10 reasons you didn’t hear the mutation you were expecting in Welsh

There are two kinds of Welsh learners – those who anxiously memorise mutation charts and the gender of nouns, and those who sit back, relax, and hope it will come to them in time.

Honestly, there are merits to both approaches. Learning as an adult, it’ll probably take a while for you to get enough language exposure to be able to ‘naturally’ pick up mutations, and becoming familiar with the basic rules can really hurry the process along. Plus, it’ll give you a deeper understanding of why things work the way they do.

But learning mutation rules by rote has its downsides, too. Not least the fact that you need to get to grips with a lot of different exceptions!

If you are someone who’s taken the time to get really familiar with Welsh mutation rules, you’ll doubtless have at some point the confusing experience of chatting to a Welsh speaker and noticing that they’re omitting a mutation you expected them to use.

This can be quite disorientating, but don’t panic. Chances are it’s not that you’ve misunderstood something, but that the rule you’re following has a tricksy exception, or that the person you’re speaking to uses a different dialect to you. In this article, we’ll explore ten possible reasons why you didn’t hear the mutation you were expecting while chatting in Welsh.

Reason one: It’s a limited soft mutation

The most common kind of mutation in Welsh is the treiglad meddal or soft mutation, also known as lenition. It’s present in the other Celtic languages too. The treiglad meddal affects nine consonants of the Welsh alphabet’s twenty-three. But for two of these, it doesn’t do so uniformly. These are ll and rh, which transform to l and r respectively.

This is because there are actually two kinds of soft mutation, which are the limited soft mutation and the full soft mutation. While the full soft mutation does affect ll and rh alongside the other seven, they are essentially ‘left out’ of the limited soft mutation.

The thing is that the limited soft mutation is actually the kind we use in some of the most common cases where soft mutations turn up at all.

For example, feminine nouns soft mutate after y / yr (the), so, for example, cadair (chair) becomes y gadair (the chair). But this is one of the scenarios where a limited soft mutation rather than a full soft mutation is used, so it doesn’t affect feminine nouns start with ll or rh. The spoon is y llwy and not y lwy, even though llwy is a feminine noun.

On the other hand, feminine nouns also actually cause a soft mutation to adjectives used to describe them – and this is a full soft mutation, affecting all nine consonants including ll and rh. So the slippery spoon should be y llwy lithrig, not y llwy llithrig.

It can definitely be quite confusing getting your head around which grammar patterns cause limited soft mutations and which cause full soft mutations. So if you were expecting to hear a mutated r and the sound remained rh, this could be why!

Reason two: Names don’t mutate

If you’re talking about a person, you shouldn’t be mutating their name. Where this rule comes from is unclear, but it makes sense as it avoids confusion and also shows respect to the person you’re talking about.

So, for example, if I received a letter from my friend Catrin, I would say I got a letter o Catrin, not o Gatrin. On the other hand, if Catrin was staying in Cardiff and sent me a letter from there, I might mention that the letter was o Gaerdydd (from Cardiff). Here, the mutation has occurred.

And this is an interesting one, because of course, Caerdydd is a name too – it’s a place name. Now, this isn’t entirely consistent, but generally place name do mutate whilst people’s names don’t. Brand names also don’t really mutate, which makes sense as they’re often based on loan words from other languages anyway.

Some place names don’t mutate either though. In particular, it’s not that common to mutate place names in other languages. The names of English places often have Welsh translations anyway, and these of course you would mutate, but if you used the English version, you wouldn’t. So in Cambridge could translate to either yn Cambridge, without a translation or a mutation of the English place name, or yng Nghaergrawnt, both mutating and translating.

In some very, very formal contexts, often referring to historical or religious figures, personal names can mutate. However, this is really the exception rather than the rule. In general, it’s safe to omit a mutation when you’re talking about people’s names.

Reason three: This mutation varies regionally

Welsh is a language with a huge amount of regional variation, and the same applies just as much to mutation as to anything else.

The rarest kind of mutation in Welsh is the aspirate mutation, or treiglad llaes. The aspirate mutation can only happen to three letters – c, which comes ch, t, which becomes th, and p, which becomes ph.

There are a lot of cases where the aspirate mutation should technically be included, but it either gets dropped or converted into a soft mutation instead. For example, after the word a (and), the aspirate mutation is very often dropped, especially for words beginning with t. The technically correct translation of a bus and a taxi is bws a thacsi, but in many regions bws a tacsi is more common.

