13.2.1 Vowel System

13.2.2 Consonants

The inventory of consonantal phonemes of present-day Welsh, along with their conventional orthographic representation in angled brackets, is given in Table 13.3.

Voiceless stops are aspirated in syllable onsets. The affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ occur in loanwords, such as tsiênj /ˈtʃeːndʒ/ ‘change’, and arise in native words in some southern dialects from the sequences /tj/ and /dj/, for instance, diwrnod /ˈdjʊrnɔd/ > /ˈdʒʊrnɔd/ ‘day’. The case for treating them as single phonemes rather than as sequences of two segments comes from their distinctive behaviour within the mutation system (see below).

The voiced fricative /z/ is limited to loanwords in southern dialects, such as sŵ ‘zoo’ northern /suː/ or southern /zuː/, and the loaned English plural marker ‑s, sometimes applied to native items, such as the jocular bonddigions ‘aristocrats’ /bɔnˈðɪɡjɔnz/.

The voiceless fricative /x/ may be velar [x] or uvular [χ] depending on dialect (G. E. Jones Reference Jones, Ball and Jones1984:47).

The voiceless nasals and voiceless /r̥^h/ are phonetically partially voiced and strongly aspirated, and could therefore be treated as sequences of sonorant plus /h/. This view is supported by the fact that many southern dialects lack /h/, and also lack voiceless nasals and /r̥^h/. This would be more easily accounted for by a two-segment analysis according to which these dialects simply lack the single phoneme /h/ in all its manifestations. However, the voiceless nasals function within the mutation system (see below) as the nasal counterpart to the voiceless stops, and /r̥^h/ undergoes soft mutation to /r/. Thus, treating them as separate phonemes leads to a more straightforward analysis of the mutation system, and this is the approach usually adopted.

The phoneme /r/ is mainly realised as a voiced alveolar trill [r] or a voiced alveolar tap [ɾ]. After /d/ and /t/, it is an alveolar approximant [ɹ], voiced after /d/ and voiceless after /t/. Approximant pronunciations in other positions are becoming more common, particularly in areas of revitalisation with imposition from English (Morris, Mayr and Mennen Reference Morris, Mayr, Mennen, Durham and Morris2016). Uvular pronunciations as [ʁ] are not unheard of in parts of the north.

13.2.3 Stress

Stress is generally on the penultimate syllable. A few words have final stress where a suffix beginning in a vowel is attached to a vowel-final stem (e.g. rhyddhâd ‘liberation’ (< rhydd- ‘free’ + causative ‑ha- + abstract-noun suffix ‑ad)), in some loanwords (e.g. carafán ‘caravan’ or syrpréis ‘surprise’), and in some place names stressed as two words (e.g. Caerdydd ‘Cardiff’ or Caerlŷr ‘Leicester’). Such unexpected positioning of stress is usually marked in the orthography with an acute accent if the vowel is short, and a circumflex if it is long.

13.2.4 Initial-Consonant Mutations

Welsh makes extensive use of changes to word-initial consonants, termed (initial-consonant) mutations. While these were originally conditioned phonologically by the final segment of the previous word, they are no longer phonologically predictable and are instead triggered by the lexical or grammatical environment. For instance, certain prepositions trigger a mutation on the initial consonant of the following noun phrase:

Other mutations are triggered by more complex grammatical environments. For instance, a feminine singular noun undergoes soft mutation after the definite article (cath ‘cat’ > gath), as does an adjective immediately following a feminine noun (bach ‘small’ > fach) or a feminine adjective (du ‘black’ > ddu):

1. (1)

   y	gath	fach	ddu
   the	cat	small	black
   ‘the small black cat; the black kitten’

The present-day system of initial-consonant mutations is given in Table 13.4. From there, it can be seen that the voiceless nasals are treated as the nasal mutation counterpart to the voiceless stops. In some northern dialects, mutations are applied to other consonants. Specifically, /tʃ/ may become /dʒ/ under soft mutation and either /n̥^hʃ/ or /n̥^hj/ under nasal mutation; and /m/ may become /m̥^h/ in contexts that trigger addition of h- before a vowel (e.g. ei mham ‘her mother’ and eu mham ‘their mother’ for ei mam and eu mam in other dialects).

