So, we slowly forgot our own language (the other parts of the country that were not dominated by the English to such a degree, actually look down on us a little bit, because we do not speak Welsh as our main dialect...).
Recently due to pushes from the government, more and more children are growing up and learning welsh, and it's now at the point that most jobs in wales are successfully requiring Welsh-speakers as part of their hiring.
It's completely possible to resurrect a dead language with native language speakers still in existence, it's faster than killing the language (It took 300 years to completely eradicate Welsh and only about 50 years of government efforts to resurrect it), it just requires the collective will to be there, and the wish to restore the culture (or some bastardized idealized version of it).
The other important thing to realize is that Welsh was ‘formalized’ in 1620 when the Bible was translated into it[1]. This had the double effect of unifying the distinct regional dialects into ‘high Welsh’ (a distinction which exists to this day!) but also, crucially, providing a standard text which people could use to learn to read and write. It meant that Welsh was able to flourish into a full legal language, and not just used as a ‘home’ language.
This gave it a backbone which was not present in other ‘regional’ languages (such as its nearest relation, Cornish), which in turn have all but died out.
With respect to the original post, I note that the Bible was only translated into Occitan in the modern era [2], which would support the evidence of it still being a language only used at home, and not in formal situations.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dafydd_Iwan
[1] https://cy.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beibl
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_into_the_...
Mirandese used to be a very local language spoken in the north, and it was a dying language.
The last couple of years, a group of people started pushing to rescue it, and nowadays the situation has improve a lot with published books, dictionaries, even Asterix gets published in Mirandese and it gets taught to children on the primary schools on the region as additional activity.
Will this save the language long term? Maybe not, but I really like that they at least are trying to keep it alive.
Asterix seems to be a favourite for minority languages. There are seventy Asterix albums published in German regional dialects: https://www.asterix.com/de/die-buecher/die-asterix-mundart-r...
I wonder if the mix of pictures along with uncomplicated but correct dialogue makes Asterix popular for promoting languages.
The occitan language that is learned in school is mostly a toy language. When Littré wrote his famous dictionary, from 1850 to 1875, he mentioned multiple dialects of the "langue d'Oc" which were still active in the South of France. Gascon, limousin, languedocien, catalan and provençal were distinct dialects. But there are no teachers fluent in any of these dialect, so during the 20th century they forged the "occitan" language which is a mix of these, but mostly built from provençal.
Overall, this article is very superficial. It wrote about troubadours, but forgot to mention a reference well-known in the UK: Richard Lionheart spoke in French and Provençal, and was probably not fluent in English. Living in France, in Aquitaine, he composed poetry in "langue d'Oc".
It's well known in France that the French Republic though that the local cultures were an obstacle to the unity of the nation. So they forbid every local language. There were panels in some schools with the text: "It is forbidden to spit and to speak Breton".