Can an app decide if a language lives or dies? Not if Welsh speakers have anything to do with it
Can an app decide if a language lives or dies? Not if Welsh speakers have anything to do with it
Duolingo is ‘pausing’ its Welsh course despite high demand – we need robust forms of learning that aren’t driven by profit, says writer and documentary-maker Gwenno Robinson
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%.
Brief moment of panic when I saw my hometown in the thumbnail.
Want to share a couple of random facts about your Hometown only locals could?
I once went back for 3 refunds when the projector at the cinema in the Miners Welfare Hall broke. The film was "Dude! Where's My Car?" so probably didn't miss much.
I was going to get married in Craig-y-Nos castle, but covid/brexit happened, so had to make do with a registry office in Basel, Switzerland.
The Aubrey Arms was renamed to The All Blacks Arms, after Neath RFC's nickname, but since everyone still called it The Aubrey, the new owners changed it back. Also, the owner before the initial name change murdered his wife, and hid the body in the attic of the shed, where my Mam used to park her bike when she was working at the pub. Fun times.
Also the gates for Buckingham Palace were made in Ystrad. They're proper fancy.
Duolingo is ‘pausing’ its Welsh course despite high demand
'high demand'. Lol
Well Mark, you had the chance to back a welsh-made language learning app startup (made by a friend of mine) and passed them up so they've moved onto other things.
Don't act surprised when an American language learning app decides to drop a relatively obscure language like Welsh.
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.
The original article contains 963 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
What do apps have to do with this?
Try reading the article
I don’t come to Lemmy to read articles, I come here to speculate wildly based on titles and make brash assumptions.
Duolingo dropped Welsh as a language to learn.
The Welsh government partially subsidized Welsh being added as a learnable language on Duolingo, then duo says they’re going to cease development of it as it doesn’t get the traffic of larger languages like English, Spanish, French, etc. According to their metrics, 3 million people attempted to learn Welsh on Duolingo but that isn’t enough.
One thing to note is, the 3 million mark was reached AFTER Duolingo announced they were halting development and the subsequent publicity campaign. There's no indication how many (or few) users there were of Welsh prior to that.