A related process triggers addition of /h/ before an initial vowel. The contexts that trigger this partially overlap with those for aspirate mutation, but the correspondence is by no means perfect. Thus, ei ‘her’ triggers both aspirate mutation and initial /h/ (ei chath ‘her cat’ and ei hafal ‘her apple’ < afal ‘apple’), but tri ‘three’ triggers only the former (tri chath ‘three cats’ but tri afal ‘three apples’) and eu ‘their’ triggers only the latter (eu cath ‘their cat’ but eu hafal ‘their apple’). Addition of /h/ is of course not possible in those southern dialects that lack /h/, and is becoming obsolete in speech more generally.

Mutations occurred historically word-internally and across word boundaries within the phonological phrase. They therefore also figure in the derivational morphology. Some prefixes trigger certain mutations: the negative prefix an- triggers a nasal mutation, hence an- + datod ‘dissolve’ > annatod ‘indissoluble’, while hy- ‘easy to, ‑able’ triggers a soft mutation, hence hy- + car- ‘love’ > hygar ‘amiable’. Compounding leads to a soft mutation on the second element, hence ysgol ‘school’ + tŷ ‘house’ > ysgoldy ‘schoolhouse’.

For further details of this, and other aspects of Welsh phonetics and phonology, see G. E. Jones (Reference Jones, Ball and Jones1984) and Hannahs (Reference Hannahs2013).

13.3.1 Nominal and Adjectival Morphology

Welsh nouns inflect for number, but not case. There are two genders, masculine and feminine, with some remnants of a former neuter in the demonstrative system. As we have seen, gender is marked in the mutation system, with feminine singular nouns undergoing soft mutation after the definite article and adjectives undergoing soft mutation after a feminine noun (see (1)).

Plural marking on nouns is diverse and lexically idiosyncratic. Most commonly, the plural is marked by addition of suffixes, the most common of which is ‑(i)au, as in mam ‘mother’, plural mamau. Other suffixes include -(i)on (dyddiadur ‘diary’, plural dyddiaduron), ‑od (llew ‘lion’, plural llewod), ‑i (eglwys ‘church’, plural eglwysi), and ‑ydd (heol ‘street’, plural heolydd). Choice of suffix is largely an arbitrary property of the noun, although there is a degree of semantic conditioning: nouns denoting animals tend to have plurals in ‑od, for instance, draenog ‘hedgehog’, plural draenogod, while those denoting groups of people have either ‑(i)aid or ‑(i)on, for instance, estron ‘stranger’, plural estroniaid, or swyddog ‘officer’, plural swyddogion. Of these, ‑(i)au is fully productive for new lexical items, while ‑od, ‑(i)on, ‑i and ‑(i)aid have some degree of productivity within their semantic class. Other, less common, suffixes are no longer productive for new lexical items.

Some nouns form their plurals via a vowel alternation, for instance, bardd ‘poet’, plural beirdd. Nouns that have a vowel alteration with no addition of a suffix are the result of early sound changes triggered by a suffix containing /i/ or /j/ that has since disappeared (‘i-affection’, cf. Germanic umlaut), as with the example just cited. In other cases, a vowel alternation accompanies the addition of a suffix in the plural. In these cases, the alternation may be due to i-affection in the plural (e.g. mab ‘son’, plural meibion), where the suffix contains or at one time contained /i/ or /j/. In rare instances, there is i-affection in the singular in items whose singular formerly had a suffix containing /i/ or /j/ and the plural suffix did not (adain ‘wing’, plural adanedd).

Processes relating to the reduction of non-final vowels in earlier Welsh are also a major source of vowel alternations in the plural. Stress shifted from the final to the penultimate syllable in Old Welsh, but not before unstressed (i.e. non-final) vowels had undergone various reduction processes. These leave their mark in such plurals as dyn ‘man’ /ˈdɨːn/, plural dynion /ˈdənjɔn/; saer ‘carpenter’ /ˈsaːɨr/, plural seiri /ˈsəɪri/; sain ‘sound’ /ˈsaɪn/, plural seiniau /ˈsəɪnjaɨ/; cenhedlaeth ‘generation’ /kɛnˈhɛdlaɨθ/, plural cenedlaethau /kɛnɛˈdləɪθaɨ/. These alternations are a productive part of Welsh phonology, not limited to nominal phonology, and similar alternations are also found when derivational suffixes are added to roots, as with twf ‘growth’ /ˈtuːv/ ~ tyfu ‘grow (v.)’ /ˈtəvɨ/ or saeth ‘arrow’ /ˈsaːɨθ/ ~ saethydd ‘archer’ /ˈsəɨθɨð/.

