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The phonology of Welsh language is characterised by a number of sounds that do not occur in English language and are rare in European languages, such as the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative and several voiceless sonorants (nasal consonant and liquid consonant). Welsh has a stress accent, which usually falls on the Penult in polysyllabic words.
A notable characteristic of Welsh is the three kinds of consonant mutations (soft, nasal, and aspirate) which affect the beginnings of words and which are also found internally within compound words. Welsh also has vowel mutations, usually occurring when a word is extended by a suffix (including certain suffixes which were formerly pronounced but are now lost).
Symbols in parentheses are either , or found only in . The sound generally occurs in loanwords, e.g. sŵ ('zoo'), although this is usually realised as in northern accents, e.g. . The postalveolar affricates and occur mainly in loanwords, e.g. tsips ('chips') and jeli ('gelatin dessert'), but also in some dialects as developments from and , e.g. from diafol ('devil'). The voiceless nasals occur mostly word-initially, as a consequence of nasal mutation. These nasals have recently been interpreted as sequences of + and are often pronounced as such. Initial is colloquially realised as in the south, e.g. chwech ('six') pronounced .
A study of mainly North Welsh speakers showed that the fortis plosives are about twice as long as the lenis , whether in word-initial or in word-final position. In northern dialects, the consonants and often also tend to be pronounced lengthened or geminated after a short stressed vowel, in words such as hápus 'happy', áteb 'answer', állan 'out'. This doubling disappears if a suffix causes the stress to shift, e.g. hapúsach 'happier', atébion 'answers', allánol 'external'. (Acute accents here are present to show the stress and are not used in written Welsh.) In southern dialects, double consonants are often pronounced single, e.g. popeth 'everything', Port Talbot 'Port Talbot'.
When and are followed by or , as in ci 'dog' or ceg 'mouth' they are slightly palatalised. In some dialects (such as that of Bangor district) a palatalised and can also be heard before , but only in certain loanwords borrowed from English The palatalisation is sometimes reflected in spelling, e.g. giât or gât 'gate'.Both spellings are given by the dictionary Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.
The fricatives tend not to be pronounced at the end of a word, e.g. nesaf ('next') realised as or i fyny ('up') from mynydd ('mountain').
The phoneme occurs for all speakers in certain words, almost all borrowings (e.g., siarad 'talk', sisial 'whisper', siop 'shop', siampŵ 'shampoo'). Otherwise its distribution varies regionally. In northern accents, it can occur when precedes , even (depending on region) across some word boundaries, e.g., es i ('I went'). In some southern accents it is produced when follows or , e.g. mis ('month').
The voiceless fricative is realised as uvular except by some southwestern speakers, who produce a velar variant .
In some dialects of north-western Welsh, the phoneme is consistently velarised or "dark" (, not to be confused with ) in all positions, but remains unvelarised or "clear" () in the south, except in rare exceptions where is found after , e.g. dlos 'pretty'.
In some words such as gwlad 'country', gwlân 'wool', gwneud '(to) do', gwraig and their mutated forms wlad, wlân, wneud, wraig, the letter is not sounded as a vowel but is a consonant, realised by a rounding of the lips accompanying the or . These words are considered to be of one syllable only. As is usual with words beginning with a consonant, the definite article has the form y, for example y wraig 'the woman'.
The voiceless sounds are generally "followed by a full, distinctly enunciated ". Thus fy mhen 'my head' and yng Nghaerdydd 'in Cardiff' are pronounced as . Phrases like fy mhres 'my money' and fy nghrys 'my shirt', which are spelled with hr, are pronounced with the following the : .
When a word traditionally ends with a stop or fricative + or , for example pobl 'people' or fenestr 'window', there is a tendency to adapt it in spoken Welsh to remove the cluster. In some cases an epenthesis vowel, repeating the existing vowel, is added to make a two-syllable word: pobl > , cancr 'cancer' > , brwydr 'battle' > . If this strategy would result in an antepenultimate accent, the or may simply be deleted: fenestr 'window' > , posibl 'possible' > . Occasionally, with , there may be metathesis: ewythr 'uncle' > .
Some mutations have a grammatical function (for example, distinguishing masculine from feminine, or subject from object, or noun from adverb). Other mutations occur automatically, for example after words such as o 'from' (followed by a soft mutation), yn 'in' (followed by a nasal mutation) or a 'and' (followed by an aspirate mutation), or when a noun is preceded by an adjective or prefix, e.g. hen ddyn 'old man' (soft mutation). The presence of the definite article blocks a mutation caused by a preceding word, e.g. o ddrws 'from a door' (soft mutation), but o'r drws 'from the door' (no mutation).
A contrary process called provection, whereby are hardened to , also exists in Welsh. One circumstance where this occurs is when a word has been extended by a suffix which historically began with : the disappears in post-stress position, hardening and doubling the consonant to which it is joined, e.g. bwyd + -ha > bwyta 'eating'; gwlyb 'wet' + -hach > glypach 'wettest'.
