Welsh is just another of those ancient languages that aren’t going to be around for much longer, right?

Maybe. Maybe not. It’s difficult to tell.

But it is a test case, a minority language with a chance of surviving. If Welsh can do it, maybe others can too.

The stakes are high, not just for the 740,000 people who speak Welsh today but for speakers of thousands of minority languages around the world.

Like its Celtic cousins Scottish Gaelic and Irish, Welsh suffers from its proximity to the English-speaking world. But Welsh has stuck around while the other Celtic languages have lost most of their speakers. In Scotland, many assert their difference from Britain by voting for independence. In Wales, they do it by speaking Welsh.

A few decades ago, things weren’t looking so rosy. Welsh was in sharp decline. If parents spoke it, they didn’t pass it on to their kids, who didn’t learn it at school either. In the population centers of South Wales, Welsh was long gone. More.

Read the full story in PRI and listen to the podcast here: http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-24/welsh-considered-model-language-revitalization-its-fate-uncertain

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