Northern Welsh

and velar

variety of acoustic investigations of Welsh (Ball & Williams 2001), and a discussion of the phonological representations of Welsh vowels (Iosad 2017). Phonological descriptions of Welsh include Ball & Jones (1984) and Hannahs (2013). Readers are also referred to sociophonetic work that has documented dialect differences in the Welsh vocalic system (Mayr & Davies 2011), investigated the realization of /l/ in Welsh-English bilingual speech (Morris 2017), and described pre-aspiration in Bethesda Welsh (Morris & Hejná 2020).
Since the 1960s, revitalization efforts including the Welsh language acts passed in 1967 and 1993 and local Mentrau Iaith, or language initiatives, have succeeded in maintaining Wales as a de facto and de jure bilingual nation (Morgan 2001). The requirement that all schoolchildren in Wales receive education in the language and the development of comprehensive Welsh-medium and bilingual educational programs through university level have also been of critical importance in maintenance of the language (C. H. Williams 2014). In 2020, 279,300 (41.1%) of the 680,100 residents of North Wales age three and over reported being able to speak Welsh (with a greater density of speakers in the western part of the region than in eastern areas); the same year, in the nation as a whole, 883,600 out of 3,039,900 residents age three and over (29.1%) reported being able to speak Welsh (StatsWales 2020). The language background of self-identified Welsh speakers in the census data includes those who speak it as a first language acquired at home, and those who learned the language in a formal educational setting. Information about differences in language acquisition, and therefore proportion of first and second language Welsh speakers, was unavailable. Though it is beyond the scope of this paper, see M. C. Jones (1994Jones ( , 1998 for an investigation of the tendency of younger speakers from Welsh-speaking homes toward a standard variety of Welsh over local varieties in eastern areas of the country and H. M. Jones (2008) for an overview of recent statistical trends in family transmission of the language.
Recorded tokens and associated spectrograms presented in this Illustration are primarily from recordings of her own voice made by Catrin Lliar Jones. Catrin is a native speaker of Northern Welsh (bilingual with English and age 47 at the time of recording), who was born and raised on the Llŷn Peninsula in the county of Gwynedd. Tokens were recorded at a 44100 Hz sampling rate using a Snowball table microphone and a PC computer running Audacity. No preamplifier was used. Additional data, reported in the aggregate below, was collected from recordings of five other female speakers of Northern Welsh. All supplementary speakers were from the county of Gwynedd or Anglesey and reported acquiring Welsh from birth. These participants wore a head-mounted Countryman E6 Omnidirectional microphone plugged into a Yamaha MG124c preamplifier, and digital recordings were made with an HP ProBook 6470b laptop.

Bilabial
Dental Alveolar All consonants can be found in initial position, although /N/ only appears word-initially as a result of initial consonant mutation (see 'Nasals' section).
1 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that this token shows voicing of the initial stop. 2 Due to a recording error, the recording provided for this item is from an alternate speaker, a 30-year-old female native speaker of Northern Welsh from Caernarfon in the county of Gwynedd. 3 Throughout the present Illustration, an asterisk ( * ) marks lexical items borrowed from English.

