Welsh orthography


Welsh orthography uses 29 letters of the Latin script to write native Welsh words as well as established loanwords.


The acute accent, the grave accent, the circumflex and the diaeresis mark are also used on vowels, but accented letters are not regarded as part of the alphabet.
The letter j has been accepted into Welsh orthography only relatively recently: for use in those words borrowed from English in which the sound is retained in Welsh, even where that sound is not represented by j in English spelling, as in garej and ffrij. Older borrowings of English words containing resulted in the sound being pronounced and spelt in various other ways, resulting in occasional doublets such as Siapan and Japan.
The letters k, q, v, x and z are sometimes used in technical terms, like kilogram, volt and zero, but in all cases can be, and often are, replaced by Welsh letters: cilogram, folt and sero.

History

The earliest samples of written Welsh date from the 6th century and are in the Latin alphabet. The orthography differs from that of modern Welsh, particularly in the use of p, t and c to represent the voiced plosives in the middle and at the end of words. Similarly, the voiced fricatives were written with b and d.
By the Middle Welsh period, this had given way to much variability: although b, d and g were now used to represent, these sounds were also often written as in Old Welsh, while could be denoted by u, v, f or w. In earlier manuscripts, moreover, fricatives were often not distinguished from plosives. The grapheme k 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 k letters in their type cases to spell every sound as k, 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, ð was also used as a letter, interchangeable with dd, such as the passage in the 1567 New Testament: A Dyw y sych ymaith yr oll ðeigre oddiwrth y llygeid, which contains both ð and dd. Elsewhere, the same word is spelt in different ways, e.g. newydd and newyð.
The printer and publisher Lewis Jones, one of the co-founders of Y Wladfa, the Welsh-speaking settlement in Patagonia, favoured a limited spelling reform which replaced Welsh f and ff – standing for and – with the letters v and f, 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, which in standard Welsh orthography would be Trefelin.
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. The conventions established by these committees are not adhered to by all modern writers.

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. In this system the vowels are named as below.
;Notes

Diphthongs

Diacritics

Welsh makes use of a number of diacritics.
The circumflex is 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 "Predicting vowel length from orthography" below.
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. pas , pàs ; mwg , mẁg .
The acute accent is sometimes used to mark a stressed final syllable in a polysyllabic word. Thus the words gwacáu and dicléin have final stress. However, not all polysyllabic words with final stress are marked with the acute accent. The acute may also be used to indicate that a letter w represents a vowel where a glide might otherwise be expected, e.g. gẃraidd "manly", as opposed to gwraidd "root".
Similarly, the diaeresis is used to indicate that two adjoining vowels are to be pronounced separately. 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. copïo 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 vowel is long:
An unmarked vowel is short:
The vowel y, when it is pronounced, is always short even when it appears in an environment where other vowels would be long: cyfan . When pronounced as a close or near-close vowel, y follows the same rules as other vowels: dydd ~ , gwynt ~ .
Before l, m, n, and r, unmarked vowels are long in some words and short in others: gwin , prin ; hen , pen ; dyn , gwyn ; stwmo , amal ; celyn , calon . Before nn and rr, vowels are always short: onn , ennill , carreg .
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: tyst . Before ll, a vowel is short when no consonant follows the ll: gwell It is long when another consonant does follow the ll: gwallt .
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 or short. However, a stressed vowel in the penult before ll is always short: dillad .
Before s, a stressed vowel in the last syllable is long, as mentioned above, but a stressed vowel in the penult is short: mesur . Vowels are always short before consonant clusters: sant , gwallt , tyst .

Digraphs

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 Llanelli 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 a ligature in Middle Welsh.
Sorting is done in correspondence with the alphabet. For example, la comes before ly, which comes before lla, which comes before ma. 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 llom comes after llong but before llongyfarch.
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:
The two letters in a digraph are both capitalised only when the whole word is in uppercase:
The status of the digraphs as single letters is reflected in the stylised forms used in the logos of the National Library of Wales and Cardiff University
.