Admittedly, Welsh does look impossible to pronounce, at least for Americans. But that’s mostly because of the frightening spelling, with words like ffrwyth, cynysgaeddir, and ymddwyn. (And don’t forget, of course, the famous town in Wales, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. That name is indeed intimidating, but it’s perfectly pronounceable, as Don Woods shows in this great video! Do watch/listen to it; you won’t regret it. I’ll wait while you watch it.)

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Speaking of singing… here is a song sung by Mared Williams and Steffan Rhys Hughes completely in Welsh, which shows how how beautiful Welsh can be:

OK, we’ve been delaying long enough. Now you want to know specifically what makes Welsh look impossible for Americans to pronounce. There are (at least) five reasons:

• The letter “w” is a vowel, leading to words like cwm that look unpronounceable to Americans.
• Although the letter “ff” looks like a double “f” as in English huffed, it’s a single letter in Welsh and as such can even begin a word, as in fforde or ffrwyth.
• The same goes for “ng,” as in nghedymdeithyas, and “ll,” as in lloyd [Hey! At least we know that name.]
• Many other long Welsh words look intimidating, primarily because of a combination of factors. For example, gwrthddweud.
• Finally, we have one difficulty which is purely one of pronunciation, not of spelling: the voiceless uvular fricative, as in the first and last phoneme in chwech. Again it’s a pair of letters that counts as a single letter.

There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?

Categories: Linguistics