Yn y dechreuad yr oedd y Gair: P-Celtic Languages
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"In the beginning was the Word," says the Welsh translation of the Gospel of St. John. Today only two P-Celtic languages count native speakers, and both are scrapping hard to keep it that way.
The first Celts probably came from somewhere in Central Asia. They joined the general migration westward circa 1000 BCE, and became one of the dominant peoples of Western Europe. At one time, the Celtic umbrella stretched from Turkey to Spain and Denmark. During this period, their languages fell into two general categories. Continental Celtic embraced the majority, while Insular Celtic was spoken in the British Isles. The Continental traditions were eventually extinguished by Latin, and today, all of the six remaining Celtic nations speak one of the two Insular dialects. The older tradition, Goidelic, is also called "Q-Celtic" because these languages include the Latin Q sound, often shortened to K. All modern Q-Celtic tongues are dialects of Gaelic. The Brythonic languages, of which Welsh and Breton are the only survivors, are called P-Celtic, because they change Q or K sounds to P (or B) in root words. Thus, Irish Gaelic's crann (tree) is pren in Welsh.
Cymru
When the Romans invaded Britain, they found it inhabited by Brythonic Celts. Unfortunately, the relatively harmless Roman occupation gave way to Germanic warriors entirely free of cerebral Pax Romana ideals. The Celts were driven off until all were crammed into the rocky, undesirable reaches of the southwest, west, and north. There Celtic culture thrived for a time. The northern Cumbrian language died in the 900s, and the southwestern Cornish language followed suit a thousand years later. Today, only Wales, the largest and most mountainous of the ancient Celtic redoubts, shelters a living Brythonic tradition, called Welsh. Welsh takes its name from the Volcae, a long-extinct Celtic tribe of Northern Italy. From Latin, the word passed into the Germanic languages as "foreigner." Following the final conquest of Wales by England in 1283, Welsh entered seven centuries of prejudice and proscription, during which it nevertheless nurtured some of Britain's most compelling artists.
Three dialects withstood the onslaught and are still heard in modern Wales. However, in 1962, Welsh nationalist Saunders Lewis broadcast his now-famous Tynged yr Iaith, in which he declared that Welsh would be extinct in forty years. Due in part to Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg and other movements that sprang up in response, he was wrong. About a fifth of Wales speaks Welsh today; the fact that the single largest subset are younger than 16 reflects the recent dramatic upswing in interest. (There is also a small Welsh-speaking community in Argentina and a number of expatriate speakers throughout the Commonwealth, particularly in Australia.)
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