Typologically, Welsh has attracted interest for the fact that a sizeable group of nouns leave the plural unmarked but add a singulative suffix, masculine ‑yn or feminine ‑en, in the singular, as with moch ‘pigs’, singular mochyn or clêr ‘flies (insects)’, singular cleren. These show some differences from ordinary plurals in that they can act as the input to derivation and compounding, for instance coed ‘trees’ > coediog ‘wooded’, and, on this basis, have been argued to be a category of ‘morphological collectives’ distinct from the plural (Nurmio Reference Nurmio2019). Some nouns have a singulative suffix in the singular and a plural suffix in the plural, for instance, cwningen ‘rabbit’, plural cwningod.

Other points of interest are nouns with double marking of plurality, as with neges ‘message’, whose plural is negeseuon, with addition of two suffixes, ‑au and ‑on, each of which is sufficient to mark plurality alone in other nouns. Some nouns have a different derivational suffix in the plural from the singular; for instance, the plural of posibilrwydd ‘possibility’ is posibiliadau, where the abstract-noun suffix ‑rwydd is replaced by a different abstract-noun suffix ‑iad. Some nouns form their plural from a derived form that is not found in the singular; for instance, the plural of cais ‘attempt’ is ceisiadau, with the abstract-noun suffix ‑iad appearing between the root and the plural suffix in the plural. A few irregular forms show no straightforward relationship between singular and plural, for instance, ci ‘dog’, plural cŵn; tŷ ‘house’, plural tai.

Welsh has also attracted attention for a few cases where derivational morphology appears to be found further from the root than plural inflectional morphology: the pejorative suffix ‑ach and diminutive suffix ‑os attach outside inflectional suffixes, as in dynionach < dyn ‘man’ + ‑ion ‘plural’ + ‑ach or merchetos < merch ‘girl’ + ‑ed ‘plural’ + ‑os.

Attributive adjectives inflect for number and gender in literary Welsh. This was only ever possible for some adjectives, but even for these, such inflection has now largely died out in speech and in some writing. Thus, in formal writing, gwyn ‘white’ has a feminine gwen, with vowel alternation, and a plural gwynion with a plural suffix ‑(i)on.

Comparison of adjectives is mostly via suffixes, with three degrees of comparison. For a regular adjective such as oer ‘cold’, there is an equative in ‑ed, (cyn) oered ‘as cold, so cold’, a comparative in ‑ach, oerach ‘colder’, and a superlative in ‑af, oeraf ‘coldest’. Some adjectives, particularly those with more than one syllable, form their degrees of comparison analytically using mwy ‘more’ or mwyaf ‘most’. All adjectives can also form the equative analytically using mor ‘as’.

Personal pronouns do not inflect for case, but some of them vary in form according to syntactic position. A weak form occurs in environments where there is corresponding agreement (e.g. a verb agreeing with its subject, as in (3); or a noun with a pronominal possessive, see (46)). A strong form occurs in isolation, in focus position and in other syntactic environments. Contrast the pairs fi ~ i, chdi ~ ti and fo ~ o in the following examples from spoken northern Welsh:

1. (2)

   Fi/chdi/fo	sy	’ma.
   1sg.str/2sg.str/3msg.str	be.prs.rel	here
   ‘It’s me/you/him that’s here.’

1. (3)

   Welais	i /	welaist	ti /	welodd	o	ddamwain.
   see.pst.1sg	1sg.wk	see.pst.2sg	2sg.wk	see.pst.3sg	3m.sg.wk	accident
   ‘I saw/you saw/he saw an accident.’

There are also genitive proclitics that optionally double weak pronouns as possessors of nouns and as objects of non-finite verbs (1sg. fy triggers nasal mutation, gweld > ngweld and cath > nghath, cf. above):

1. (4)

   Mae	Megan	wedi	fy	ngweld	i.
   be.prs.3sg	Megan	perf	1sg.gen	see.vn	1sg.wk
   ‘Megan has seen me.’

