A Question About Dialects

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Emilius
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A Question About Dialects

Postby Emilius » 2005-11-21, 20:49

Hylo,

I have just started to learn Welsh, using the BBC online course which looks and feels pretty good.

In the course, they give you both the south and north variants of words in case there are differencies. My question is, should I learn the southern Welsh deeply and also get to know the northern one, or the other way around? Which one is more widely spoken? Which one is the standard?

Diolch yn fawr,
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Postby Magnus » 2005-11-22, 17:05

S'mae?

I would say that, unless you're actually living - or intending to live - in a specific part of Wales (in which case learn the local forms as your first priority), it doesn't make a great deal of difference.

In so far as there is a standard language, it's the literary variety based on the 1588 translation of the Bible, which is very far removed from how anybody naturally speaks Welsh these days. Compared to the gap between formal written Welsh and the spoken language (also used for less formal writing), the differences between spoken dialects are mostly fairly small anyway.

In any case, the distinction between North and South variants is rather an oversimplification as it implies that all people in the North speak the same way and similarly for all people in the South. Certainly there are generalisations that tend to work, although they are not universal. For instance the standard dictionary form for "milk" is llaeth, while in many parts of the North llefrith is used instead, although a lot of people still use llaeth at least some of the time (I tend to use the two words fairly interchangeably) and I think there are parts of North East Wales where llaeth is the more common. I don't know if many people down South, except perhaps Gogs (northerners) who've moved down there, use llefrith but I'm fairly sure most of them would know what it means.

Emilius
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Postby Emilius » 2005-11-22, 19:10

Ok, so I understand the dialect issue is not so critical.

And concerning the literal Welsh: I suppose that newspapers are written in the formal "1588 Bible" style. What about modern Welsh literature or poetry? Are most of them written in the standard or in the modern spoken Welsh? And how hard would it be for me to understand the standard when I learn spoken Welsh? Is the common Welshman familiar with the formal Welsh?
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Postby Magnus » 2005-11-23, 17:42

Emilius wrote:And concerning the literal Welsh: I suppose that newspapers are written in the formal "1588 Bible" style. What about modern Welsh literature or poetry? Are most of them written in the standard or in the modern spoken Welsh? And how hard would it be for me to understand the standard when I learn spoken Welsh? Is the common Welshman familiar with the formal Welsh?

Well, most papers wouldn't be quite so literary as the 1588 Bible. Some are reasonably formal, while others (e.g. yr Herald which if I remember correctly is a national weekly paper) are in a more informal register pretty similar to the spoken language (also the way that most people tend to write letters and things like that). Interestingly, the TV news as read on S4C tends to be quite a lot more formal - not quite the full-on literary language but much more formal than everyday spoken varieties of Welsh.

As for modern literature, there's again quite a variation. Some books are quite literary and formal in style while others are a lot more informal and sometimes quite dialectal. For instance, Caradog Pritchard's Un Nos Ola'r Leuad is mostly written in a Bethesda dialect which I found much easier to understand by reading it aloud and hearing the sounds than by trying to read silently and recognise the forms (living within 5 miles of Bethesda and having learnt a very similar dialect helps a lot). There are a couple of chapters, though, that are written in a very formal style.

Poetry, of course, has all kinds of archaic/obscure vocabulary and often relies heavily on some of the more inflected forms that are standard in the literary language but rare in speech and informal writing. I'm sure there are plenty of poets who write in a less formal register though.

Unless your first interest is in reading older or very formal literature, it's probably best to learn a spoken variety of Welsh first. I know there are quite a lot of Welsh speakers, even native ones, who find the literary language quite heavy going. I've known first-language Welsh speaking Christians who will read an English Bible in preference to the Welsh one because they find the language of the latter almost impenetrable (the 1988 Beibl Cymraeg Newydd is better in that respect than the 1588, but it's still very formal).

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Postby culúrien » 2005-12-24, 3:42

I'm attempting to learn north welsh. I don't know why. I live in the US and have never met anyone who can speak welsh, but I'm trying to learn some of the easier ways in which they vary.
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