Welsh/Conjugations

Similar to other Celtic languages and languages such as French, Spanish and German, verbs in Welsh are conjugated or inflected based on both tense and person. This means that suffixes which are added at the end of the stem of the word transmits information about who and when the verb is referring to. Compared to English, Welsh has generally very few irregular verbs. Due to this, conjugations in Welsh is fairly straight forward.

Irregular verbs

This section will contain a brief overview of the 5 most irregular verbs in Welsh. All of these 5 verbs are very common and their conjugated forms are used all the time.

Regular verbs

Suffix table

Tense	S1	S2	S3	P1	P2	P3
Past	-ais	-aist	-odd	-on	-och	-on
Future	-af/-a	-i	-iff/-ith	-wn	-wch	-an
Conditional	-wn	-et	-ai	-en	-ech	-en
Imperative		-a			-wch

Example

Here is the conjugation table for the verb gweld meaning to see.

Tense	S1	S2	S3	P1	P2	P3
Past	gwelais	gwelaist	gwelodd	gwelon	gweloch	gwelon
Future	gwelaf/gwela	gweli	gweliff/gwelith	gwelwn	gwelwch	gwelan
Conditional	gwelwn	gwelet	gwelai	gwelen	gwelech	gwelen
Imperative		gwela			gwelwch

Tenses

In this article we will go over the most common conjugations and paraphrastic ways of indicating the tense. In spoken Welsh, using axillary verbs like bod and gwneud is more common than in formal written Welsh.

While more tenses are available, especially in written Welsh, this article will describe the most common ones: present, past, future, conditional, and imperative as well as some available paraphrastic patterns.

Present tense

In Welsh, present tense if formed using a paraphrastic pattern using the verb bod (to be) as an auxiliary verb. This is the equivalent of using the verb to be in English, for example I am going. Bod is highly irregular, but for present tense these are some of the most common variants:

Welsh			English
Affirmative	Interrogative	Negative
Dw i			I am
Rydw i	Ydw i	Dydw i
Rwyt ti	Wyt ti	Dwyt ti	You are (singular)
Mae e/o/hi	Ydy e/o/hi	Dydy/Dyw e/o/hi	He/she is
Dyn/Dan ni			We are
Dych/Dach chi			You are (plural)
Maen nhw	Ydyn nhw	Dydyn nhw	They are

For a full overview of possible conjugations of bod, please consult the article specifically about bod.

By using a conjugation of bod, either yn or wedi, and a verb, we can form a pattern that indicate that something is taking place in the present time. So for example:

Rwyt ti'n mynd

You are going

Mae hi'n mynd

She is going

Note that yn gets merged with the vowel in front and becomes 'n

By using the particle wedi instead we get:

Rwyt ti wedi mynd

You have gone'

Negative statements

If we want to negate the sentence, we need to insert the word 'ddim between a negative conjugation of bod and the particle we are using.

Dwyt ti ddim yn mynd

You are not going

Questions

If we want to ask a question we simply replace the conjugation of bod with its interrogative version like:

Wyt ti'n mynd?

Are you going?