Welsh language

Wikipedia contributors · CC BY-SA · EN · 04/10/2026

Welsh (Cymraeg or y Gymraeg) is a Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively in Wales by about 18% of the population, by some in England, and in Y Wladfa (the Welsh colony in Chubut Province, Argentina). Historically, it has also been known in English as Cambrian, Cambric and Cymric.

The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 gave the Welsh language official status in Wales. Welsh and English are de jure official languages of the Senedd (the Welsh parliament). According to the 2021 census, 538,300 usual residents in Wales aged three or over (17.8% of the population) were able to speak Welsh, while just over a quarter (25.1%) reported having some Welsh language skills.

Other surveys have produced higher figures: a survey in 2022–2023 found that 34% of people aged 16 or over could speak Welsh (of whom 18 per cent said they could speak Welsh, and 16 per cent said they had some Welsh speaking ability). In March 2026, other survey data estimated that 843,700 people (27.3%) aged three or over in Wales could speak Welsh.

Almost half of all Welsh speakers consider themselves fluent, while 20% are able to speak a fair amount. 56% of Welsh speakers speak the language daily, and 19% speak the language weekly. Since 1951, the number of Welsh speakers living in Wales has gone up, though the percentage of Welsh speakers with respect to the entire population of Wales has decreased every census year, with the exception of the 1991 and the 2001 UK Census.

The Welsh Government plans to increase the number of Welsh-language speakers to one million, and to double the daily use of the language, by 2050. Since 1980, the number of children attending Welsh-medium schools has increased, while the number going to Welsh bilingual and dual-medium schools has decreased. Welsh is considered the least endangered Celtic language by UNESCO.

History

The language of the Welsh developed from the language of Britons. The emergence of Welsh was not instantaneous and clearly identifiable. Instead, the shift occurred over a long period, with some historians claiming that it had happened by as late as the 9th century, with a watershed moment being that proposed by linguist Kenneth H. Jackson, the Battle of Dyrham, a military battle between the West Saxons and the Britons in 577 AD, which split the South Western British from direct overland contact with the Welsh.

Four periods are identified in the history of Welsh, with rather indistinct boundaries: Primitive Welsh, Old Welsh, Middle Welsh, and Modern Welsh. The period immediately following the language's emergence is sometimes referred to as Primitive Welsh, followed by the Old Welsh period – which is generally considered to stretch from the beginning of the 9th century to sometime during the 12th century. The Middle Welsh period is considered to have lasted from then until the 14th century, when the Modern Welsh period began, which in turn is divided into Early and Late Modern Welsh.

Late Modern Welsh, which is still the form spoken today started with William Morgan's 1588 translation of the Bible, and is still readable to most Welsh readers today. This Bible was the first Welsh translation of the whole Bible, and due to the Protestant Reformation in Wales emphasising literacy and vernacular reading of the Bible this standardised the language across Wales.

The first Welsh dictionary was the Antiquae linguae Britannicae as a Welsh-Latin dictionary published in 1632 by John Davies, who was an assistant in translating the 1588 Bible. The first Welsh-English dictionary was published in fifteen parts between 1770 and 1794 by John Walters based on the work of William Gambold.

The word Welsh is a descendant, via Old English wealh, wielisc, of the Proto-Germanic word Walhaz, which was derived from the name of the Celtic people known to the Romans as Volcae and which came to refer to speakers of Celtic languages, and then indiscriminately to the people of the Western Roman Empire. In Old English the term went through semantic narrowing, coming to refer to either Britons in particular or, in some contexts, slaves. The plural form Wēalas evolved into the name for their territory, Wales.

The modern names for various Romance-speaking people in Continental Europe (e.g. Walloons, Valaisans, Vlachs/Wallachians, and Włosi, the Polish name for Italians) have a similar etymology. The Welsh term for the language, Cymraeg, descends from the Brythonic word combrogi, meaning 'compatriots' or 'fellow countrymen'.