Provection can also occur in compound words where meet (or their soft mutations ). Thus pob + peth > popeth 'everything'; bwyd + tŷ > bwyty 'restaurant'.
The vowels and merged with and in southern dialects, but are retained in northern dialects. An acoustic study of ten speakers from North Wales showed that some speakers did not distinguish the short vowels and , although all clearly distinguished the long vowels and . The same study showed that long vowels clearly have longer duration than short ones both in Southern and Northern Welsh.
The length contrast for most vowels in most cases involves also a contrast in vowel quality (e.g., vs. ) and there is debate as to which is the primary contrasting feature. The long counterpart to short is sometimes misleadingly transcribed . This is often found in solely quality-distinctive transcriptions to avoid using a length mark. The actual pronunciation of long is , which makes the vowel pair unique in that for most speakers there is no significant quality difference. Regional realisations of may be or in north-central and (decreasingly) south-eastern Wales or sporadically as in some southern areas undoubtedly under the influence of English.
Long vowels are found only in stressed syllables, and in North Wales only in stressed final syllables or monosyllables. Since stress in Welsh is, with a few exceptions, on the penultimate syllable of polysyllabic words, this means that length contrasts mostly occur only in monosyllabic words, apart from a few words such as Caerdydd 'Cardiff' which are stressed on the final syllable. To a large extent the length of the vowel in a stressed final syllable can be predicted by the consonant which follows it. Where there is no final consonant, as in tŷ 'house', or if the vowel in a final syllable is followed by b, d, g, v, dd, ff, th, ch, s, e.g. dydd 'day', cath 'cat', bach 'small', mis 'month', the vowel is usually long. When the final syllable ends in p, t, c, m, ng, sh, j or when it ends with two consonants the vowel is usually short, e.g. trwm 'heavy', twp 'stupid', llong 'ship', plant 'children', corff 'body'.
Sometimes there are differences between North and South Wales. Words in which the final vowel is followed by ll or s before a stop consonant, such as gwallt 'hair', Pasg 'Easter', and cosb 'punishment', tend to have a long vowel in the North, short in the South. Conversely, heb 'without', and monosyllables ending in ll such as llall 'the other', and pell 'far' tend to have a short vowel in the North, but long in the South. But (h)oll 'all' has a long vowel even in the North.
When a final vowel is followed by l, n, r, the vowel is long in some words, short in others: for example, it is long in mil 'a thousand', hen 'old', tir 'land', but short in tal 'tall', pren 'wood', car 'car'.
Since a vowel can be long only in stressed syllables, in a phrase like dros nos 'over night', the vowel of the preposition dros is short, being unstressed, but the vowel of nos 'night' is long.
The vowel does not occur in the final syllable of words (except a few monosyllabic ) and some English words. It is always pronounced short except when emphasised in the name of the letter y.
In penultimate syllables in North Wales accents all vowels are short. Thus cath 'cat' has a long vowel, but cathod 'cats' has a short one. In South Wales in some words, such as defaid 'sheep (pl)', efail 'forge', ola(f) 'last', rhedeg 'to run', ugain 'twenty', ifanc 'young', can be heard with a vowel which has been described as "half-long". Words such as lleol 'local', where the penultimate vowel is followed by no consonant, have a long vowel. In South Wales tonau 'tunes' and tonnau 'waves' are often pronounced differently, but in North Wales identically.
Vowels in penultimate syllables followed by two consonants, as in cynta(f) 'first' or gorffen 'to finish', are usually short, as are vowels followed by a consonant + the semivowel , as in dynion 'men' or cofio 'to remember'. Penultimate vowels before are usually short and the consonants themselves, especially are often pronounced long when following a stressed vowel, e.g. hapus 'happy', capel 'chapel', ateb 'to answer', tocyn 'ticket', cyllell 'knife'. The fricative has a contradictory effect, making a final stressed vowel long, but a penultimate stressed vowel short; thus bys 'finger' has a long vowel, but bysedd 'fingers' has a short one.
The long vowels are not all derived from Proto-Celtic long vowels, which in some cases were transformed into diphthongs in Welsh, but instead from the New Quantity System.
The diphthongs containing occur only in northern dialects; in southern dialects is replaced by and are merged with . There is a general tendency in the South to simplify diphthongs in Colloquialism, e.g. Northern corresponding to in the South, or Northern and Southern . Since different speakers pronounce the diphthongs in different ways, the phonetic transcription can only be approximate. Mayr and Davies note that although and are both usually transcribed with as their first element, in fact the two diphthongs start from different vowels.
For the north Welsh diphthongs ending in etc., Hammond (2019) writes etc., noting that the glide in these diphthongs is distinct from the vowel .