Plosives
Northern Welsh has a three-way place of articulation contrast among oral plosives: bilabial /pH p/, alveolar /tH t/ and velar /kH k/. Previous work on Welsh has described the plosive contrast as primarily one of voicing, but our consultant seldom produced full voicing of lenis plosives, which has been previously described for Welsh (Ball 1984: 18;Hannahs 2013: Chapter 2). Thus, we have chosen to represent the primary contrast between homo-organic plosives as one of aspiration.
Fortis plosives are characterized by strong aspiration in all positions (G. E. Jones 1984 reports slightly weaker aspiration word-medially). Aspiration is generally greater for velar plosives than it is for alveolar and bilabial plosives, which has been documented for many other languages by Cho & Ladefoged (1999). Figure 2 shows mean and standard deviation Figure 2 Voice onset times produced by five female native speakers of Northern Welsh in aspirated and unaspirated plosive-initial words from consonant list above (5 speakers × 6 consonants × 3 repetitions = 90 tokens used to produce the plot).
of voice-onset time measured in initial aspirated /pH tH kH/ and unaspirated /p t k/ plosives by five female native speakers of Northern Welsh (not including our primary consultant Catrin). Release of fortis plosives may verge on affrication (see /tHen"ˆ/ [»tsHEn"] tenau 'thin', in Figure 3). Lenis plosives are unaspirated in initial position (Figure 3), and may exhibit voicing intervocalically and word-finally. Pre-aspiration of both fortis and lenis consonants has been documented for Northern Welsh spoken in Bethesda (Morris & Hejná 2020). Pre-aspiration was observed in our speaker's production of post-vocalic fortis plosives (Figure 4).

Affricates
The voiceless and voiced palatal affricates /tS/ and /dZ/ are non-native to Welsh but appear in a large number of words borrowed from English, such as /tSein"/ Tsieina 'China' and /dZeli/ jeli 'jelly'. Although it is not part of the formal mutation system, /tS/ has been observed to undergo voicing in environments triggering soft mutation, as in /tSHçklEt/ siocled 'chocolate' > /ei tSçklet/ ei jocled 'his chocolate ' (G. E. Jones 1984: 44-45;Hannahs 2013: 15-16). (NB: siocled may also be pronounced with an initial voiceless palatal fricative /S/, in which case it does not undergo mutation.)

Nasals
Nasals have a three-way contrast in place of articulation: bilabial /m/, alveolar /n/, and velar /N/. /N/ appears word-initially only as a result of nasal mutation of the lenis velar plosive /k/ but is contrastive word-medially. Examples in (1) demonstrate intervocalic contrasts for the three voiced nasals. Traditionally, Welsh is described as also having phonemically contrastive voiceless nasals. However, both phonetically and phonologically, the 'voiceless nasals' are not true voiceless nasals (Hammond 2019). Rather, they are a sequence of the nasal in question followed by the glottal /h/ ( Figure 5), and they are therefore transcribed as a sequence here. As with voiceless nasals in Angami (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996: 111-116), Welsh voiceless nasals exhibit a period of aspiration toward the end of the segment. Unlike those of Angami, Welsh voiceless nasals are not truly voiceless; voicing is present during the nasal and may continue during the aspiration period due to coarticulation from the adjacent voiced nasal and vowel, resulting in

Trills
Welsh has two alveolar trills, voiced /r/ r and voiceless /r8 / rh. The voiced trill may appear in any position in the word, but the voiceless trill is confined to initial or pre-tonic syllables. In intervocalic position, the voiced trill may be realized as an alveolar tap [R], as in /»"r"v/ [/"R"v8 ] araf 'slow'. In clusters, /r/ can also appear as alveolar approximant Jones 1984: 49-50). Morris (2013) observed that /r/ was produced as the alveolar approximant [®] by younger speakers of Northern Welsh, particularly in casual contexts. The initial portion of the voiceless trill /r8 / may be produced as a voiceless trill or fricative, while the latter portion is the glottal [h] (Figure 6, right). As has been observed for other languages (see Solé 2002), the Northern Welsh voiceless trill is acoustically similar to a fricative, with spectral energy in the 2-4 kHz range. The voiceless trill alternates with the voiced trill when preceded by a trigger of soft mutation (see 'Mutation' section). Figure 6 illustrates the difference between the voiced trill (left), which shows brief period of rapid tongue-tip opening and closure, and the voiceless trill (right), which shows only frication.

