cymru)
أكواد اللغات
ISO 639-2	wel (B) cym (T)
ISO 639-2	wel (B) cym (T)
ISO 639-3	cym
Glottolog	wels1247
Linguasphere	50-ABA

Video of a Welsh speaker.

الويلزية (Cymraeg كومريگ) هي لغة كلتية من الفرع البريطوني، ويتكلمها بعض أهل بلاد ويلز في غرب بريطانيا وبعض أهل وادي تشوبوت في منطقة باتاغونيا في الأرجنتين كلغة أٌم. هناك أيضا ناطقون بها في إنجلترا والولايات المتحدة وأستراليا وبلدان أخرى. الويلزية والإنجليزية هما اللغتان الرسميتان في ويلز.

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 الأصول

انظر أيضاً: اللغات الكلتية § التبويب

The 1588 Welsh Bible

 Middle Welsh

المقالة الرئيسية: Middle Welsh

Middle Welsh (Cymraeg Canol) is the label attached to the Welsh of the 12th to 14th centuries, of which much more remains than for any earlier period. This is the language of nearly all surviving early manuscripts of the Mabinogion, although the tales themselves are certainly much older. It is also the language of the existing Welsh law manuscripts. Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible to a modern-day Welsh speaker.

• Languages of Wales 1750 - 1900
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  1750

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  1800

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  1850

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  1900

Key: • Welsh      • Bilingual      • English     

 Status

Trilingual (Spanish, Welsh and English) sign in Argentina

Bilingual road markings near Cardiff Airport.

Bilingual road sign near Wrexham Central station.

Sign promoting the learning of Welsh

 Vocabulary

Welsh supplements its core Brittonic vocabulary (words such as wy "egg", carreg "stone"), with hundreds of word lemmas borrowed from Latin, such as (ffenestr "window" < Latin fenestra, gwin "wine" < Latin vinum). It also borrows words from English, such as (silff "shelf", giât "gate").

 Phonology

المقالة الرئيسية: Welsh phonology

The phonology of Welsh includes a number of sounds that do not occur in English and are typologically rare in European languages. The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [ɬ], the voiceless nasals [m̥], [n̥] and [ŋ̊], and the voiceless alveolar trill [r̥] are distinctive features of the Welsh language. Stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable in polysyllabic words, and the word-final unstressed syllable receives a higher pitch than the stressed syllable.

 Orthography

المقالة الرئيسية: Welsh orthography

Welsh is written in a Latin alphabet of 29 letters, of which eight are digraphs treated as separate letters for collation:

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

In contrast to English practice, "w" and "y" are considered vowel letters in Welsh along with "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u".

The letter "j" was not used traditionally, but is now used in many everyday words borrowed from English, like jam, jôc (joke) and garej (garage). 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: cilogram, folt and sero. The letter "k" was in common use until the 16th century, but was dropped at the time of the publication of the New Testament in Welsh, as William Salesbury explained: "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth". This change was not popular at the time.

The most common diacritic is the circumflex, which usually disambiguates long vowels, most often in the case of homographs, where the vowel is short in one word and long in the other: e.g. man ("place") vs mân ("fine, small").

 Morphology

المقالة الرئيسية: Colloquial Welsh morphology and Literary Welsh morphology

 Dialects

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.

For example: consider the question "Do you want a cuppa [a cup of tea]?" In Gwynedd this would typically be Dach chi isio panad? while in the south of Dyfed one would be more likely to hear Ych chi'n moyn dishgled? (though in other parts of the South one would not be surprised to hear Ych chi isie paned? as well, among other possibilities). An example of a pronunciation difference is the tendency in some southern dialects to palatalise the letter "s", e.g. mis (Error: {{language with name/for}}: missing language tag or language name (help)), usually pronounced IPA: [miːs], but as IPA: [miːʃ] in parts of the south. This normally occurs next to a high front vowel like /i/, although exceptions include the pronunciation of sut "how" as IPA: [ʃʊd] in the southern dialects (compared with northern IPA: [sɨt]).

 The four traditional dialects

Although modern understanding often splits Welsh into northern (Gogledd) and southern (De) 'dialects', the traditional classification of four Welsh dialects remains the most academically useful:

• Y Wyndodeg, the Gwynedd dialect
• Y Bowyseg, the Powys dialect
• Y Ddyfedeg, the Dyfed dialect
• Y Wenhwyseg, the dialect of Gwent and Morgannwg

A fifth dialect is Patagonian Welsh, which has developed since the start of Y Wladfa (the Welsh settlement in Argentina) in 1865; it includes Spanish loanwords and terms for local features, but a survey in the 1970s showed that the language in Patagonia is consistent throughout the lower Chubut valley and in the Andes.

