Yr wyddor Gymraeg
The Welsh alphabet has 29 letters, eight of them digraphs such as ch, dd, ll and rh that count as single letters. W and y are vowels, and there is no k, q, v, x or z.
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Ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh and th each count as one letter and have their own place in the alphabet. Dictionaries sort them that way: all words in ll come after all words in l (lwc, luck, before llaeth, milk), and ng comes right after g, so angen (need) is listed before anifail (animal).
Welsh has seven vowels: a, e, i, o, u, w and y. W sounds like oo (cwm, valley) and y like the u of Welsh or the a in “about” (dyn, man; y, the). In the north u and y have a sound made with the tongue drawn back; in the south they sound like ee.
Single f is v, double ff is f; dd is the th of “this”, th the th of “thin”. The k sound is always written c and the v sound f, so k, q, v, x and z are not in the alphabet; z and a few others appear only in foreign names and some loanwords.
Ll is a voiceless l: put your tongue where you say l and blow air out past its sides, without using your voice. You hear it in many place names, such as Llanelli and Llandudno. English speakers often approximate it as “thl”, but it is a single sound.
The first letter of a word often changes after certain words. Cath (cat) becomes ei gath (his cat), ei chath (her cat) and fy nghath (my cat). Dictionaries list the unchanged form, so if a word starting with g, ch, ngh or f is not found, try the letter it may have come from.
Stress normally falls on the second-last syllable: MY-nydd (mountain), but my-NYDD-oedd (mountains) when a syllable is added. Some words stressed on the last syllable are marked with an acute accent, as in casáu (to hate).
The circumflex, called to bach (little roof), marks a long vowel: tân (fire), dŵr (water), tŷ (house). A grave accent marks a short vowel in some loanwords, and the diaeresis shows that a vowel is said separately, as in copïo (to copy). None of these are separate letters.
Letter inventory checked against Unicode CLDR.