Origins

Welsh evolved from Common Brittonic, the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Celtic Britons. Classified as Insular Celtic, the British language probably arrived in Britain during the Bronze Age or Iron Age and was probably spoken throughout the island south of the Firth of Forth. During the Early Middle Ages the British language began to fragment due to increased dialect differentiation, thus evolving into Welsh and the other Brittonic languages. It is not clear when Welsh became distinct.

Linguist Kenneth H. Jackson has suggested that the evolution in syllabic structure and sound pattern was complete by around 550 AD, and labelled the period between then and about 800 AD "Primitive Welsh". This Primitive Welsh may have been spoken in both Wales and the Hen Ogledd ('Old North') – the Brittonic-speaking areas of what are now northern England and southern Scotland – and therefore may have been the ancestor of Cumbric as well as Welsh. Jackson, however, believed that the two varieties were already distinct by that time.

The earliest Welsh poetry – that attributed to the Cynfeirdd or "Early Poets" – is generally considered to date to the Primitive Welsh period. However, much of this poetry was supposedly composed in the Hen Ogledd, raising further questions about the dating of the material and language in which it was originally composed. This discretion stems from the fact that Cumbric was widely believed to have been the language used in Hen Ogledd. An 8th-century inscription in Tywyn shows the language already dropping inflections in the declension of nouns.

Janet Davies proposed that the origins of the Welsh language were much less definite; in The Welsh Language: A History, she proposes that Welsh may have been around even earlier than 600 AD. This is evidenced by the dropping of final syllables from Brittonic: bardos 'poet' became bardd, and abona 'river' became afon. Though both Davies and Jackson cite minor changes in syllable structure and sounds as evidence for the creation of Old Welsh, Davies suggests it may be more appropriate to refer to this derivative language as Lingua Britannica rather than characterising it as a new language altogether.

Primitive Welsh

The argued dates for the period of "Primitive Welsh" are widely debated, with somehistorians' suggestions differing by hundreds of years.

Old Welsh

The next main period is Old Welsh (Hen Gymraeg, 9th to 11th centuries); poetry from both Wales and Scotland has been preserved in this form of the language. As Germanic and Gaelic colonisation of Britain proceeded, the Brittonic speakers in Wales were split off from those in northern England, speaking Cumbric, and those in the southwest, speaking what would become Cornish, so the languages diverged. Both the works of Aneirin (Canu Aneirin, 600) and the Book of Taliesin (Canu Taliesin) were written during this era.

Middle Welsh

Middle Welsh (Cymraeg Canol) is the label attached to the Welsh of the 12th to 14th centuries, of which much more remains than for any earlier period. This is the language of nearly all surviving early manuscripts of the Mabinogion, although the tales themselves are certainly much older. It is also the language of the existing Welsh law manuscripts. Middle Welsh is reasonably intelligible to a modern-day Welsh speaker.

Modern Welsh

The Bible translations into Welsh helped maintain the use of Welsh in daily life, and standardised spelling. The New Testament was translated by William Salesbury in 1567, and the complete Bible by William Morgan in 1588. Modern Welsh is subdivided into Early Modern Welsh and Late Modern Welsh. Early Modern Welsh ran from the 15th century through to the end of the 16th century, and the Late Modern Welsh period roughly dates from the 16th century onwards. Contemporary Welsh differs greatly from the Welsh of the 16th century, but they are similar enough for a fluent Welsh speaker to have little trouble understanding it.

During the Modern Welsh period, there has been a decline in the popularity of the Welsh language: the number of Welsh speakers declined to the point at which there was concern that the language would become extinct. During industrialisation in the late 19th century, immigrants from England led to the decline in Welsh speakers particularly in the South Wales Valleys. Welsh government processes and legislation have worked to increase the proliferation of the Welsh language, for example through education.