Fricatives
The set of Welsh fricatives includes the paired voiceless and voiced labiodentals /f v/ and interdentals /T D/, as well as the voiceless alveolar /s/, lateral /¬/ (described in more detail below), velar /x/, and glottal /h/, which do not have voiced counterparts. Borrowings from English such as /Set/ sied 'shed' include the voiceless palatal fricative /S/, a sound which otherwise appears in native vocabulary due to palatalization of the alveolar fricative /s/ in /si/ sequences.
All fricatives may appear word-initially and word-medially, and all but /h/ may appear word-finally. The voiceless fricatives /f T x/ appear as the result of aspirate mutation of fortis plosives /p h t h k h / (further discussed in the 'Mutation' section below). In speech, the labiodental voiced fricative /v/ is often deleted when it appears in word-final position but may be retained in the orthography: /tHrev/ [tHre˘v] ∼ [tHre˘] tref 'town'. The posterior voiceless fricative has been previously described as uvular /X/ in Northern Welsh, and as velar /x/ in Southern Welsh (Ball & Williams 2001). However, velar /x/ best represents the fricative as produced by our consultant, and is therefore used here. /x/ is commonly followed by /w/ as in /xwEx/ chwech 'six', and less commonly followed by a vowel: /xi/ chi 'you (PL)'.
In an acoustic study of fricatives in Northern Welsh, Jones & Nolan (2007) measured the duration, relative amplitude, and center of gravity of voiceless fricatives /f T s S ¬/, and /X/ (as noted above, we transcribe the voiceless dorsal fricative as velar /x/, rather than uvular /X/). They found that the set of six voiceless fricatives could be divided into three pairs based on relative amplitude, with high amplitude /s/ and /S/, medium amplitude /¬/ and /X/, and low amplitude /f/ and /T/.

Voiceless lateral fricative
The voiceless lateral fricative /¬/ ll may appear in any position in the word. As produced by our consultant, /¬/ shows a concentration of acoustic energy in the 4-6 kHz range. Jones & Nolan (2007) demonstrate that /¬/ is shorter in duration than other fricatives, and has a relatively high center of gravity, falling below the anterior fricatives /s f T/ but above /S/ and /x/. Figure 7 shows the differing concentration of spectral energy for fricatives /T s S/, and /¬/. Spectral energy for /¬/ is overall lower than for /s/ or /S/, with no clear peak.

Lateral
Northern Welsh has a voiced lateral /l/, which may appear in any position in the word. /l/ also results from Soft Mutation of the voiceless lateral fricative /¬/. Northern Welsh /l/ is described as dark (  Ball & Williams 2001, Hannahs 2013. Previous research has used the difference between F2 and F1 to measure variation in /l/ darkness in Northern Welsh bilingual speech (Morris 2017) and in Scottish Gaelic (Nance 2014). Using this metric, we found that our consultant produced a darker /l/ in syllable coda position than in syllable onset position, indicated by a smaller F2-F1 value (see Table 1). Without more extensive data collection, we cannot speak as to whether this pattern is idiosyncratic to our speaker, or if differences in /l/ darkening according to syllable position are more common in Northern Welsh than previously reported. When /l/ appears as the second element in a final cluster, it may be realized as syllabic [l] or an epenthetic copy of the vowel in the previous syllable may be inserted. Additional discussion of vowel epenthesis can be found in the section 'Vowel and consonant interactions' below.

Mutation
Welsh initial consonant mutation developed from a series of predictable and natural phonological effects such as intervocalic consonant lenition and nasal place assimilation. Over time, the conditioning environments were lost through regular historical sound change, resulting in a sometimes opaque system of mutation. See Hannahs (2013) for a discussion of mutation in Welsh phonology and King (2003) for a general overview of the grammar of Welsh mutation; Hannahs (2011) discusses mutation in the Celtic language family. There are three types of initial consonant mutation in modern Welsh, with the correspondences illustrated in (3) below. The 'Unmutated' column gives the phonetic (left) and orthographic (right) form of all consonants that are subject to mutation in Welsh. The subsequent columns show the results of the soft, nasal, and aspirate mutation processes on each mutateable consonant. The right side of each column provides the orthographic representation of each consonant (in italics); shading indicates that a particular consonant is not subject to that mutation process.
Welsh mutation is indicated orthographically by the replacement of the affected consonant with its mutated counterpart. From the orthographic form, it can be unclear whether a form is mutated or not. For example, a word beginning with orthographic n may represent the mutated form of /d/, or it may correspond to an underlying /n/.

