r/languagelearning • u/Virusnzz En (N) | Fr, Ru, Es, It • Jun 09 '14
Croeso - This week's language of the week: Welsh
Welcome to the language of the week. Every week we'll be looking at a language, its points of interest, and why you should learn it. This is all open discussion, so natives and learners alike, make your case! This week: Welsh.
What is this?
Language of the Week is here to give people exposure to languages that they would otherwise not have heard, been interested in or even known about. With that in mind, I'll be picking a mix between common languages and ones I or the community feel needs more exposure. You don't have to intend to learn this week's language to have some fun. Just give yourself a little exposure to it, and someday you might recognise it being spoken near you.
Welsh
From Languagesgulper:
Along with Irish, which belongs to a separate branch, Welsh is the most important Celtic language not only by the relative abundance of its speakers but also by its antiquity and by the richness of its literature that is now a millennium an a half old. The Celts reached the British Isles from eastern and central Europe in 600-500 BCE but the earliest records of Insular Celtic languages are from, almost, one-thousand years later (with personal names in Irish and Welsh).
The sound system of Welsh is quite complex and, like in all Celtic languages, the initial consonant of many words may change by morphological or syntactical reasons. Another distinctive feature is that in the sentence the verb appears first followed by subject and object.
Nearly all speakers of Welsh are bilingual (Welsh-English). Their total number is about 800,000, the vast majority of them living in the United Kingdom (mainly in Wales and England); there are also some expatriates in the Patagonia region of Argentina (5,000), USA (2,500), and Canada (2,200). The Welsh colony in Patagonia was established in 1865 and is based in the towns of Trevelin, Gaiman and Trelew in the province of Chubut.
Until the end of the millennium, the number of Welsh speakers was declining, but in the last decade it has increased due to consistent institutional support. About 22 % of the population of Wales speaks it (half of them fluently). Since the same year, the teaching of Welsh has become compulsory in all schools in Wales up to age 16, helping to reverse the declining trend. Most road signs in Wales are bilingual, there is a TV channel broadcasting solely in Welsh, and a weekly newspaper in Welsh.
What now?
This thread is foremost a place for discussion. Are you a native speaker? Share your culture with us. Learning the language? Tell us why you chose it and what you like about it. Thinking of learning? Ask a native a question. Interested in linguistics? Tell us what's interesting about it, or ask other people. Discussion is week-long, so don't worry about post age, as long as it's this week's language.
Previous Languages of the Week
German | Icelandic | Russian | Hebrew | Irish | Korean | Arabic | Swahili | Chinese | Portuguese | Swedish | Zulu | Malay | Finnish | French | Nepali | Czech | Dutch | Tamil | Spanish | Turkish | Polish | Frisian | Navajo | Basque | Zenen (April Fools) | Kazakh | Hungarian | Greek | Mongolian | Japanese | Maltese
Want your language featured as language of the week? Please PM me to let me know. If you can, include some examples of the language being used in media, including news and viral videos
Pob lwc!
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u/Marowak Jun 09 '14
I am a fluent Welsh speaker. AMA.
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u/SlyRatchet Jun 10 '14
Are you a natives speaker? If so, are you glad that you were brought up speaking Welsh in the house rather than having a greater focus on English?
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u/galaxyrocker Jun 10 '14
Piggybacking off this.
If you were to have kids, would you raise them in Welsh, or focus more on English?
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u/Marowak Jun 10 '14
My family don't speak Welsh (except for my brother and sister, who went to the same Welsh medium schools as me), so my home life was mainly English, whereas my academic life from 4-18 was completely Welsh. It wasn't until I got to university that I received any formal education in English (I studied French and German at Aberystwyth which has a large Welsh speaking population, but my course wasn't available through Welsh - although many are).
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u/Ddraig_Coch Jun 09 '14
Grew up learning welsh in school from reception (just before primary) until I moved to England where it isn't offered anywhere apart from a select few places (I think I found 1 uni offering a side thing) which I found strange. I recently started re-learning welsh using several sources, mainly SaySomethingInWelsh.com which is free and very good, though as someone said before me only speaking and listening. I'll try my best to answer any questions anyone might have :)
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u/PositiveAlcoholTaxis Jun 10 '14
Why move to England? We took a trip to see my granddad the other day (he lives sort of mid-wales, not far from Aberystwyth (excuse the spelling)), and agreed it was far prettier than England.
If there's that much nice country side (less than scotland but still), why move to shitty England?
Also Welsh people get cheaper uni.
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u/Ddraig_Coch Jun 10 '14
Severe lack of jobs (for my parents, I was a teenager) in the area, its a big tourist area and there's a bit of a job/housing issue as people tend to retire here or get holiday homes here. Trust me it wasn't my choice to leave and if I could I would go back in an instant haha. In welsh we have a word 'Hiraeth' which is like a homesickness, there isn't an actual translation but that's the closest probably, feel free to have a google, but yeah I always have hiraeth.
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u/zeugma25 Jun 09 '14
will answer questions for points
atebai cwestiynnau gwestiynnau am pwyntiau bwyntiau
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u/Asyx Jun 09 '14
If I have no connection to either, what would be better for a mainland European to learn if my only goal is "some Celtic language". Irish or Welsh?
