Welsh Pronunciation
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
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.
Consonants
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).
Vowels
Simple Vowels i.e. single vowels as opposed to clusters of two or three (diphthongs and triphthongs) have a
‘pure’ sound in Welsh. In this respect they are closer to continental vowels than to their English equivalents
which have a tendency to ‘diphthongize’.
Welsh vowels are usually sounded with their full value in situations where English vowels are either
swallowed or neutral (listen to potel - bottle - in Linguata Welsh: Eating. Items and to Te lemon in Food and
Drink. At the Bar or Café. 1 ).
Welsh vowels can be short or long. You will find most of the following vowel sounds conveniently
demonstrated in the three Linguata sections on Buying things.
A broad generalisation is that vowels in the many common monosyllabic words are short before consonant
clusters, e.g. ffordd (road), bwrdd (table), pump (five, pron. pimp), before (unvoiced) consonants c p t, and
before m and ng; long before the voiced consonants g b d f dd and before ch th ff and s. They are also long
in open-ended monosyllables such as da (good), ty (house) and de (south).
An important group of one-vowel words are short: a (and) e (he, him) i (to) o (from) and y (the).
A : short as in ‘map’ versus long as in ‘tardy’, e.g. map (map) vs tad (father).
E : let/late, e.g. het (hat) vs beth (what).
I : dim/deep, e.g. dim (no) vs mis (month).
O : cot/pole, e.g. cot (coat) vs pob (every). Welsh long ‘o’ lies between ‘coat’ and ‘caught’.
U : similar to i in South Wales. Listen to Buying things. General phrases 1 & 2. There is no English
equivalent to the N.Wales u, which is likened to an ‘ee’ produced at the back of the throat, with the tip of the
tongue placed against the lower front teeth and its middle section raised towards the roof of the mouth.
W : cook/cool, e.g. cwm (valley) vs cwn (dogs).
Y : hint/here, e.g. hynt (journey) vs hir (long). In addition to functioning like i above, y has a third sound, the
‘obscure’ sound, like the ‘u’ in ‘fur’, the ‘er’ in ‘paper’.
Note : i and w act as consonants in some words. For example, the i in arian (money) and iaith (language)
sounds like the ‘y’ in ‘yard.
W sounds like ‘w’ in ‘water’, as in gwyn (white, pron. gwin) and gwin (wine, pron. gween).