English and Welsh

English and Welsh is the title of J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...

's
valedictory address to the University of Oxford

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...

 of 1955.
The lecture sheds light on Tolkien's conceptions of the connections of race, ethnicity and language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

.

Tolkien begins with an overview of the terms "British", "Celtic", "Germanic", "Saxon", "English" and "Welsh", explaining the latter term's etymology in walha

Walha

Walhaz is a reconstructed Proto-Germanic word, meaning "foreigner", "stranger", "Roman", "Romance-speaker", or "Celtic-speaker". The adjective derived from this word can be found in , Old High German walhisk, meaning "Romance", in Old English welisċ, wælisċ, wilisċ, meaning "Romano-British" and in...

.
Tolkien also addresses the historical language contact

Language contact

Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...

 between English and Welsh since the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, including Welsh loanwords and substrate influence found in English, and conversely English loanwords in Welsh. Comparing the Germanic i-mutation

I-mutation

I-mutation is an important type of sound change, more precisely a category of regressive metaphony, in which a back vowel is fronted, and/or a front vowel is raised, if the following syllable contains /i/, /ī/ or /j/ I-mutation (also known as umlaut, front mutation, i-umlaut, i/j-mutation or...

 and the Celtic affection

Affection (linguistics)

In Celtic linguistics, affection is the change in the quality of a vowel under the influence of the vowel of the following, final syllable. The vowel triggering the change may or may not still be present in the modern language.The two main types of affection are a-infection and i-infection...

, Tolkien says

"The north-west of Europe, in spite of its underlying differences of linguistic heritage – Goidelic, Brittonic, Gallic; its varieties of Germanic; and the powerful intrusion of spoken Latin – is as it were a single philological province

Sprachbund

A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...

, a region so interconnected in race, culture, history, and linguistic fusions that its departmental philologies cannot flourish in isolation."

In the final part of the lecture, Tolkien explores the concept of phonaesthetics, citing the phrase cellar door

Cellar door

The English compound noun cellar door is commonly used as an example of a word or phrase which is beautiful in terms of phonaesthetics with no regard for semantics...

as a recognized beautiful-sounding phrase in English, adding that to his own taste, in Welsh "cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent". Tolkien describes the working of phonaesthetics inherent in the moment of association of sound and meaning

Phonestheme

The term phonestheme was coined in 1930 by British linguist J. R. Firth to label the systematic pairing of form and meaning in a language.A phonestheme is different from a morpheme because it does not meet the normal...

,

"this pleasure is felt most immediately and acutely in the moment of association: that is in the reception (or imagination) of a word-form which is felt to have a certain style, and the attribution to it of a meaning which is not received through it."

Tolkien alludes to his view that such tastes are inherited, "an aspect in linguistic terms of our individual natures. And since these are largely historical products, the predilections must be so too".
To refer to such an inherited taste of language, Tolkien introduces the term of "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue".