The Internet

The Internet is changing everything. The world of language in the future is totally different from the world of language in the past and the reason is quite simple. There is more written language on the Internet now than all the libraries in the world combined. We've never seen anything like it before and we haven't seen anything yet. When you're talking about the future of a language. We are asking about its long-term prospects, where do they essentially lie? And my answer is they lie in the young people, they lie especially in the hands of teenagers. The teenagers are the parents of next generation of children. If teenagers are going to succeed in maintaining the intergenerational transmission of a language, then they have got to be infused about the minority language, the endangered language that their parents and others speak, so how would you get teenagers infused is the question. Well, there is no question today, the only thing that infuses teenagers, apart from sex, is internet and all the electronic world. And so that is the area where one has got to focus. A minority language has got to get itself up electronically in all the varieties that are available to it. Now in the case of something like welsh, there is already quite a strong welsh presence on the World Wide Web and increasingly there are welsh chat rooms, welsh blogs, welsh Facebook interactions, and so on. Well, this is a very very positive sign, and it needs to be reinforced as much as possible. The future of the Welsh language, I think all languages actually lies in the electronic domain.