1. (5)

   fy	nghath	(i)
   1sg.gen	cat	(1sg.wk)
   ‘my cat’

In speech, there is a tendency to replace doubling with a genitive proclitic and a post-head weak pronoun (the pattern in (4)) with a single pronominal element, a strong pronoun in post-head position (see section 13.5, especially example (48)).

Very formal literary Welsh uses accusative clitics for pronominal objects of finite verbs, but these have died out in speech; contrast literary (6) with spoken (7).

1. (6)

   Fe	’th	welodd	Mair.
   aff	2sg.acc	see.pst.3sg	Mair
   ‘Mair saw you.’

1. (7)

   Welodd	Mair	ti/chdi.
   see.pst.3sg	Mair	2sg.str
   ‘Mair saw you.’

13.3.2 Verbal and Prepositional Morphology

There are significant differences between spoken and literary Welsh in the domain of verbal morphology. In spoken Welsh, regular verbs have three main synthetic paradigms, namely future, past and conditional, plus an imperative. In literary Welsh, the three main paradigms have rather different semantics, so that they are often referred to as present, preterite and imperfect respectively. In literary Welsh, there is also a pluperfect formed using ‑as- between the root and the conditional (imperfect) endings, and a present subjunctive, remnants of which survive only in fixed expressions in speech. The main forms for a regular verb cysgu ‘sleep’ are given in Table 13.5. The major spoken forms are given there, with literary forms given in parentheses where they differ considerably. The future (present) paradigm expresses a modal future in speech ‘will sleep, is willing to sleep’, while it can be used as a plain present in literary Welsh. Various verbal periphrases using aspectual particles express other tense–aspect combinations, particularly in speech. In spoken Welsh, subject pronouns are generally obligatory, while they may be omitted in a null-subject pattern in literary Welsh.

In spoken Welsh, only affirmative imperatives are available, and negative imperatives are formed with paid (singular) and peidiwch (plural), the imperative forms of the verb peidio ‘stop, cease’. Note that this no longer has a specifically inhibitive sense (negating an action that has already begun) and can be used to negate any imperative.

A notable feature of Welsh is the existence of impersonal forms of the verb used to express a generic human subject:

1. (8)

   Gellir	chwarae	pêl-droed	yma.
   be.able.prs.impers	play.vn	football	here
   ‘One/you can play football here; it is possible to play football here.’

This is mainly a feature of the literary language.

There is only one non-finite form in the verbal paradigm, traditionally termed the verbnoun. Morphologically, the verbnoun is generally formed using a lexically unpredictable suffix attached to the bare root (‑io in syrthio ‘fall’, ‑u in gwenu ‘smile’, ‑o in hyrwyddo ‘faciliate’, ‑ed in yfed ‘drink’, ‑i in croesi ‘cross’, ‑yll in sefyll ‘stand’, ‑an in clebran ‘chatter’ etc.), or it may be suffixless (dal ‘hold’, atal ‘prevent’, cyrraedd ‘arrive’). For new verbs, ‑io is by far the most productive suffix.

Many verbs have a deverbal adjective in ‑(i)edig, such as printiedig ‘printed’ or berwedig ‘boiling’. Although for transitive verbs this is superficially similar to a past participle in other languages, it can only be used as an attributive or predicative adjective, and, unlike a past participle in other languages, it does not participate in any verbal constructions, such as compound tenses. Furthermore, the form is not available for all verbs, with very many idiosyncratic gaps. It is thus more comparable to other derivational affixes that form adjectives from verbs, such as ‑adwy ‘-able’ (deall ‘understand’ > dealladwy ‘understandable’) or hy- ‘easy to, ‑able’ (plygu ‘bend’ > hyblyg ‘flexible’).

A characteristic of all the modern Celtic languages is the presence of person–number inflection on prepositions. Most prepositions agree with pronominal objects, as with am ‘about’ > amdani hi ‘about her’. A few prepositions are invariant, such as gyda ‘with’ > gyda hi ‘with her’.

13.5.1 Diglossia and Standardisation

At least until the second half of the twentieth century, Welsh manifested diglossia, with literary Welsh used in high contexts, notably for religious purposes, journalism, formal writing and literature, and, in slightly modified form, for scripted speech, and the dialects used in low contexts, for all everyday unscripted speech and some folk literature. There were considerable phonological, morphological and syntactic differences between the two, some of which have been outlined above.

