Every 14 days, a language dies. Within the next century, about half of the 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today will have disappeared, taking with them a unique lexicon, culture and way of seeing the world.
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%.
But there have been reasons for optimism. Welsh-medium education in schools is on the rise. During the pandemic, people across the world began learning Welsh on the internet on apps such as Duolingo. 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.
So, when Duolingo announced earlier this year that it would “pause” its Welsh language course to focus on more “popular” languages, such as Spanish, it felt like a kick in the teeth. A total of around 574 million people globally speak Spanish. Just over 500,000 speak Welsh.
The Welsh course will remain available for learners to use, but it will no longer be updated or developed. 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. Jeremy Miles, the Welsh government’s minister for education and the Welsh language, has since met Duolingo to express his “concern with the decision”.
It’s a symptom of a wider trend of rolling back resources from an already underfunded language. Only last month, HSBC came under fire for scrapping its Welsh language phoneline. The popular language-learning platform Rosetta Stone also recently stopped developing its Welsh language course.
Perhaps, we were naive to ever think that tech companies could hold the answer when it came to revitalising endangered languages. After all, corporations such as Duolingo (a publicly traded company) will rely on a model of supply and demand. As much as they seem to want to support endangered languages, by introducing Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Welsh, they continue to be motivated by profit. The interests of endangered languages won’t ever be central.
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”. On the one hand, the Living Tongues Institute has harnessed new technologies to create the Living Dictionary, an online platform that allows minority-language speakers to upload language data and share it with their own networks. But she warns we should be keeping in mind the larger power structures that are at play.
She’s right. It’s a struggle for minority languages to be represented on the internet. Research carried out by the Meta-Net Network of Excellence concluded that 29 European languages, including Welsh, were at risk of digital extinction because of a lack of support in language technologies. Often, minority languages don’t have their own keyboard, let alone more advanced features such as machine translation and speech recognition. In the 20 years of my life, I’ve only ever spoken Welsh to my Mamgu (grandmother). Since she got an iPhone, our text conversations happen solely in English because of how frustrating she finds overriding the autocorrect. It’s not just limited to the older generation either. A study found that nearly 70% of Welsh speakers aged 13 to 15 used English “often” or “always” online.
We need to take endangered languages into the digital era with us, or we risk leaving them behind. Dr Gerald Roche, associate professor of politics at La Trobe University and co-chair of the Global Coalition for Language Rights, spoke to me about the “false idea that you can solve political problems with technical solutions”. In his view, communities need a broader framework of “greater self-determination and freedom from human rights violations to ensure that their languages survive. There’s no app for that.”
Ultimately, we need to find robust, reliable forms of language learning that aren’t driven by profit or demand. While there’s certainly a place for big tech, we can’t depend on it alone to provide us with resources to maintain endangered languages. Anna Luisa Daigneault echoes a similar thought, advocating for language learning “made by the people, for the people”.
Technology has the power to revitalise minority languages, in the right hands. AI Prinka is being used to preserve the language of the Ainu people, in north-east Japan. Te Hiku Media, a Māor-owned non-profit radio station, is the first to build automatic speech recognition technology for an Indigenous language. In Wales, similar innovations are happening. Recently, the Welsh government funded a new initiative allowing young people who use a computerised speech program to speak both Welsh and English, and to choose a regional dialect. Bangor University’s Canolfan Bedwyr is currently developing a Welsh-language voice assistant, Macsen.
After all, the Welsh language, like many other minority languages, owes its survival to the unintended consequences of technology. The rise of the printing press in the 15th century led to the publication of the first Welsh Bible in 1588, meaning a largely illiterate population learned to read in Welsh. It’s still credited today as having saved the Welsh language from decline.
We are at a crossroads when it comes to minority languages. The choice is simple: we take them with us, or we leave them behind.
Gwenno Robinson is an award-winning writer and documentary-maker from south Wales
