The Welsh language is one of the Celtic scripts of the Brythonic group. It is mainly distributed in the western administrative part of the UK, that is, in Wales, where about 659 thousand people use this speech.
History of emergence and development
It is known that this language began to form in the 6th century, and British became its basis. Its name comes from the word Walha, which means "foreign speech". The first Welsh school was founded in Aberystwyth in 1939. Nowadays, more than 500 institutions have been opened where education is conducted entirely in Kimric (as the native speakers themselves call it).
The earliest examples of literature written in Welsh are the poems of Taliesin and hence the Gododin of the author Aneurin, who described a 600-year battle between the Northumbrians and the Celts. The exact date of compilation and recording of these works is not known to anyone. Before their appearance, all literary works found on the territory of the country were written in Latin.
Usage options
Speaking about the modern Cymric language in a broad sense, it must be said that it is divided intotwo main parts: colloquial and literary. The first option is used in everyday informal speech, which is rapidly developing and improving to the norms of today's world. The greatest changes occur in the vocabulary: the disappearance of words denoting objects that are no longer used, and, conversely, the arrival of new, relevant expressions.
Literary Welsh is used both in formal situations and in official documents. It remains close to the 1588 Bible translation.
Relevance
It's hard to call the Welsh language dead, because nowadays there are a number of TV channels and radio stations broadcasting entirely or predominantly in Welsh. In addition, weekly and monthly printed publications are published in the country, and about 500 books are published a year. Children aged 5 to 16 learn Welsh English in schools as a core language throughout their education.
In 2001, after the 2001 census showed a decline in the proportion of residents who could speak Welsh, the language council was abolished. Instead, the office of Commissioner for the Welsh Language was introduced. Its main purpose is to promote the frequent use of Welsh. The activities of the commissioner are based on two principles:
- The official language of Wales should have conditions for functioning at the level of English;
- availability of media resources in Welsh, which the population will have if they wishuse.
The first to take this position was M. Hughes, who was previously Deputy Director of the Language Council. A year later, the National Assembly passed a law, according to which, the institution is obliged to conduct activities not only in English, but also in Welsh.
Number of media
At the beginning of the 20th century, half of the population used Welsh in everyday communication, and by the end of the century, the number of speakers had decreased to 20%. The 2001 census showed the following statistics: 582,368 people can only communicate in Welsh, and 659,301 people. can read Welsh and use it in spoken and written language. Approximately 130,000 speakers live in England, half of which live in Greater London. The statistics of 2004 showed that the number of the population speaking the state language increased by 35 thousand people.
Dialects and accent
Despite the fact that England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland are part of the same state, their official languages are somewhat different from each other. Let's return to the use of Welsh. The literary language does not have as many different dialects as the spoken language. This is due to the fact that everyday speech is used much more often than formal speech, respectively, the part that is used more will develop. Consequently, there are no significant changes in the literary language.
Spoken dialects are divided into southern and northern. Differences between themdetermined by grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation. Take, for example, the Patagonian Welsh dialect, which was formed in 1865 after the Welsh people moved to Argentina. This dialect has borrowed many Spanish terms for local features.
General characteristics
Cymric language is the self-name of the word “Welsh”, which is familiar to us, which comes from the term Cymru (Wales), read as “Kemri”. It belongs to the Indo-European family, the writing system of the alphabet is Latin. People who speak Welsh can be found in some regions of countries such as Argentina (Patagonia colony), USA, Canada, Scotland, New Zealand, Australia and England. Wales is the territory where this language has official status.
The letter was based on the Latin alphabet, the number of letters in which is 28. The letter J is mainly used in English borrowings: garej, jam, etc. The sounds of the Cymric language are atypical for European languages, for example, deaf sonants. As for stresses, in polysyllabic words they fall on the penultimate syllable.
Subject - predicate - object - this is the obligatory order of parts of speech in a sentence. Verb forms and preverbal particles are used instead of pronouns in subordinate clauses.
Welsh English has a decimal counting system, that is, the number 40 literally from Welsh into Russian will be translated as "two times twenty", and, for example, 39 turns intonineteen plus twenty. This method is used primarily to indicate age and dates, in other cases the usual decimal system is used.