Soft mutation
Soft mutation is the most common and robust mutation in Welsh, and causes voicing of voiceless obstruents and liquids, and fricativization of lenis plosives. The exceptions are /m/, which mutates to the voiced labiodental fricative /v/, and /k/, which deletes under soft mutation. Environments triggering soft mutation include the definite article when preceding a feminine noun, many common prepositions, certain prefixes, and the third-person masculine possessive pronoun, as (4) shows.

Nasal mutation
Nasal mutation developed from a historical process of regressive nasal assimilation. In the modern language, nasal mutation affects lenis plosives /p t k/ and fortis plosives /pH tH kH/, yielding /m n N/ and /mh nh Nh/, respectively. Lexical triggers of nasal mutation (the first-person singular possessive /v´/ fy 'my' and the preposition /´n/ yn 'in') are inconsistently applied in the spoken modern language (King 2003), but nasal mutation is realized consistently when triggered word-internally, as by the negative prefix an-: /"n-t"r¬en-"tui/ ["n"r¬en"twi] annarllenadwy 'illegible', as seen in (5).

Aspirate mutation
Aspirate mutation causes fricativization of fortis plosives, resulting in voiceless fricatives. The bilabial plosive /pH/ alternates with the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/, the alveolar plosive /tH/ alternates with the voiceless dental fricative /T/, and the velar /kH/ alternates with the voiceless velar fricative /x/. Like nasal mutation, aspirate mutation is highly variable in the modern language, and is most consistently realized following the third-person feminine possessive pronoun /ei/ [ei ∼ i] ei 'her'. Among the triggers of aspirate mutation are /kˆt"/ gyda 'with', and numerals /tri/ tri 'three' and /xwEx/ chwech 'six'. Another aspiration process occurs when, following the possessive pronouns /ei/ ei 'her', /eˆ/ eu 'their' or /ein/ ein 'our', /h/ is inserted at the beginning of a vowel-initial word (Borsley, Tallerman & Willis 2007: 19). 4 Examples of aspirate mutation are given in (6).  Ball & Williams (2001) and Hannahs (2013). Iosad (2017) also addresses the Welsh vowel system, specifically in a dialect of South-Western Welsh, but makes observations that are relevant to Northern Welsh as well.
Northern Welsh contrasts thirteen monophthongs in stressed syllables. Twelve of these (excluding /´/), can be organized into pairs differing in length and vowel quality /"˘", e˘E, i˘I,ˆ˘ˆ, u˘U, o˘ç/. The high central vowels /ˆ˘ˆ/ are a feature of Northern Welsh not shared with southern dialects of the language, where these vowels have merged with the high front vowels /i˘i/ (Hannahs 2013). While long vowels are traditionally described as monophthongal (Mayr & Davies 2011), Catrin produced long vowels /i˘ˆ˘u˘/ with strong offglides, as in /tHi˘n/ [tHi˘j´n] tîn 'bottom', /kHˆ˘n/ [kHˆ˘j´n] cŷn 'chisel', /k h u˘n/ [k h u˘w´n] cŵn 'dogs'.
The distribution of long and short vowels is restricted by syllable position, stress, and following consonant(s). In unstressed syllables and non-final syllables, all vowels are short (B. Williams 1983). While in southern dialects of Welsh, long vowels may appear in both penultimate and ultimate stressed syllables, in Northern Welsh, long vowels are restricted to stressed word-final syllables, a category that includes monosyllables (Awbery 1984, Hannahs 2013, Iosad 2017. The distribution of long vowels is further restricted by the following consonant; long vowels appear in open syllables, before unaspirated plosives /p t k/, fricatives /f v T D x/, and fricative-plosive clusters /ft sp st sk ¬t/. Short vowels appear before aspirated plosives /pH tH kH/, fricatives /s ¬/, nasals /m N/, and all other clusters (see 'Syllables' section for a description of all possible coda clusters). A minimal set of monosyllables demonstrating vowel quality and centralization differences before /t/ and /tH/ is given in (7). Vowel length is lexically contrastive only in monosyllables with coda /n l r/.  