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
The traditional names of the letters are Brake, P. and Brake, J. (2020), Welsh in 12 Weeks, pp. 5–6.Morris-Jones, J. (1922), An Elementary Welsh Grammar, p. 1. In South Wales, where the letters i and u are pronounced identically, they are distinguished as and ( means "horseshoe"). Thus the television channel S4C is pronounced . Informally, another way of saying the letters is often used, adding the sound [ɘ] after stop consonants and simply pronouncing the others: a, by, cy, ch, dy, dd, and so on.
In a Welsh dictionary, the Welsh order of letters is strictly observed, so that 'council' is found before 'muscular', and 'lorry' is found before 'milk'.
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 makes no use of (, ), (, ), (, ), (, ), and (, /).
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 ⟨j⟩ has only recently entered into Welsh orthography, but is still debated: for newly borrowed words from English which retain the sound, even when it was not originally spelled ⟨j⟩ in English, as in ("garage"), ("giraffe"), and ("fridge"), although often these words have Welsh equivalences or are spelt without ⟨j⟩ such as ("garage"), ("giraffe"), and ("fridge"). Older borrowings of English words containing resulted in the sound being pronounced and spelled in various other ways, most commonly approximated by ⟨si⟩ with the sound as in ("Japan"), and ("jacket").
The letters ⟨k, q, v, x, z⟩ 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, taxi, and zero, but in all cases can be, and often are, nativised: , , , and .Thomas, Peter Wynn (1996) Gramadeg y Gymraeg. Cardiff: University of Wales Press: 757.
History
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 to represent the voiced plosives non initially. Similarly, the voiced fricatives were written .Watkins, T. Arwyn (1993) "Welsh" in Ball, Martin J. with Fife, James (Eds) The Celtic Languages. London/New York: Routledge: 289-348.
By the Middle Welsh period, this had given way to quite a bit of variability: Although were now used to represent , these sounds were also often written as in Old Welsh, while could be denoted by . In earlier manuscripts, moreover, fricatives were often not distinguished from plosives (e.g. for , now written ).Evans, Simon D. (1964) A Grammar of Middle Welsh. Dublin: ColourBooks Ltd. The grapheme 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 letters in their type cases to spell every as , so the order went "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth";, an essay by J. R. R. Tolkien this was not liked at the time, but has become standard usage.
In this period, (capital ) was also used interchangeably with , such as the passage in the 1567 New Testament: , which contains both and . 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 and with and , 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, introducing . Not all modern writers adhere to the conventions established by these committees.Thomas, Peter Wynn (1996) Gramadeg y Gymraeg. Cardiff: University of Wales Press: 749.
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. {| class="wikitable" ! Letter ! Name ! Corresponding sounds ! English approximation |- | a
| father (long) |- | b
| bat |- | c
| case |- | ch
| No English equivalent; similar to loch in Scots, but pronounced further back. |- | dThe sequence si indicates when followed by a vowel; similarly, di and ti sometimes indicate and respectively when followed by a vowel, although these sounds are spelled j and ts in loanwords like "jug" and "watch".
| day |- | dd
| these |- | e
| bed (short) / closest to hey (long) |- | f
| violet |- | ff
| four |- | g
| gate |- | ng
| thing |- | hIn addition to representing the phoneme , h indicates voicelessness in the graphemes mh, nh, and ngh.
| 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 |- | phThe digraph ph – which indicates the aspirate mutation of p (e.g. ) – may also be found very occasionally in words derived from Greek (e.g. ), although most words of Greek origin are spelt with ff (e.g. ).
| phone |- | r
| Rolled R |- | rh
| Voiceless rolled R |- | s
| sat |- | t
| stick |- | th
| thin |- | u | (N), (S) | (N),In the North, the letters u and y are occasionally pronounced , the same as in the South, rather than . This is usually the case when the preceding vowel is or when y is preceded or followed by g or followed by w , forming a diphthong. (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 (glide) |- | yThe vowel letter y indicates in unstressed monosyllabic words (e.g. "the", "my") or non-final syllables (regardless of whether these are stressed or not), but (N) or (S) in word-final syllables (again, regardless of stress). | | (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 {| class="wikitable" ! Orthography ! Northern dialects ! Southern dialects ! English (approximation only) |- | rowspan=2 | ae | final or only syllable, e.g. , | | eye |- | non-final syllable. e.g. , | | may |- | ai
| eye |- | au | , | , | eye. Realised as cat (north) and bet (south) 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
| Northern : not present in English. Southern : see "iw" above. |- | wy In some other words containing the letter combination "wy", instead of this being a diphthong, the "w" is a consonant (). In these cases, the pronunciation of the "y" can then vary as shown in the previous table. For example: short final in ( (N), (S)), long final in ( (N), (S)), non-final in ().
| Not present in English; closest to gooey. |- | yw where yw is followed by a vowel, e.g. , , , this does not contain the yw diphthong, but a non-final y (hence , see above) followed by a consonantal w
| 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 .
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 sequence 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).