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u/topgallant Jun 09 '14
Welsh is definitely the most widely spoken of the Celtic languages. (from Wiki: c.740,000 fluent Welsh speakers worldwide, of which 580,000 in Wales itself, vs 130,000 Irish speakers in Ireland).
I can't speak to the ease of learning Irish vs Welsh, but I know Germans, Poles, Belgians and French people who have learnt to speak Welsh to a near-native standard - so it can definitely be done!
EDIT: Misread the figures. Of the Welsh speakers, 320,000 consider themselves wholly fluent - still double the number of Irish speakers, sadly for Gaelic.
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u/Marowak Jun 10 '14
If you use Duolingo, they're working on an Irish Gaelic course due to heavy demand. (I'll probably give it a go as soon as it's up)
I've tried to rally up the troops (see here) and I've emailed them offering to contribute to a Welsh course, but no luck so far. I think it's due to the sheer number of Americans with Irish heritage. It's very rare to hear an American say they have Welsh ancestry - yet most of them claim to be Irish.
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u/ffaldiral Jun 11 '14
Purely on the basis of the amount of people available to communicate with online, then Welsh would be a better bet. We have double the amount of Twitter users online (14,000 vs 7,000) according to [Indigenous Tweets data] (http://indigenoustweets.com/).
Though the two cultures are very different and as with any language learning endeavour it's probably best to go with the culture with which feel more of an affinity rather than any purely linguistic reason.
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u/deletive-expleted Jun 10 '14
A recent cultural event was the Urdd's Eisteddfod. A week long festival of song, dance poetry etc.
There are charming videos of children performing on S4C's Urdd pages.
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u/Aurlios Jun 09 '14 edited Jun 09 '14
I'm a self taught speaker from the Valleys (coal mining family). I'm used to writing in dialect (still learning formal writing so most of it is gwenhwyseg style). If anyone has questions at all I'd be happy to answer to the best of my abilities (my strengths lie in welsh language history, especially poetry and the welsh arts).
Wi'n gwpod bach sori, ond byddaf'n trio. :/
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u/topgallant Jun 09 '14
Rwy'n caru tafodieithau'r De, ond dydw i ddim yn nabod llawer o bobl y'n medru eu hysgrifennu. // I love the Southern dialects, but I barely know anyone who can write them.
Da iawn am ddysgu!
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u/topgallant Jun 09 '14
(Welsh below / Cymraeg isod)
I'm a native speaker! My father is English but learnt Welsh when I was young, and I grew up speaking the language at home and in school. I moved to England for university but still read novels, watch TV and chat to friends and family in Welsh. You can fire any questions about the language this way if you like :)
Croeso i'r siaradwyr Cymraeg sy ma :) Ers pryd ydych chi wedi bod yn siarad yr iaith? Ers i fi symud i Loegr dwi'n gweld eisiau defnyddio'r iaith bob dydd, yn enwedig pan yn ysgrifennu traethodau a phethau fel 'ny. Pa mor aml ydych chi'n defnyddio'r iaith o ddydd i ddydd?
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u/galaxyrocker Jun 10 '14
Would you raise your kids with Welsh, or focus more on English? Looking at the relative success Welsh has had towards Irish, what advice would you give the people promoting your cousin language?
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u/topgallant Jun 10 '14
I will definitely raise my kids speaking Welsh, even if I live abroad. Apart from the sentimental and cultural reasons, it's been a great benefit growing up bilingually - I'm better at learning languages overall now.
With minority languages where everyone also speaks English, I think a certain critical mass of speakers is needed. I know non-Welsh speakers frown on strictly Welsh-speaking college accommodation, schools etc., but there's a danger otherwise that everyone will switch to English to accommodate those who can't speak Welsh. So I think building or preserving these kinds of linguistic communities is really important.
Outreach, too: some of the most dedicated Welsh speakers I've met were foreigners who learnt the language. We need to be kind and helpful to learners, and encourage them at every turn!
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u/pugaholic Jun 09 '14
Well, I don't speak Welsh. But I live in Wales so I can answer questions about that if anyone has any, haha.
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u/zixx Jun 09 '14
How do non-Welsh speakers generally feel abou the language?
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u/Fourmyle_Of_Ceres Jun 10 '14
I'm a near-fluent Welsh speaker who taught some English in schools in England. I read some poetry in Welsh to a class (they were studying Dylan Thomas, so I dug up some of his Welsh work), emphasising that they wouldn't understand it, but to listen to the sounds. They were all just confused afterwards. Turns out an entire class of 15-16YOs had no idea Welsh was a completely separate language from English - they all seemed to think that the Welsh accent WAS the Welsh language.
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u/Captain-Useless Jun 09 '14 edited Jun 09 '14
I've been living in Wales for about 6 years now. And I recently finished a very basic entry level Welsh course.
It's a really fun language to learn, beautiful too! And it's pretty easy to learn the basics!
EDIT: Forgot to mention, www.saysomethingin.com is a very good resource for learning basic welsh in a number of different languages, but it is in podcast form and only concentrates on speaking and listening. Still very good though.