Five fun ways to add emphasis to your speech in Welsh

Are you at that point in your Welsh-learning journey where you’re confident in the words and phrases you do know, but you’d like to liven things up a bit? One good way to do that is by varying the amount of emphasis you place on different elements of speech.

Or maybe you’re just starting out with Welsh and are getting a bit tired of memorising mutation charts and practicing the LL sound. Why not take a break to look at the bigger picture of how Welsh language rules in practice are used to convey meaning and emotion?

Either way, how emphasis is created is one of the most enjoyable and characterful aspects of any language, and something worth paying attention to on your learning journey!

Of course, many of the principles of emphasis are the same no matter the language. You can alter the pitch or tone of your voice when speaking, and use punctuation or formatting tools to make the written word stand out. But there are definitely some fun ways of creating emphasis that are unique to Welsh – much as you’d expect for such a lively, energetic language. 

Repetition

This one is common across many different languages, and Welsh is no exception. Repeating a word, a phrase, or a sentiment adds emphasis to it, and shows that you really mean what you say. Let’s quickly go over a couple of contexts where you can repeat words in Welsh.

Firstly, adjectives can sometimes duplicate. This isn’t the most common phenomenon in Welsh as compared to some other languages, but it does happen, especially in creative writing. And because it’s slightly rarer, it’s even more effective at creating that emphasis we’re pursuing.

Simpler, shorter, and more common adjectives are much more likely to be subjected to repetition for emphasis than longer or more recently innovated adjectives.

When you do this, the first instance of the adjective should generally cause the second instance of it to take a soft mutation – unless it starts with a letter that isn’t susceptible to mutation at all.

The first instance may also take a soft mutation anyway, for example if it is coming after the predicative yn.

But this kind of very specific mutation rule isn’t always respected in colloquial speech, which is why you are likely to hear people saying tipyn bach bach (a very little bit), not tipyn bach fach.

Another great time to use repetition to create emphasis is when you’re answering  question. This works well in Welsh because the default form of answering yes or no to a question is actually by essentially repeating back the central verb of the question, either in an affirmative or negative form.

If someone asks you wyt ti’n mynd adre? (are you going home?) and you respond ydw, this actually means I am.

But in recent times, it’s become more and more common for people to use the words ie and na. These are very casual words – they correspond almost exactly to the English yes and no, but they are more informal, because they’re not the standard response as they are in English.

The possibility that this innovation does open up, however, is repetition by emphasis. If someone asks a oes unrhyw llaeth? (is there any milk?), you could respond ie, oes, which means something in-between yes, yes and yes, there is. And you can do the exact same thing if you’re answering no, by saying na, nac oes.

This is something I notice myself, friends and family doing quite a lot in speech – so if you’re around our part of Wales, this will make you sound like a natural! 😉

Emphatic sentences, or ‘blaenu’

I’d be remiss not to include what is possibly the most effective way of creating emphasis in Welsh, which is changing around word order. It’s colloquially referred to as blaenu (fronting), but technically, what you’re doing is creating a brawddeg bwysleisiol (emphatic sentence).

What you need to do to create a brawddeg bwysleisiol is move the part of the sentence that you want to put emphasis on to the front. This will mess around a bit with the traditional verb-subject-object order of Welsh sentences, but that’s okay!

Let’s take a simple sentence and explore the different ways we could create emphasis with it.

The above is the simplest, most standard way of getting the point across. But what if I wanted to place emphasis on the fact that it’s fy nhad (my dad) – rather than fy mam (my mum) or fy nhad-cu (my grandpa)? Well, I’d go with this:

As you can see, the subject of the sentence, fy nhad, has moved right to the front. And the word mae has been changed to sy, another conjugation of bod (to be). This change happens specifically when the subject of the sentence has been emphasised by undergoing blaenu.

If, on the other hand, I wanted to stress that it’s yma that my dad works, I would move that element to the front instead.

If you do rearrange a sentence so that it doesn’t start with a verb anymore, like most Welsh sentences, this has consequences for how the phrase can be linked to other phrases in a longer compound sentence.

In these cases, you’ll need to use the word mai. Mai isn’t a misspelling of mae – it’s a word in its own right. It performs a linking function, that joins two sentences together when the second one doesn’t start with a verb. So, if I wanted to say I shop here because my dad works here, I have two options.

The top one is the standard. It doesn’t need to use mai because the second part of the sentence is phrased in the default way, with a verb (mae, transformed to bod in a compound sentence) at the beginning. The second one needs mai because the second part of the sentence has been phrased emphatically, with a noun (fy nhad) at the beginning.

• Dw i’n meddwl bod fy nhad yn gweithio yma. (standard, no emphasis)
• Dw i’n meddwl mai yma fy nhad yn gweithio. (emphasis on yma)

In the South, plenty of people will use taw instead of mai, and in the North, you may hear na, but they all mean the same thing.

