Welsh English
Welsh English,
Anglo-Welsh, or
Wenglish (see below), refer to the
dialects of
English spoken in
Wales by
Welsh people. The dialects are significantly modified by
Welsh grammar and
nouns, and contain a number of unique words. In addition to the distinctive words and grammar, there are a variety of
accents found across Wales.
John Edwards has written and spoken entertainingly about a specific form of Welsh English—that found in the south-east area of Wales—as
Wenglish. Some people, generally outside Wales, use the same word to refer to any form of English spoken in Wales.
Some of the features of Welsh English are
* Distinctive pitch differences giving a "sing-song" effect.
* Lengthening of all vowels is common in strong
valleys accents.
* A tendency towards using an
alveolar trill /r/ (the 'rolled r') in place of an approximant /ɹ/ (the 'normal English r').
*
Yod-dropping does not occur after any consonant, so
rude and
rood,
threw and
through,
chews and
choose,
chute and
shoot etc. are distinct.
* Sometimes adding the word "like" or "indeed" to the end of a sentence for emphasis, or using them as stop-gaps.
As well as straightforward borrowings of words from the
Welsh language (
cwtsh,
picking to rain), grammar from the language has crept into English spoken in Wales. Placing something at the start of a sentence emphasises it: "furious, she was". Periphrasis and auxiliary verbs are used in spoken Welsh, resulting in the English: "He do go there", "I do do it", particularly in the so-called Wenglish accent.
There is also evidence of the misappropriation into English sentence forms of Welsh verbs. The Welsh verb
dysgu (meaning both to learn and to teach) is mistranslated in the common Wenglish form, "He learned me to drive," in place of the correct English usage, "He taught me to drive," although the reverse error is not usually heard.
There is a very wide range of regional accents within Wales.
The sing-song Welsh accent familiar to many English people is generally associated with
South Wales. Accents from South Wales can be heard from the actors
Richard Burton and (to a lesser extent)
Anthony Hopkins, or on recordings of
Dylan Thomas.
Swansea accents are prominent in the film
Twin Town. The popular Welsh actress
Catherine Zeta-Jones also has a Swansea accent. The singers
Shirley Bassey and
Charlotte Church, meanwhile, are from
Cardiff.
The accents of
North Wales are markedly different. In North West Wales the accent is less sing-song, with a more consistently high-pitched voice and the vowels pressed to the back of the throat. Consonants are pronounced very clearly, including at the end of a word, so "bad" can sound like "batt". The "R" sound is rolled extensively and the
dark L is used at the beginning or middle of words, for example in "lose", "bloke", and "valley". The sound is often pronounced unvoiced (the sound does not exist in Welsh), so "lose" is pronounced the same as "loose".
In North East Wales, the accent can sound like that of
Cheshire or
Staffordshire.
Scouse-like
Liverpool accents are used around
Queensferry and
Flint. Around
Wrexham, accents are similar to Scouse and younger people in particular have begun to use more Scouse-like vocabulary, such as "la" and "kid." To the ears of an Englishman a Wrexham accent can sound Scouse or just generally like Northern English.
The accents of
West-Wales, especially North
Carmarthenshire and
Ceredigion, are gentler in nature than either the "
valleys" or the Northern Welsh accents and are, by repute, one of the more beautiful British accents to listen to.
An online survey for the BBC ([
1]) reported in January 2005 placed the Swansea accent in the bottom ten accents likely to help a career, although
"Cardiff folk ranked only a few places higher".
While English accents have affected Anglo-Welsh, it was by no means a one way traffic. In particular,
Scouse and
Brummie accents have both had extensive Anglo-Welsh input through immigration, although in the former case, the influence of
Anglo-Irish is better known.
*
Talk Tidy:John Edwards, the inventor/populariser of the term "Wenglish" and his books and CDs on the matter.
*
Some thoughts and notes on the English of south Wales : D Parry-Jones, National Library of Wales journal 1974 Winter, volume XVIII/4
*
Samples of Welsh Dialect(s)/Accent(s)
