To kick start our new weekly blog series, Bloomsbury Linguistics’ Five Fun Facts about Languages, we've chosen five fun, or at least vaguely interesting, facts about Welsh for your entertainment. Remember, you can share any of your fun facts about Welsh by tweeting us @BloomsburyLing, #5funfacts. So, here we go!
1) Welsh, or Cymraeg, is spoken by 19% of Wales’ total population of around 3 million, according to the 2011 census. This is down from 20.8% in 2001. However, in the sixth century AD Welsh was spoken in most of Britain, and until the twentieth century some shepherds in Cumbria were still counting their sheep in Welsh.
2) Welsh orthography uses 28 letters from the Latin alphabet to write native Welsh words, including 8 digraphs:
a, b, c, ch, d, dd, e, f, ff, g, ng, h, i, l, ll, m, n, o, p, ph, r, rh, s, t, th, u, w, y
‘Offically’ there are no letters “j”, "k", "q", "v", "x", and "z", although they can be used for borrowed words or some technical terms. “K” was in fact common until the sixteenth century but was dropped when the New Testament was translated into Welsh. William Salesbury explained: "C for K, because the printers have not so many as the Welsh requireth".
3) Similar to languages such as Arabic, Classical Hebrew, and Mayan, the canonical word order in Welsh is verb–subject–object. This is unlike English and most other European Languages, which tend to use SVO.
4) The town of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch has the longest place name in the UK. This is not an authentic Welsh toponym, but was artificially created in the 1860’s as a publicity stunt. At 58 letters long, ‘Lanfairpg’ is often mistakenly thought to be the longest place name in the world. With 85 letters Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaun-gahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, the Māori name for a hill in New Zealand, holds the record.
5) In January 2014 it was reported that the Welsh language ‘faces emergency’, due to the inability of many who want to live their lives through the medium of Welsh to access Welsh in public services. However, the Welsh government insists that it is committed to promoting the Welsh language and "to ensuring that people are able to use it in all aspects of their daily lives".
Make sure to come back next Thursday for five fun facts about 'Jafaican' English!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
Recent Comments