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Wales, Ho!

© Kristen Hanley Cardozo

Ever since Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas named their daughter Carys, I’ve seen the name come up on internet bulletin boards repeatedly. The Douglases tapped into a potent trend: that of naming a baby a name of British Isles origin. Welsh is particularly hard to pronounce (at least to this American girl), but a number of Welsh names have become familiar or Anglicized over the years. Here’s an Anglo-centric list for English-speaking parents who want a Welsh name, but don’t want the hassle of explaining the pronunciation over and over. My apologies to traditionalists. I live in the U.S., and I just don’t think most people will know how to pronounce Eibhlín. (In case you’re wondering, it’s pronounced the exact same way as Eileen, the Anglicized version.)

Here’s a few clues for people like myself, who just aren’t sure how to pronounce Welsh names.
* A G at the end of a name is pronounced like a hard C. Thus, the male name Caradog is pronounced like Caradoc.
* The accent usually goes on the second to last syllable in multi-syllabic names.
* A single F is pronounced as a V. The letter C is always hard, like K.
* Double consonants are their own letters. Dd is pronounced similarly to the sound of Th in the English word ‘thee’.
* A double F sounds like the English pronunciation of F. A single F takes the place of V, as mentioned above.
* Ll is perhaps the hardest to equate with an English sound. At the beginning of a word it is similar to “Thl” and after a vowel, it is similar to “Hl”.
* The letter U is pronounced similarly to the English Y.
* Y can sound like the English I as it is pronounced in “it”, or it can sound like U as in “under”.
* W usually sounds like the English W, but this can change based on accents, and where it is placed.

The above should illustrate to some degree how it is that Welsh names come to be Anglicized over time. Either the name is spelled the same way and pronounced in English, or an English spelling comes up over time. The same is true for many Irish and Scottish names, as I hope to cover in the future.

Despite the difficulties associated with Welsh names (I must emphasize again, in the U.S. – my English and Irish friends all seem fairly familiar with at least some Welsh pronunciation), many parents here are looking back to their roots and wanting to choose a name of Welsh origin. For them I offer the following list of easy to pronounce names. Most names and pronunciations are taken from the book A World of Baby Names.