More recently, there has been some convergence of the two varieties, and a stylistic continuum has been emerging. Example (40) shows a sentence in traditional literary Welsh. A parallel contemporary written Welsh version, typical, for instance, of much journalism today, is given in (41). This removes more archaic features of literary Welsh not shared with speech, notably the preverbal particle y, the first-person plural prepositional ending ‑om, the verbnoun form gweled ‘see’ and plural inflection on adjectives. This example also illustrates some of the ways in which written Welsh has begun to adopt some features of spoken varieties, namely the prepositional ending ‑on and the inclusion of the pronoun ni ‘us’ as the object of the preposition.

1. (40)

   Y

   mae

   arnom

   eisiau

   gweled

   eich

   teigrod

   gwynion.

1. (41)

   	Mae	arnon	ni	eisiau	gweld	eich	teigrod	gwyn.
   prt	be.prs.3sg	on.1pl	1pl	want	see.vn	2pl	tigers	white.pl
   ‘We want to see your white tigers.’

These changes bring the written form close to a usage possible in careful speech, and, to some extent, also bridge the gap with less formal spoken forms, such as the northern (42) and the southern (43). Some regional features now also appear in relatively high contexts, such as print and broadcast journalism and government communication.

1. (42)

   ’Dan

   ni

   eisia

   gweld

   eich

   teigyrs

   gwyn

   chi

1. (43)

   ’Ŷn	ni	moyn	gweld	eich	teigyrs	gwyn	chi.
   be.prs.1pl	1pl	want	see.vn	2pl	tigers	white	2pl
   ‘We want to see your white tigers.’

In (42) and (43), the experiencer is marked as the subject of the verb ‘be’ rather than with ar ‘on’; the form of the verb ‘(we) are’ is dialectally specific (rather than formal literary yr ydym or less formal but still written rydyn ni); the lexical item eisiau ‘want’ is replaced in the south by a different item altogether, namely moyn (cf. the literary cognate ymofyn ‘fetch’); with the loanword teigyr ‘tiger’, the morphological plural in ‑od is replaced by the English loan morpheme ‑s; and the preposed possessive construction is replaced by a bipartite embracing construction (eich … chi).

Conversely, features of scripted speech, particularly those represented in the orthography, have begun to appear in non-scripted contexts. For instance, educated southern speakers now adopt a phonology based on the orthography in free conversation, replacing long monophthongs with diphthongs, for example, thus pronouncing cae ‘field’ as [ˈk^haɪ] rather than as [ˈk^hɑː].

More colloquial registers also exist. Examples of the same sentence in normal casual speech are given in northern (44) and southern (45). Here, the verb ‘be’ is dropped entirely in the south, as is the prenominal possessor marker eich in both north and south.

1. (44)

   ’Dan

   ni

   ’sio

   gwel’

   teigyrs

   gwyn

   chi.

1. (45)

   	Ni	moyn	gweld	teigyrs	gwyn	chi.
   be.prs.1pl	1pl	want	see.vn	tigers	white.pl	2pl
   ‘We want to see your white tigers.’

Linguistic revitalisation has also had an impact on this emerging continuum. The question of which variety of Welsh should be taught as a second language (L2) has consumed considerable energy since the 1960s. Until then, learners were generally taught literary Welsh, leaving them able to read and write Welsh, but not to speak it outside of the most formal environments. A new form intended to be taught as a spoken variety to L2 learners, Cymraeg Byw ‘Living Welsh’, was planned and developed by the Welsh Joint Education Committee in the 1960s and 1970s. This variety was condemned as artificial by conservatives who stressed the existing use of a variety close to literary Welsh in highly formal, unscripted conversation and advocated this as a learner variety (Thomas Reference Thomas1982). Nevertheless, it was influential in the late twentieth century.

Today, highly localised dialect features are on the decline among all speakers, with general southern and northern colloquial varieties emerging and beginning to serve as de facto spoken standards within their regions. Adult L2 learners are now generally taught one of these two varieties. In immersion schools, the variety used by teachers with children is typically a regional spoken standard with some prescriptive influence from literary Welsh, and the variety acquired is this, often mediated by an English-language substrate, leading to a further decline in use of local dialect features (M. C. Jones Reference Jones1998).

