> In all of the above, however, the 'narrative' sections, between the > dialogues, are in completely standard Welsh; as are newspapers, magazines, > official documents and anything else where you might encounter written > Welsh. In these cases there is no variation in the spelling. I wouldn't agree that all these are in "completely standard Welsh". It depends what you read - newspapers and magazines like Y Cymro and Barn are written in a fairly consistent "standard" Welsh. But if you look at something like Golwg, you get lots of non-standard stuff like isio for eisiau, pobol for pobl, mi roedd for roedd/yr oedd, even the occasional tydi for dyw/nid yw. Even within the magazine there's a lot of variation - the news pages are more standard than the editorial, which is more standard than the feature articles, which are more standard than the weekly columns. I think the extent of the variation is much greater in, say, Golwg than in anything you could expect from a comparable English-language magazine. And I suspect that this is because in Welsh you're expected to read to yourself exactly as the words are spelt on the page, whereas the English-language journalist/editor expects you to fill in things like want to = wanna if the context of the article seems to demand it. In Welsh it's all written out for you: want to = eisiau, wanna = isio. David.