I’m lucky enough to be one of just 0.01% of the world’s population who speaks Welsh as their mother tongue. Its survival over 1,500 years is remarkable, living cheek by jowl with English, the most dominant language on Earth. The Welsh language faces a genuine threat; it is classed as “vulnerable” by the Endangered Languages Project and “potentially vulnerable” by Unesco. The latest census showed that despite huge expense and effort, in 2021 there were 24,000 fewer Welsh speakers in Wales than a decade earlier, with the proportion dropping to a record low of 17.8%.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The latest census showed that despite huge expense and effort, in 2021 there were 24,000 fewer Welsh speakers in Wales than a decade earlier, with the proportion dropping to a record low of 17.8%.
In December 2023, Duolingo announced that the app’s Welsh course had hit a record 3 million learners, proving particularly popular in the US, Argentina, New Zealand and India.
Within a few days of the announcement being made, a petition urging the first minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, to personally intervene with the CEO of Duolingo, gathered a few thousand signatures.
I spoke to Anna Luisa Daigneault, programme director at the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, who sees the power of the internet as a “double-edged sword”.
In his view, communities need a broader framework of “greater self-determination and freedom from human rights violations to ensure that their languages survive.
Te Hiku Media, a Māor-owned non-profit radio station, is the first to build automatic speech recognition technology for an Indigenous language.
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