How To Protect Minority Languages

There used to be lots of minority groups and they used to speak their own language. However, fewer people speak those minority languages nowadays. Moreover, a few of them, Cornish and Manx, are almost dead.



On the other hand, speaking of Welsh, it is reviving gradually and the number of the speakers is increasing, being encouraged to study by schools. For example, all school students in Wales study Welsh at school for 12 years as the first or second language. In the past, Welsh used to be regarded as kind of like a vulgar language and people refused to speak it or were forced to stop using it. In this ways, the language was likely to die. However, there are about 600000 welsh speakers at present and it's increasing. The picture of Britain on the right shows what percentage of the population speaks Welsh. You can see it's a lot!



How can we encourage other minority languages to revive like welsh? There are some ideas;





・Making minority languages subjects (first of all, teachers teach students histories of minority languages or something like that to give students interest in the languages.


・Giving people a lot of information about minority languages, using the mass media.


・In the place where a minority language was used, the language should be used on sign boards and prochures and so on with English subtitles.




A language is not just a language to communicate, but has its history and culture and something special that can't be shown in another language. So, we need to cherish our own language and to be proud of it, and also to help to keep other minority languages:)