Another example is that the negative particles ni and na should cause aspirate mutations to negative statements – ni chysgais i (I didn’t sleep). Many speakers retain this mutation even without the particle, so chysgais i ddim, but another popular option is to use a soft mutation instead, rendering the previous example phrase gysgais i ddim.

These are just a couple of examples. There are loads of mutation rules that change across different areas and dialects of Wales and Welsh.

Reason four: It’s a plural form of a feminine noun

The noun gender system and the irregular plurals are two of the things about Welsh that I often find learners get frustrated by. Combine those two things, and mixing up mutations when you encounter a plural feminine noun is one of the easiest mistakes to make.

One of the first mutation rules you’re likely to learn in Welsh is that feminine nouns a) take a soft mutation after y (the) and other forms of it, and b) cause a soft mutation to adjectives used to describe them. For example, the clever boy is y bachgen clyfar with no mutations, because bachgen is a masculine noun, but the clever girl is y ferch glyfar, with two mutations!

The thing is that when a feminine noun is pluralised, both of these mutation rules go away. You do not soft-mutate a feminine plural noun after y, and adjectives that describe it don’t soft mutate either. So the clever girls is y merched clyfar. It’s crazy how much one little change can alter the whole phrase!

There is actually one exception to this, which is the plural of the collective noun pobl (people). For some strange etymological reason, even when pobl is pluralised to pobloedd, it still mutates to bobloedd after y.

If you hear someone missing out soft mutations when talking about a feminine noun, the reason very well might be that they’re using the plural form. It’s particularly hard to spot plurals in Welsh because they’re irregular, so don’t beat yourself up about it if you’re finding this rule confusing.

Reason five: This word is already a mutated form

There are some words in Welsh that just never take a mutation at all. This can be for a variety of reasons, but one that’s fairly common is that this word is technically already a mutated form.

Loads of words in many different languages mostly get used in very specific contexts. In Welsh, the context a word is most regularly used in might be one which causes a mutation. A good example is buan (fast / prompt), which almost always appears as part of the term yn fuan (soon). In cases like this, the mutated word starts to be treated as if it were a word in its own right.

But the key thing is that it’s not a word in its own right, and because it’s already been mutated, it can’t be subject to a mutation again.

A good example is beth, which is a question word meaning what? It comes from the expression pa beth (which thing), where pa has caused peth to mutate to beth. Since beth is a mutation of peth, it can never mutate any further no matter what context you put it in. Another example is gyda (with), which interestingly comes from the phrase cyd â.

Reason six: The person you’re speaking to is being more or less formal than you expected

Welsh can sound quite different depending on what kind of a register it’s spoken in – very casual, informal Welsh, normal colloquial Welsh, or very formal literary Welsh. Just as much as accepted mutation rules differ between regions, they also differ based on levels of formality.

One example is the ts to j mutation. As you might know, j was added to the Welsh alphabet officially by the Welsh government around fifty years ago. This is to reflect that it’s used in a lot of loan words, which make up a big part of Welsh vocabulary. Ts is another sound that is included in the Welsh-ification of a lot of English words and words from other foreign languages.

Some speakers will soft mutate ts to j when chatting casually. For example, they might say mae gen i jips (I have some chips)instead of mae gen i tsips, because mae gen i causes a soft mutation. (This is already a pretty informal phrase, as the Welsh do have our own word for chips, which is sglodion).

If you have heard people do this a lot you might assume that it’s a standard, correct mutation, but it’s not technically accepted as such. If you’re speaking in a more formal setting then this mutation is unlikely to be heard.

Another example is what I like to call ‘dropped word mutations’. This is where a word that is included in the fullest, most formal and most correct version of a phrase is omitted, but the mutation it causes is still retained. For example, I did is mi wnes i / fe wnes i, but a lot of people just omit the first particle and say wnes i. Here, they’re still retaining the soft mutation of gwnes to wnes that the omitted particle would have caused.

Dropped word mutations are really common in Welsh and they’re definitely worth getting your head around. It can also lead you down some interesting rabbit holes of grammatical research!

However, when people are speaking very informally, they may sometimes not use dropped word mutations. This is considered less correct, but realistically, it is a part of how people use the Welsh language in everyday life, so it’s something you should be aware of as a learner.

Whether the person is being more formal or less formal than you expected, different levels of formality can lead to different uses of mutations.

Reason seven: Different meanings cause different mutations

Most languages have examples of homonyms – words that are spelt and/or pronounced the same way as each other, but have different meanings. Welsh is no exception!

One thing to remember about homonyms in Welsh is that they may cause different mutations to each other. One example is the word ei, which can mean either his or her. If it’s used to mean his, it causes a soft mutation, and if it’s used to mean her, it causes an aspirate mutation.

