Member of the Celtic branch of the
Indo-European language family, spoken chiefly
in the rural north and west of Wales; it is
the strongest of the surviving Celtic
languages, and in 1981 was spoken by 18.9% of
the Welsh population. Welsh has been in
retreat in the face of English expansion
since the accession of the Welsh Henry Tudor
(as Henry VII) to the throne of England.
Modern Welsh, like English, is not a highly
inflected language, but British, the Celtic
ancestor of Welsh, is. The continuous
literature of Welsh, from the 6th century
onwards, contains the whole range of change
from British to present-day Welsh. Nowadays,
few Welsh people speak only Welsh; they are
either bilingual or speak only English.