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 Registers

Modern Welsh can be considered to fall broadly into two main registers—Colloquial Welsh (Cymraeg llafar) and Literary Welsh (Cymraeg llenyddol). The grammar described 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 1588 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. Some differences include:

Literary Welsh	Colloquial Welsh
Can omit subject pronouns (pro-drop)	Subject pronouns rarely omitted
More extensive use of simple verb forms	More extensive use of periphrastic verb forms
No distinction between simple present and future (e.g. af "I go"/"I shall go")	Simple form most often expresses only future (e.g. af i "I'll go")
Subjunctive verb forms	Subjunctive in fixed idioms only
3rd.pl ending and pronoun –nt hwy	3rd.pl ending and pronoun –n nhw

Amongst the characteristics of the literary, as against the spoken, language are a higher dependence on inflected verb forms, different usage of some of the tenses, less frequent use of pronouns (since the information is usually conveyed in the verb/preposition inflections) and a much lesser tendency to substitute English loanwords for native Welsh words. In addition, more archaic pronouns and forms of mutation may be observed in Literary Welsh.

 Examples of sentences in literary and colloquial Welsh

English	Literary Welsh	Colloquial Welsh
I get up early every day.	Codaf yn gynnar bob dydd.	Dw i'n codi'n gynnar bob dydd. (North) Rwy'n codi'n gynnar bob dydd. (South)
I'll get up early tomorrow.	Codaf yn gynnar yfory.	Mi goda i'n gynnar fory. (North) Wna i godi'n gynnar fory. (South)
He had not stood there long.	Ni safasai yno yn hir.	Doedd o ddim wedi sefyll yno'n hir. (North) (D)ôdd e ddim wedi sefyll yna'n hir. (South)
They'll sleep only when there's a need.	Ni chysgant ond pan fo angen.	Fyddan nhw'n cysgu ddim ond pan fydd angen.

The differences between dialects of modern spoken Welsh pale into insignificance compared to the difference between some forms of the spoken language and the most formal constructions of the literary language. The latter is considerably more conservative and is the language used in Welsh translations of the Bible, amongst other things - although the 2004 Beibl Cymraeg Newydd (Error: {{language with name/for}}: missing language tag or language name (help)) is significantly less formal than the traditional 1588 Bible. Gareth King, author of a popular Welsh grammar, observes that "The difference between these two is much greater than between the virtually identical colloquial and literary forms of English". A grammar of Literary Welsh can be found in A Grammar of Welsh by Stephen J. Williams or more completely in Gramadeg y Gymraeg by Peter Wynn Thomas. (No comprehensive grammar of formal literary Welsh exists in English.) An English-language guide to colloquial Welsh forms and register and dialect differences is Dweud Eich Dweud by Ceri Jones.

 See also

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المزيد من المقالات الناطقة

• Association of Welsh Translators and Interpreters
• English and Welsh
• Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion
• Languages in the United Kingdom
• List of Welsh-language media
• List of Welsh films
• List of Welsh-language authors
• List of Welsh-language poets (6th century to c. 1600)
• List of Welsh people
• List of Welsh areas by percentage of Welsh-speakers
• Welsh literature
• St Benet's, Paul's Wharf
• Welsh Language Board
• Dal Ati
• Welsh placenames
• Welsh Tract
• Welsh (surname)
• Sindarin (A language invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for his legendarium – a body of literary works, mostly set in Middle-earth. The language was strongly influenced by Welsh.)

 References

• J.W. Aitchison and H. Carter. Language, Economy and Society. The changing fortunes of the Welsh Language in the Twentieth Century. Cardiff. University of Wales Press. 2000.
• J.W. Aitchison and H. Carter. Spreading the Word. The Welsh Language 2001. Y Lolfa. 2004

 External links

لغة ويلزية edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011: available in Welsh and **English.
• Welsh Language Commissioner
• Welsh language at Omniglot
• Welsh Language Board: The Vitality of Welsh: A Statistical Balance Sheet, August 2010
• Link for Welsh language statistics from the Welsh Assembly Government (accessed 10 January 2009)
• Example knowledge of Welsh (KS25) data (Newport) from the Office for National Statistics