Every 14 days, a language dies. Within the next century, about half of the 7,000 languages spoken on Earth today will disappear, taking with them a unique lexicon, culture and way of seeing the world.
I am lucky enough to be one of only 0.01% of the world’s population who speak 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 real threat; it is classified as “vulnerable” by the Endangered Languages Project and “potentially vulnerable” by Unesco. The latest census showed that despite great expenditure and effort, there were 24,000 fewer Welsh speakers in Wales in 2021 than a decade earlier, with the ratio rising to a record low of 17.8%.
But there were reasons for optimism. Welsh-medium education in schools is on the rise. During the pandemic, people around the world started learning Welsh online on apps like Duolingo. In December 2023, Duolingo announced that the app’s Welsh course had broken a record 3 million learnersproving particularly popular in the US, Argentina, New Zealand and India.
So when Duolingo announced earlier this year that he would “pause” his Welsh language course to focus on more “popular” languages, such as Spanish, it felt like a kick in the teeth. A total of approximately 574 million people worldwide 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 an appeal to the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford, to personally intervene with the CEO of Duolingo has gathered several thousand signatures. Jeremy Miles, the Welsh Government’s minister for education and the Welsh language, has since met with Duolingo to express his “concerns about the decision”.
It is a symptom of a wider trend to roll back resources from an already underfunded language. Only last month HSBC came under fire for deletion its Welsh language telephone line. Popular language learning platform Rosetta Stone has also recently stopped developing its Welsh language course.
Perhaps we were naive to ever think that tech companies could hold the answer when it comes to reviving endangered languages. After all, corporations like Duolingo (a publicly traded company) will rely on a supply and demand model. As much as they seem to want to support endangered languages, by importing Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Welsh, they are still motivated by profit. The interests of endangered languages will never be central.
I spoke with Anna Luisa Daigneault, program 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 harnessed new technology 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 cautions that we must keep in mind the larger power structures involved.
She is right. It is a struggle for minority languages to be represented on the Internet. Research conducted by the Meta-Net Network of Excellence ended that 29 European languages, including Welsh, were at risk of digital extinction due to a lack of support in language technologies. Often minority languages don’t have their own keyboard, let alone more advanced features like machine translation and speech recognition. In the 20 years of my life, I have only spoken Welsh with my Mamgu (grandmother). Since she got an iPhone, our text conversations are only in English because she finds it frustrating to ignore the autocorrect. It is not just limited to the older generation either. A study found that almost 70% of Welsh speakers between the ages of 13 and 15 use English “often” or “always” online.
We must take endangered languages with us into the digital age, 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 Right, 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 is no application for that.”
Ultimately, we need to find robust, reliable forms of language learning that are not driven by profit or demand. While there is certainly a place for big technology, we cannot rely on it alone to provide us with resources to maintain endangered languages. Anna Luisa Daigneault echoes a similar thought and advocates language learning “made by the people, for the people”.
Technology has the power to revive minority languages, in the right hands. AI Prinka is used to preserve the language of the Ainu people in northeastern 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 happen. Recently, the Welsh Government funded a new initiative which enables young people using a computerized 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 that a largely illiterate population learned to read Welsh. It is still recognized 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.
