(English is my first language, so any errors are typos, failure to proofread, or my personal style. 🙂)

I've loved meeting so many polyglot on here, so thought I'd give a shout out for Welsh, which might not be on many people's radar. This sales pitch is English, because anyone who could read it in Welsh doesn't need convincing!

What is Welsh?

It's a P-Celtic languages spoken mostly in Wales, in the UK, but also with native speaker communities in Patagonia. As a Celtic language it's part of the Indo-European language-family, but if you're used to Romance, Slavic or Germanic languages, it looks very different.

It's also a minority language, and it's under threat from English. These days its legal status is better than it's been in centuries, but there are no monolingual Welsh communities left, and cultural and economic factors threaten to break up bilingual communities. The Welsh government has a target of 1m speakers by 2050.

Why should I learn Welsh?

Connections to Wales and a language-addiction aside, for me it has to be access to the lively cultural scene. If you can't understand Welsh, you're missing out on some fantastic books and music!

From a language learner's perspective, it's fascinating! The verb goes at the start of the sentence, which is really rare globally, prepositions conjugate by person, and it shares the Celtic phenomenon of mutation, so lots of fun things to get your teeth into. Also, Welsh communities put so much effort into welcoming helping learners. Since the pandemic a lot of learning has gone online, so you can get a warm welcome into the Welsh learner community from anywhere in the world.

But isn't it hard?

In my opinion, no, no harder than any other language. I think people get put off because the words look so unfamiliar if you're a speaker of Romance or German. "Edrych"/"to look" doesn't have any obvious cognates, and until you get the hang of how to say letters, where do you even start with a word like "myfyriwr"/"student"? However the sound to spelling relationship is really regular, and Welsh loves to make new words by adding prefixes to existing ones so once you get over the unfamiliarity hump, you're laughing.

What's easy about Welsh?

Verbs. Forget your strong, weak and mixed verbs and forget your reference books just dedicated to verb conjugation. In the spoken language most tenses are expressed with auxiliary/modal + verb noun, so learn those couple of auxiliaries and modals and you'r set. Goodbye irregular verbs!

Determiners. There's no indefinite article, and the definite article doesn't vary by number or gender.

Nouns. There are only two genders (masculine and feminine), and a surprising amount of the time you don't have to change anything depending on the gender of the noun. Also, no cases! (Looking at you German...)

lurals in Welsh are irregular unfortunately, but the good news is you use the singular form after numbers, so you can often avoid using the plural.

Adjectives. Usually don't agree for number, and in a lot of circumstances don't agree for gender either.

Vocab. All Welsh speakers are bilingual in English (except those in Patagonia who are bilingual in Spanish) so you will always be understood if you have to drop in an English word here and there. You can always 'jyst fudgio" things.

Plenty of words have an English origin, e.g. "licio" / "like" and quite a few words come from Latin as well, which helps with deciphering words e.g. "llyfr" / "book".

What's hard about Welsh?

I won't deny it, some properties of Welsh seem specifically designed to torture learners. For example there's no single word for "yes" or "no". Instead you have to say "I will", or "he didn't", i.e. the answer has to match the person and tense of the question. Now you really couldn't have designed a better way to tongue-tie a learner. At least you can still nod or shake your head!

Numbers. There are two counting systems: decimal and in twenties, and the numbers two, three and four have masculine and feminine forms. Given that numbers and dates come up early in a beginner's course, this is a real kick in the teeth. But on the plus side, you don't actually use numbers that often in day to day conversation!

Varieties. As a minority language, the emphasis has historically been on eliminating it rather than standardising it. There's therefore significant dialectal variation, and written norms allow several different variants, e.g. the word for "he" can be "e" or "o" and the word for with can be "gan", "gyda" or "efo". As a learner this can feel overwhelming! But don't worry, people understand other variants and it doesn't matter if you mix them up.

Mutations. I've saved the best (worst?) for last. If you're used to Germanic or Romance languages you're used to changing the ends of words, but in Welsh you're just as likely to change the start of a word, due to the phenomenon of "mutation". Basically this means that certain sounds change in certain contexts.

Some of the contexts are grammatical, e.g. Feminine nouns soft-mutate after a definite article in the singular, so "cadair" / "a chair" becomes "y gadair"/ "the chair" but "y cadeirydd"/"the chairs". However others are more about position in the sentence, e.g. the word for "and" triggers aspirate mutation in the following word, e.g. "a chadair" / "and a chair".

Learners hate mutation. It just doesn't work like anything else you've ever come across, unless you also speak Gaelic, Manx, Breton or Cornish. But that's the joy of learning languages!

On the plus side, everyone will understand you if you get your mutations wrong, and quite a lot of native speakers don't apply the full rules in every day language. At the end of the day it's just a different system to get used to but it's so pervasive in the language you'll get plenty of practice!

If this has got you tempted, the main language teaching providers are https://dysgucymraeg.cymru/, saysomethingin.com/, and of course Duolingo.

Why not rho cynnig arni? (give it a go)