Now, aspirate mutations only apply to three letters in Welsh, t, c, and p, as I mentioned earlier. So if the first letter of the next word after ei (her) can’t aspirate mutate, it won’t mutate at all.

If I want to say his table, I would say ei fwrdd, using a soft mutation. But her table is ei bwrdd, with no mutation at all, because an aspirate mutation isn’t possible. You might be expecting to hear the former and actually hear the latter instead.

Another easy mistake to make is assuming that the mutation of the noun will be based on the gender of the noun, rather than on the gender of the ei. A good example is that ei chariad means her boyfriend / girlfriend and ei gariad means his boyfriend / girlfriend, whereas you might assume that ei chariad means his / her girlfriend and ei gariad means his / her boyfriend.

Ei isn’t the only example of this mutation confusion, there are plenty more. Another common one is yn, which can cause a soft or a nasal mutation depending on which meaning is intended.

One of yn‘s two meanings is to connect bod (to be), and the different forms of it, to the adjective, noun, or verbnoun in a sentence. We can think of it as a linking word. In this sense, it causes a soft mutation, so she is pretty is mae hi’n bert, using a mutated form of pert (pretty).

The other of its meaning is one of the two Welsh words meaning in. The other is mewn, and they’re used in slightly different circumstances. Yn (in) causes a nasal mutation, so in Tenby is yn Ninbych. Here, Ninbych is a nasal mutation of Dinbych, the Welsh word for Tenby.

Let me know what other examples you can think of in the comments below!

Reason eight: It’s a loan word

Your first instinct might be to disagree with this one, as plenty of loan words do mutate in Welsh. And I’d have to give that one to you – most Welsh loan words mutate just like any others. But there are exceptions.

I would separate Welsh loan words into three broad categories. The first is words that have existed in Welsh for ages and have been thoroughly Welsh-ified. Good examples would be clyfar and ffrind. These words tend to mutate perfectly normally, although there are some seemingly random exceptions. For example, braf, which was borrowed from English brave, doesn’t mutate.

The second is words that have been borrowed in the past 100 or 200 years, often related to new technological developments. Ffôn (phone) is one of these. Another is grêt. These tend to be mutated, with an exception for those that begin with a g, which often aren’t. But in very casual conversation people may miss mutations for these words whatever they begin with.

The last example is words that aren’t really loan words at all – they’re just English words that are often used in Welsh. These words will almost never mutate.

Words also get borrowed from other languages than English, and like with English loan words, whether they mutate depends a lot on how long they’ve been used in the language for, as well as the individual speaker.

For example, mosg (mosque) is from Arabic, has existed in Welsh for a reasonable amount of time, and mutates normally. Cappuccino is an Italian word, and although people use it while speaking Welsh, it’s not treated as a Welsh word and isn’t usually mutated.

Reason nine: It’s just a random exception

Unfortunately, there are many exceptions to mutation rules which just can’t be explained! Mor (so / as) is one of these – it doesn’t mutate, and I couldn’t tell you why. Cyn is another one. They both cause a soft mutation to the word following them, but they don’t mutate themselves.

These seemingly random exceptions often turn up when words are part of set phrases. The common expression O mam bach! is sometimes said O mam fach!, as on the surface of it, this makes more sense – mam (mum) is a feminine adjective so bach (small) should mutate. But the version without the mutation is actually much more common.

There are so many possible reasons for this – a word might have been dropped over time that prevents a mutation, or causes one where you didn’t expect it.

Sometimes, mutations also get dropped in the titles, like that of a museum or park. This may be done to make sure all the words in the phrase are as recognisable as possible to speakers of all abilities. For example, the Museum of Land Speed is sometimes translated as Amgueddfa Cyflymder and sometimes as Amgueddfa Gyflymder.

In general, you just have to get used to these random exceptions.

Reason ten: The person you’re talking to made a mistake!

As a learner, it’s easy to lack confidence in your knowledge and speaking skills in Welsh. And that’s perfectly okay. Being nervous and insecure is normal when you’re getting to grips with a new language.

But the fact is, there may be times when you are right and other people are wrong. For example, the person you’re talking to might be a learner too without you having known. And even native speakers make mistakes, just as many English speakers make grammar mistakes, or may not be aware of certain rules. You never know – it may just have been a slip of the tongue.

The bottom line is there a million reasons why someone may not have used the mutation you were expecting, and it shouldn’t lead you to question your linguistic achievements and progress. The best option is always to ask the person you’re speaking with. You can talk about it together and figure eit out!