So another day, another tedious whine over at the Guardian as noticed by Timmy.
Can an app decide if a language lives or dies? Not if Welsh speakers have anything to do with it
That headline is, of course, misleading. Duolingo isn’t doing any such thing.
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%.
Yeah? So what? Welsh is a limited language that is spoken in a tiny principality on the edge of an island in northern Europe. It is also spoken by an equally small outpost of the Welsh empire in Patagonia. It isn’t needed by the rest of the world’s population, so they don’t bother to learn it and why should they? If it dies, no one outside of those tiny enclaves will care enough to give a shrug. That it has lasted this long is down to activism and forcing it to be kept alive. Left to its own devices, it would have eventually become absorbed into English. Such is the nature of things. Manx, for example, is another version of the old Celtic languages that is now only available via old recordings and is no more than a curiosity. Duolingo don’t, so far as I am aware, offer a course in Manx.
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.
You just answered your own question there. Duolingo is a business. Businesses like to make money. The numbers speak for themselves. Also, globally, Spanish is rather more useful.
As Timmy says,
Speak Welsh to each other then. If no one wants to then that’s it for Welsh.
And if that is the case, the world will barely notice or care.
“despite huge expense and effort”. As usual, taxpayers money was squandered for no result and for something that nobody cares about.
As well as, if it takes a huge expense and effort, it wasn’t worth the life support.
The expense? All those very long road signs.
Why are there so many places called Araf?
Great language for Countdown and Scrabble.
“I’ll take a consonant. And another. And another…….”
There are 7 vowels in Welsh.
One could say the same for the Cornish language, which seems to have been reinvented over the last half century or so. I’m sure those who speak these minority languages only do so because they dislike the English so much.
Pretty much. Like a spoiled child rebelling against his parents.
Pasty its sell by date
I thought that Tim’s comment summed the whole thing up very concisely. If the Welsh are concerned that their language is dying out, why is it anyone else’s problem? Since it does seem to be dying out that suggests that most Welsh people aren’t that concerned, if they were there wouldn’t be a problem.
It was only ever really a thing in the north. When I lived there, most of the villagers spoke it to some extent. Until you got to the towns, then less so. In the south, barely at all. In recent years the demands for bilingual signage and pushing it into schools has revived it to some extent, but it is a fight against the inevitable.
Similarly, in Scotland, Scotscensus wrote : “Just over 57,000 people said they could speak Gaelic. This was a fall from 59,000 in the 2001 census. 23,000 people said they could understand Gaelic, but not read, write, or speak it.”
That’s 57k out of 5.4M Scots.
Interesting figures here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/scotland/commissioning/gaelic/
The Scottish police vehicles all have the words “Poileas”, which is Gaelic for “Please” ( very polite the Scottish Constabulary) and “Police” which is ENGLISH. Jings, crivvens, help-ma-boab.
I believe they should do it properly and have “POLIS” proudly emblazoned. After all everybody, the polite ones anyway, calls them the Polis
Polizei would be more apt in today’s oppressive climate.
It seems that the Welsh might have a more serious problem to worry about, their local government blowing mountains of cash on an imaginary problem.
“Wales To Spend £2.6 Billion Fighting Climate Change Next Year”