8 and 9 show F1 and F2 (Hz) values for Northern Welsh monophthongs produced by the supplementary five female speakers of Northern Welsh described above. Catrin did not contribute to this portion of the data. Items were recorded using a word-reading task within a carrier phrase, and each item was produced three times. Items included the target vowels in three environments: before the lenis alveolar plosive /t/ and before the fortis alveolar plosive /tH/ (Figure 8), and before the alveolar nasal /n/ (Figure 9). 8 An exception to the short vowel centralization pattern is /"˘"/, which does not appear to participate in spectral quality contrasts, likely due to the constrained nature of the lower vowel space. Figure 10 shows the duration of monophthongs produced in different following consonant environments. On the left, allophonic vowel duration varies widely due to the coda consonant. On the right, phonemically long vowels have greater duration than short vowels, with the exception of the /e˘E/ pair, which overlap in duration. Looking in more detail at the duration distribution of the /e˘E/ vowel pair, Figure 11 shows that phonemically long and Figure 8 Plot of mean F1 and F2 (Hz) values of monophthongal Welsh vowels in stressed syllables before /tH/ and /t/. In error, no tokens of /ˆ/ before fortis /t h / were collected so only tokens of /ˆ/ before lenis /t/ are included in the plot (5 speakers × 12 vowels × 3 repetitions = 180 tokens used to produce the plot).
short members of the /e˘E/ pair contrast in duration for some speakers (2, 3), but not for others (1,4,5). The contrast between the high front and high central vowels of Northern Welsh is a traditional shibboleth of the dialect, distinguishing it from southern dialects where these vowel categories have merged (Ball 1981, G. E. Jones 1984, Hannahs 2013. Recent work by Mayr Lines extend one standard deviation above and below the mean value measured for the duration of each vowel. Dotted lines indicate short vowel values, and solid lines indicate long vowel values (5 speakers × 12 vowels × 4 contexts × 3 repetitions = 720 tokens used to produce the plot).

Figure 11
Duration differences in the vowel pair /e˘E/ due to following consonant (left) and phonemic length contrast (right) by speaker, showing inter-speaker variation in the use of duration as a cue to vowel length. Dotted lines indicate short vowel values, and solid lines indicate long vowel values (5 speakers × 2 vowels × 4 contexts × 3 repetitions = 120 tokens used to produce the plot).
& Davies (2011) supports this dialect difference, but the acoustic data presented here is more complex, as Figure 12 shows. We refer readers interested in the geographic distribution of the Welsh high front and high central vowel contrast to the Welsh dialect survey (A. R. Thomas 2000) and to recent work by Rees (2016) that investigated these vowels in dialects of central Wales.

Figure 13
Spectrogram of /»m´.nˆD/ mynydd 'mountain' illustrating the quality difference between the stressed /´/ and unstressed /ˆ/, both spelled y. Northern Welsh is described as having thirteen diphthongs, which can be divided into three categories: front-closing, central-closing, and back-closing (Hannahs 2013). One category, transcribed by Hannahs as /Aˆ/, was not distinct from the diphthong /"ˆ/ in the speech of our consultant, as reflected in the phonetic transcriptions in the above list. Figure 14 shows the F1 and F2 (Hz) values for diphthongs recorded by the same group of five speakers as the monophthong items discussed above, divided into three groups based on the location of the diphthong's closing element.