Geographical distribution

Wales

Welsh has been spoken continuously in Wales throughout history. By 1911, however, it had become a minority language, spoken by 43.5 per cent of the population. While this decline continued over the following decades, the language did not die out. The smallest number of speakers was recorded in 1981 with 503,000, although the lowest percentage was recorded in the most recent census in 2021 at 17.8 per cent. By the start of the 21st century, numbers began to increase once more, at least partly as a result of the increase in Welsh-medium education.

The 2004 Welsh Language Use Survey showed that 21.7 per cent of the population of Wales spoke Welsh, compared with 20.8 per cent in the 2001 census, and 18.5 per cent in the 1991 census. Since 2001, however, the number of Welsh speakers has declined in both the 2011 and 2021 censuses to about 538,300 or 17.8 per cent in 2021, lower than 1991, although it is still higher in absolute terms. The 2011 census also showed a "big drop" in the number of speakers in the Welsh-speaking heartlands, with the number dropping to under 50 per cent in Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire for the first time. However, according to the Welsh Language Use Survey in 2019–20, 22 per cent of people aged three and over were able to speak Welsh.

The Annual Population Survey (APS) by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimated for the year ending March 2026, approximately 843,700, or 27.3 per cent of the population of Wales aged 3 and over, were able to speak the language. Children and young people aged three to 15 years old were more likely to report that they could speak Welsh than any other age group (47.7 per cent, 231,600). Around 971,600 people, or 31.5 per cent, reported that they could understand spoken Welsh. 25.0 per cent (772,300) could read and 22.4 per cent (692,600) could write in Welsh. The APS estimates of Welsh language ability are historically higher than those produced by the census.

In terms of usage, ONS also reported that 14.5 per cent (446,800) of people aged three or older in Wales reported that they spoke Welsh daily in March 2026, with 4.9 per cent (151,900) speaking it weekly and 6.4 per cent (198,600) less often. Approximately 1.5 per cent (46,000) reported that they never spoke Welsh despite being able to speak the language, with the remaining 72.7 per cent of the population not being able to speak it.

The National Survey for Wales, carried out by the Welsh Government, has also generally reported a higher proportion of Welsh speakers than the census. In 2022–2023, the survey found that 34 per cent of people aged 16 or over could speak Welsh (of whom 18 per cent said they could speak Welsh, and a further 16 per cent reported having some Welsh-speaking ability. This was broadly unchanged from the 2021–2022 results.

Historically, large numbers of Welsh people spoke only Welsh. Over the course of the 20th century this monolingual population all but disappeared, but a small percentage remained at the time of the 1981 census. Most Welsh-speaking people in Wales also speak English. However, many Welsh-speaking people are more comfortable expressing themselves in Welsh than in English. A speaker's choice of language can vary according to the subject domain and the social context, even within a single discourse (known in linguistics as code-switching).

Welsh speakers are largely concentrated in the north and west of Wales, principally Gwynedd, Conwy County Borough, Denbighshire, Anglesey, Carmarthenshire, north Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, parts of Glamorgan, and north-west and extreme south-west Powys. However, first-language and other fluent speakers can be found throughout Wales.

Outside Wales

The rest of the UK

Welsh-speaking communities persisted well into the modern period across the border in England. Archenfield was still Welsh enough in the time of Elizabeth I for the Bishop of Hereford to be made responsible, together with the four Welsh bishops, for the translation of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer into Welsh. Welsh was still commonly spoken there in the first half of the 19th century, and churchwardens' notices were put up in both Welsh and English until about 1860. Alexander John Ellis in the 1880s identified a small part of Shropshire as still then speaking Welsh, with the "Celtic Border" passing from Llanymynech through Oswestry to Chirk.

Source and attribution

Adapted from “Welsh language” by English Wikipedia contributors. Main paragraphs and sections are retained; tables, reference markers and technical markup are omitted. This is an encyclopedic adaptation, not a personal review. Original revision and contributor history ↗. Text is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗. Check current visitor access, tickets and transport with the relevant operator.