Emphatic pronouns

Yet again with this one, the clue is in the name!

Emphatic pronouns are a special feature in Welsh – I’d love to know if they exist in any other languages. Basically, they’re separate forms of all the personal pronouns in Welsh.

Some people think that the name emphatic pronouns is a misnomer, and that they should be called ‘conjunctive pronouns’. This is because what their actual grammatical purpose is to indicate that the pronoun is in some way connected to, or distinct from, another noun or pronoun that has been mentioned in the sentence.

However, although they don’t always have to indicate emphasis, they can certainly be used in that way. At the very least, they add a lot of colour and variety to speech in Welsh. And they can’t always be accurately translated into other languages, since exactly what they mean is very context dependent.

• minnau / innau / finnau is the emphatic form of mi / i / fi (I / me)
• ninnau is the emphatic form of ni (we / us)
• tithau / chdithau is the emphatic form of ti / chdi (you, informal and singular)
• chithau is the emphatic form of chi (you, formal and / or plural)
• yntau is the emphatic form of o / e (he / him)
• hithau is the emphatic form of hi (she / her)
• nhwythau is the emphatic form of nhw (they / them)

Let’s look at an example of how this could be used.

If your friend said to you, dw i eisiau bwyta mas (I want to eat out), and you were up for it too, you could respond a fi (and me). This would be entirely correct.

But, since you’re connecting yourself through the word a (and) to your friend, an emphatic pronoun is appropriate here too. So a finnau (and me) is a good choice too. It means the exact same thing but draws attention to the grammatical relationship between you and your friend as subjects of the sentence.

By taking advantage of this unique feature of Welsh, and using different forms of pronouns at different points in the sentence, you can create contrast, and thereby emphasis.

Expanding contractions

Just like in English, Welsh speakers use a wide variety of contractions. This is just a natural part of the evolution of a language – people don’t want to spend ages saying what they need to! And if you’ve grown up with the language or spent a long time learning it, these are just as natural and easy to understand as the full forms of phrases.

However, the full forms of phrases come in handy too. Think about it in English. I don’t want to go there is the normal form of the phrase that everyone would use (even in quite formal contexts), but if you expand it to I do not want to go there, you have the opportunity to add extra vocal stress to the word not, and really hammer home your point.

You can do the exact same thing in Welsh. Expanding a contraction to its full form not only adds emphasis in its own right, but also gives you more choices for where you want to place stress with your voice when saying the sentence.

The two phrases above mean exactly the same thing. But the second one, by being longer and less casual, inherently feels it carries a bit more weight. And expanding out dwi’m to its full form of dw i ddim means you can choose to emphasis either i or ddim. In the former case, you’re emphasising that you don’t want to go there. In the second, you’re emphasising that you don’t want to go there.

And, if you wanted to add even more emphasis to the negative in this sentence, you could expand dw to its full form, which in this case would be dydw.

Vocabulary

The simplest way to create emphasis in any language is by using words that get your point across! And the list of such words could go on forever.

Intensifiers are really important. These are words like very and really in English. In Welsh, the most common of these is iawn, which actually means right or okay, but is also often used to mean very.

As you can see, it comes after the adjective it’s describing, just as the adjective comes after the noun.

Go iawn is a common variation. It means really or truly, but it’s often just used as an intensifier. In general, putting go before an adjective intensifies its meaning (and also causes a soft mutation). So go da, coming from go and da (good), means really good.

In more literary language, instead of go, you’d be likely to use pur (pure) or tra (exceedingly). Pur causes a soft mutation and tra causes an aspirate mutation.

Similarly to the expression go iawn, we can use the word gwir (true) to create additional emphasis. It seems that when the Welsh want to emphasise something, our go-to is to assure the listener that we are definitely telling the truth!

Union is another really good word to know. Though it’s spelt the same way as the English word, its meaning isn’t the same at all, and it actually comes from combining iawn with the number un. It means direct, exact, or accurate. I’d say it comes up most often in the adverb form yn union (exactly), but you can also use it as an adjective, in which case it usually comes before the noun, unlike most Welsh adjectives.

In general, adverbs are a useful source of emphasis. Adverbs are generally formed by adding yn before an adjective, just like with union.

And there are quite a few common adverbial translations for completely or totally, which you can add to the end of any statement to underline your point.

• yn hollol
• yn llwyr
• yn gyfan gwbl
• yn llawn

My last example for today is the word ofnadwy, which means terrible. You’d think that’s not a good thing – but actually you can use it as an adverbial intensifier, as in phrases like terribly kind in English. You can either just add ofnadwy after the adjective you want to emphasise, or you can put it before the adjective and insert o (of / from) in between them. In this case, the intervening o causes a soft mutation to the second adjective.

See what I mean?

Emphasis in Welsh is just the same as in any other language – a mixture of grammar, word choice, and vocalisation. Experiment with some of the options above, and see what you come up with!