13.5.2 Contemporary Variation and Change

Studies of variation in spoken Welsh in a quantitative framework have been undertaken since the 1970s. They have identified age, style or register, linguistic background and linguistic identity as significant factors in determining variation. There seems to be little significant social-class variation, although this has generally been assumed as an informal observation rather than demonstrated. Absence of social-class variation might indeed be expected, partly due to the traditional diglossic situation described above and the consequent absence of a sociolinguistic continuum, and partly because the high variety, which might influence speech, was replicated through religious and cultural institutions to which access was restricted by network rather than social class (Thomas Reference Thomas1987:100).

Current topics of interest include variation and change in the expression of pronominal possessors and in omission of the verb bod ‘be’ as auxiliary and in other contexts, and recent work in these areas will be briefly sketched here.

Traditionally, a pronominal possessor is expressed by a clitic that precedes the noun, optionally doubled by a pronoun following it:

1. (46)

   ein	cath	(ni)
   1pl	cat	(we)
   ‘our cat’

While these patterns are found in speech, they have been joined by another pattern, where only the postnominal pronoun is present:

1. (47)

   cat	ni
   cat	we
   ‘our cat’

This pattern dates back to the nineteenth century in L2 Welsh (Willis Reference Willis2016) and was perhaps originally used by first-language (L1) speakers with personal names (Twm ni ‘our Tom’) (Watkins Reference Watkins1977:157). In contemporary Welsh, the postnominal pattern is found much more frequently in the language of younger speakers (Davies Reference Davies, Durham and Morris2016). In the 1990s, it was reported that the incidence of the postnominal variant was very high in the speech of primary schoolchildren, with L2 children having higher proportions of non-standard variants than L1 ones (B. M. Jones Reference Jones1990a). The emergence of this pattern means that Welsh more consistently adopts noun–possessor word order, increasing its adherence to the head-initial language typology. This can also be thought of as an analogical extension of the word order found with nominal possessors (cf. cath Steffan ‘Steffan’s cat’), or as an extension of a parallel change that began with the object of non-finite verbs (verbnouns). Direct objects of verbnouns can be expressed using preverbal clitics with optional doubling of a post-verbal pronoun, cf. (4). In speech, this pattern is often replaced with a solely post-verbal one:

1. (48)

   Mae	Megan	wedi	gweld	fi.
   be.prs.3sg	Megan	perf	see.vn	1sg.str
   ‘Megan has seen me.’

This change has progressed further than that with possessors.

The role of English here has been disputed. While, on the one hand, there is no analogue of the postnominal structure in English, it has been argued that language contact promotes regularisation and simplification (Trudgill Reference Trudgill2011) and that this is what has been happening in this case in Welsh (see B. M. Jones Reference Jones, Ball, Fife, Poppe and Rowland1990b).

Deletion of forms of ‘be’ is another feature of contemporary spoken Welsh. Thus, in (49), ‘be’ is omitted, and ∅ marks the place where an overt form of it might be expected to appear.

1. (49)

   ∅	Ni	’n	dal	y	bws	nawr.
   (be.prs.1pl)	we	prog	catch.vn	the	bus	now
   ‘We[’re] catching the bus now.’

While, on the one hand, this parallels be-deletion in spoken English interrogatives (You ready yet?), introducing an SVO pattern that resembles English, and is found in nineteenth-century representations of L2 speakers (Willis Reference Willis2016, Reference Willis2020), some aspects of it are not so readily explained as contact-induced. All varieties of Welsh manifest this phenomenon (often termed ‘auxiliary deletion’, although it applies to both auxiliary and main-verb ‘be’), yet it shows complex patterns of variation by person, number and dialect that do not closely match factors relevant in English. Deletion in the first-person plural, for example, as in (49), is largely restricted to southern varieties. Auxiliary deletion is mostly found in clauses with pronominal subjects (although deletion with lexical subjects is not completely unheard of). The auxiliary does not need to be in absolute sentence-initial position, and, indeed, can be in a subordinate clause. Another view (Davies Reference Davies2010:323–8) thus takes it to be a phonologically motivated language-internal change subsequently accelerated by the isomorphism with English.

Given the current close relationship with English brought on by language revitalisation in the northeast and southeast, and continued pressure on the language in the heartland areas of the west, sociolinguistic issues involving language contact are likely to continue to feature prominently in the study of Welsh linguistics.