Consonants

English speaker who plans to learn Welsh will be pleasantly surprised to find that Welsh is far easier to pronounce than its appearance on paper, in the form of place-names for instance, might suggest. The reason for this is that the Welsh alphabet bears a closer relationship to the sounds it represents than the English alphabet does. On the whole, therefore, written Welsh is a reliable guide to how spoken Welsh sounds.

There are significant regional variations in vocabulary and in some vowel sounds, but the Welsh spoken in the Linguata Welsh module reflects standard usage, understood and accepted across Wales.

Stress falls on the last syllable but one, with few exceptions, one of these being the word for Welsh itself, Cymraeg, where the last syllable is stressed.

Welsh does not have the letters k, x or z. There is no z sound in Welsh. The k sound is represented by c, which never takes on the s sound; Welsh cs sounds like English x. J does not belong to the Welsh alphabet but is used to represent the sound of an English j in imported words such as garej (garage) – and also in names such as ‘Jones’!

Welsh uses a number of digraphs – ch dd ff ng ll ph si and th – to represent single sounds: dd, ff, and ll are not double d f l, but are different consonants in their own right, as are ch ph and th. All except ng and si are treated in Welsh language dictionaries as separate letters (they are listed immediately after the first letter of the pair). So, as far as crossword puzzles are concerned, a place-name such as Llangollen counts as eight letters in Welsh, ten in English.

The only Welsh consonants which are doubled are n and r.

The majority of Welsh consonants sound like their counterparts in English. The differences are as follows:

Welsh prounciation compared to English

(Welsh) C as c in ‘cat’, not as in ‘nice’. Ci (dog) sounds ‘key’.

DD as th in ‘the’, not as in ‘thin’: gardd (garden). Pron. ‘garthe’.

F as v in ‘very’: afon (river) sounds like ‘arvon’ without the ‘r’

FF/PH as f in ‘farm’: ffenestr (window) – think of ‘defenestrate’.

G as g in ‘get’, not as in ‘page’: cegin (kitchen). Pron. ‘kaygin’.

NG as ng in ‘song’, occasionally as in ‘finger’, but Bangor is pron. ‘bang-gor’.

S as s in ‘sister’, as a strong sibilant, not as in ‘those’: seren (star) pron. ‘serren’. But as sh before ia ie io and iw: siarad (to speak) pron. ‘sharrad’, siwgr (sugar) pron. ‘shoogr).

TH as th in ‘thin’, not as in ‘those’: athro (teacher) pron. ‘ath-ro’.

Four consonants do not have exact English equivalents, though three of them present no difficulties to Scottish students:

R trilled, emphasized– as in ‘Harry’, never as in ‘corner’: aros (to stay) is pron. ‘arr-os’.

RH a ‘breathy’ version of r above

CH as in Scottish ‘loch’, NOT ‘lock’: chi (you –polite form) pron. ‘chee’ as a harsh ‘hee’, not as ‘chee-‘ in ‘cheese’.

LL a uniquely Welsh sound – see below

Welsh learners often approach ll with some hesitation. Something of a mystique has built up around ll which Welsh language guides try to dispel by advising the student to ‘put the tongue in the l position and emit a sharp breath’ or ‘put the tongue in the l position and try to hiss’. However the sound is described technically as a (voiceless) unilateral l. Indeed a series of tests carried out by Sir John Morris-Jones who chaired the 1928 committee to standardise modern Welsh orthography determined that Welsh speakers produce the sound on the right as opposed to the left side of the mouth in a proportion of three to one.

Try Caradar’s method: practice saying ‘long’ from the right side of your mouth (or from the left if you prefer) i.e. with the tongue firmly preventing air escaping from the left side by pressing against the teeth to the left and front. The sound that emerges from unblocked side will be the Welsh llong (boat).

W and Y will be dealt with in the section on vowels.

Graham Rooth