Media Pressures on Welsh Language Preservation

Despite universal school instruction in the Welsh language, and strong cultural incentives to acquire the language, the most recent UK Census showed a downward trend in the number of speakers. The asymmetry in explicit language acquisition incentives is here considered to be offset by the media dominance of the English language. This dominance is modelled by the introduction of a time-dependent connectivity amongst English speakers into an adapted epidemiological model. Extrapolations up to 2050 are made, this being the announced date of a Welsh Assembly language-planning target of one million Welsh speakers.