Diphthongs
Note: No tokens of the back-closing diphthong [´U] were collected from the additional speakers, so it is not included in Figure 14.

Figure 14
Each diphthong is represented by line segments connecting the mean F1 and F2 (Hz) values taken at 25%, 50%, and 75% of the vowel's duration, measured from productions of real words by five female speakers of Northern Welsh (5 speakers × 12 diphthongs × 3 repetitions = 180 tokens used to produce the plot).
In rising sonority clusters following a stressed syllable, a copy of the preceding vowel may be epenthesized between members of the cluster. This epenthetic process is more common in casual speech, and applies to clusters with /n/, /l/ or /r/ as the second element. Other examples Figure 15 Coda duration varies according to duration of the preceding vowel, as shown in the minimal pair /m"n/ man 'place' vs. /m"˘n/ mân 'small'.

Stress
Stress in native Welsh typically falls on the penultimate syllable of polysyllabic words. The majority of exceptions have final stress, including polymorphemic words beginning with /´m/ ym-REFLEXIVE. Compare monomorphemic /»´m.l"˘D/ ymladd 'to kill' and polymorphemic /´m.»l"˘D/ ymlâdd 'to tire oneself'. Words with antepenultimate stress are also found in Welsh, but are usually borrowings from English. When suffixes are applied to a penultimate stress polysyllabic stem, primary stress is maintained on the penultimate syllable, regardless of morpheme boundaries. In words with four or more syllables, secondary stress, described by Ball & Williams (2001: Chapter 12) as a 'rhythmic prominence', appears on all even numbered syllables to the left of the penultimate primary stress.
For a detailed explanation of the phonetic correlates of stress in Welsh, see B. Williams (1999). In brief, stressed syllables are shorter in duration and have lower amplitude than their following (unstressed) ultimate syllables. Consonants following stressed vowels are longer in duration than consonants following unstressed vowels (B. Williams 1999, Webb 2011. Table 3 demonstrates variation in syllable stress and pitch due to repeated suffixation to the root word /´skriv/ [»/´s.kriv] ysgrif 'article, essay'. Previous accounts of Welsh stress have described stressed syllables as having lower f0 (B. Williams 1983, Mennen, Mayr & Morris 2015. In our consultant's speech this pattern was not observed; Catrin produced consistently higher pitch in stressed penultimate syllables than in unstressed ultimate syllables, as Table 3 shows.

Intonation
Due to the limitations of our data set, an analysis of intonation was not possible, however, Cooper (2015) provides an in-depth analysis of phonetic implementation of intonation in Anglesey Welsh, a dialect of Northern Welsh similar to the variety described here. As in many languages, intonation is used in Northern Welsh to distinguish interrogative and declarative utterances; the height of the nuclear pitch peak (defined as the strongest stress in the phrase) in interrogatives varies according to the amount of lexical and syntactic marking present in the question, and is consistently higher in questions than in statements (Cooper 2015). Cooper also describes a L+H * pitch accent consisting of a low tone (aligned with the onset of the stressed syllable's initial consonant) followed by a high tone (aligned within the stressed syllable's nucleus) that occurs on both the pre-nuclear and nuclear stressed syllables of a phrase. Additional descriptions of Welsh intonation in general can also be found in Thomas (1967), Pilch (1975), Rhys (1984), and Evans (1997).

English translation
The North Wind and the Sun were arguing which of them was the strongest, when a traveler came past wrapped in a warm cloak. They agreed that the one who succeeded in making the traveler take off his cloak first would be the strongest. Then, the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew, the more tightly the traveler pulled his cloak about him, and in the end, the North Wind had to cease his effort. Then the Sun shone brightly, and straight away, the traveler took off his cloak. And so, the North Wind had to agree that the Sun was the stronger of them.