Some writers classify the diphthongs as long and short. In their acoustic study of 20 different speakers from North and South Wales, found that tended to be shorter than other diphthongs in overall length; however, they judged that there was no clear way of dividing the diphthongs into long and short as there is with monophthongs. On the other hand, , testing a speaker from Anglesey pronouncing words containing and (for example hail 'feast', haul 'sun', hael 'generous'), found that was not only longer overall than the other two by about 30%, but that the first element in was approximately twice as long as the first element of the other two. Similar spectrographic evidence showed that the first element in in the pronunciation of one Northern Welsh speaker was longer than the first element of . According to , the diphthong also has a long first element in some words, such as hwyr 'late', mwy 'more', llwyd 'grey', though a short one in others such as pwynt 'point' and rhwystr 'obstacle'. He notes that in North Wales there is also a long first element in words such as llaw 'hand' and tew 'fat' where there is no final consonant. According to the same author the first element is also long in certain other words such as paun 'peacock', trôi 'he was turning'. In penultimate syllables, the first element of all diphthongs is short.
Welsh also has rising diphthongs and triphthongs, starting with the glides and , e.g. chwech 'six', iaith 'language'. The glide when derived by mutation from is usually treated as a consonant, taking the article y, e.g. y wasg 'the press'; whereas is usually treated as a vowel with the article yr, e.g. yr iaith 'the language'. Both glides tend to become devoiced following a voiceless consonant, for example in chwerthin 'to laugh', clociau 'clocks'.
The digraph is ambiguous, since it can represent either a falling diphthong () or a rising one (): falling in wythnos 'week', gwybod 'to know', gwyliau 'holidays', posibilrwydd 'possibility'; rising in gwydr 'glass', digwydd 'to happen', ffermwyr 'farmers'. There are several words which formerly had a falling diphthong but which now are often pronounced with a rising one, especially in North Wales, for example wyneb 'face', ofnadwy 'dreadful', Conwy 'Conwy'. In formal Welsh, the definite article remains yr as usual for words starting with a vowel: yr wyneb 'the face', yr Wyddfa 'Mount Snowdon'.
The change from to only occurs when is spelled y; when in a final syllable is spelled u, there is no change. Thus the vowel changes in dydd 'day', dyddiau 'days', but not in llun 'picture', lluniau 'pictures'. In some words the penultimate vowel also changes, e.g. cwmwl 'cloud', cymylau 'clouds'.
It is thought that these vowel mutations may have arisen at a period when the stress in Welsh was still on the final syllable of two-syllable words; when the stress shifted to the penultimate syllable, the reduced vowels remained even though they were now in stressed syllables. The mutation > also occurs in final syllables (e.g. dwylo 'hands' from llaw 'hand'), but this is thought to have arisen after the stress moved from the final to the penultimate syllable.
Before :
Before :
Before :
Examples in plural adjectives are:
An example in a verb is:
The affected vowel is usually in the ultimate (or only) syllable, but occasionally the penultimate is affected, as in the following word:
In the following word, both vowels are changed, with a-affection of > in the final syllable of the feminine, and i-affection of > in the penultimate syllable of the masculine form:
After a noun, the feminine adjective has soft mutation of the first letter, e.g. rhaff gref 'a strong rope', cath wen 'a white cat'; but the masculine adjective is used after a 'and', e.g. cath ddu a gwyn 'a black-and-white cat'. Feminine adjectives are only used with singular nouns, as there is no distinction of gender in the plural in Welsh.
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| ysgrif | 'article, essay' |
| ysgrifen | 'writing' |
| ysgrifennydd | 'secretary' |
| ysgrifenyddes | 'female secretary' |
| ysgrifenyddesau | 'female secretaries' |
Adding a syllable to ysgrifennydd to form ysgrifenyddes changes the pronunciation of the second . This is because the pronunciation of depends on whether or not it is in the final syllable.
Compound nouns are usually accented on the penultimate like other words, e.g. gwínllan 'vineyard', ánnoeth 'unwise'. In some cases, however, they are pronounced as if they were two separate words, with a secondary accent on the first part and the primary accent on the second part, e.g. cyn-faer 'ex-mayor'. Under this secondary accent, the vowel spelled has the sound , as usual in final syllables, and long vowels can be preserved, as in the place name Casnewydd or 'Newport'.
In many accents, stress on penultimate syllables is characterised by a low Pitch accent, which is followed by a high pitch falling to a low pitch on the (unstressed) word-final syllable; but in stressed monosyllables and in polysyllabic words where stress is on the final syllable, that syllable also bears the high pitch. This high pitch is thought to be a remnant of the high-pitched word-final accent of early Old Welsh (derived from original penultimate stress in Common Brittonic by the loss of final syllables); the stress shift from final to penultimate occurred in the Old Welsh period without affecting the overall pitch of the word. The date of the shift in stress from the final to the penultimate syllable is dated differently by various scholars, for example 11th century (Jackson, 1953) or 9th century (Watkins, 1972).
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