On the topic of the ‘usefulness’ of languages, The Times used this line against Welsh this week. Here’s a response: https://nation.cymru/2017/the-times-still-wants-the-welsh-language-dead/
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My experience (I grew up next to a reservation) is that people who say “Native Americans” usually aren’t. Actual Native Americans refer to themselves as either “Natives” or “Indians.” I think the latter is reflective of a certain deadpan irony.
on a brief vist to Kansas a decade or two ago ., we visited an “Indian” college. I forget its exact title but the word “Indian” came into it. My host, although basically identifying as white anglo American, told me he had some native American / American Indian blood somewhere in his ancestry. I think he used rhe word “Indian”
I have just read your very interesting article, Rebecca, which offers much food for thought.
I do letters in my spare time for Survival International, which campaigns for threatened tribal peoples worldwide. I couldn’t help draw a parallel between that infamous Blue Books report of 1847 and the reasons which continue to be given by governments round the world for the need for tribal peoples to abandon their traditional cultures and integrate into so-called ‘mainstream’ society. In the case of these peoples, it is of course not simply their traditional languages at stake but their whole cultures and often their lives.
I’m not sure of the most recent estimate but the article below stated that in 2008 an indigenous language was dying on average once every two weeks. Also that five thousand of the world’s six thousand languages are/were indigenous, the majority of those threatened with extinction being indigenous languages.
Not sure whether these uplifting thoughts are any use to you, but thought they deserved a mention.
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Hi! My article on minority languages is published today: https://aeon.co/essays/should-endangered-languages-be-preserved-and-at-what-cost
It’s less Welsh-heavy than the draft I posted earlier, because the editors wanted a wider range of languages. But it was 100% inspired by my experiences learning Welsh, and some of the comments I got in this thread were really helpful in thinking about it, so diolch yn fawr powb!
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Ooh, if I’d known you were writing a book about swearing, I’m sure I could have made some contributions… 
[That’s what everyone says, right?..;-)]
Thank you for that interesting piece. I’d pick up on the bit about it being better to create a world from scratch with one language - I guarantee you if that happened, it would almost immediately start splitting into local variants of that language which would eventually not be mutually intelligible - cf French and Spanish now, and what’s happening to English in many parts of the world… all interesting stuff…
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I would LOVE to hear from you (or anyone else who fancies getting in touch) about swearing in Welsh … I assume that foul language would be frowned upon on the forum, but sweary emails may be sent to Rebecca dot Roache at rhul dot ac dot UK
That’s a great point! Come tp think of it, we do often value being able to speak without being understood by certain groups … I think that’s how cockney rhyming slang originated, and IIRC certain minority languages (including Welsh) are sometimes used in the military, because intercepted messages would be more troublesome to translate than more widely spoken ones.
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At least were, extensively, in WW2, apparently:
Possibly nowadays, with google translate, etc, it might not be so effective.
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Oh, yes, deliberately exclusive language would make a lovely pairing for natural divergence on that front… had we but world enough and time…
I am a shy and bashful type, really, but let me close my eyes and point you in the direction of the hair-raising and eye-watering Rhegiadur… 
Interesting and well-written. Da iawn a diolch!
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Great that it has been published “go iawn”.
Also interesting that, since the first draft, Catalonia (and indirectly) Catalan, has come into public consciousness in a way that perhaps it hadn’t been. I’m not sure if Catalan fits your criteria for a minority language, but it’s obviously something the Catalonians are very proud of and identify strongly with as part of their culture, and in the past at least, it’s been under threat by the national authorities.
It might be interesting at some point for a study to be done to find out how much the drive for independence comes from the desire to protect and preserve the language, and how much from other things. (Although it’s not clear that independence would actually help the language all that much. Irish independence didn’t seem to help Irish all that much (even if its official status was promoted)) Not that the situations are directly comparable…
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@elizabeth_jane’s account of being hassled in the street for speaking Welsh reminded me that I’ve been shouted at in public for having the temerity to speak Catalan in Catalonia. It may be numerically stronger than Welsh, but it suffers from the fact that limited inter-comprehensibility with Castilian allows it to be mis-characterized (and looked down on) as a mere, aberrant dialect. You still have @aran’s thing of “speaking any small language is a political act”, but Welsh at least has the advantage of being completely incomprehensible 
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Thinking back to my own comment about the inter-comprehensibility of Catalan and Castilian, my old Catalan tutor used to reckon that there was a qualitative difference in the relationship between language politics and politics-politics when you had that kind of relationship. I have no idea if anyone’s ever tried to quantify or substantiate this, so for the present it can be filed under “anecdata”, but I’d tend to agree with him: there are, I believe, Basque nationalists who do not speak Basque; there are and were certainly plenty of English-speaking Irish nationalists and republicans (and citizens of the Republic of Ireland) who think themselves none the less Irish for that (although admittedly the IRA did teach themselves Jailic); and I think you’d have to be pretty brave to argue that Leanne Woods was somehow less Welsh before choosing to learn the language. On the other hand, while it’s perfectly possible to speak Catalan and not want independence, it’s basically inconceivable that anyone would be a Catalan nationalist and not speak the language.
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This post is not intended to offend anyone. Please accept it is just my obervations from mid-Argyll!
I may be wrong, but I suspect there is more involved than that. If the language was that motivating, Wales would have been independent before Scotland! Gaelic is very much a minority language here and pretty well confined to the Western Isles now, I think. Certainly, the desire to run ones own affairs does not connect with language here. OK ‘The National’ newspaper prints some articles in Gaelic and some in Scots, but I think that is just a gesture. All the recent party conference of the SNP was in English! I have noticed that the official name of the Western Isles Constituency has become Na h-Eileanan an Iar. I think it is that a Scottish Parliament values all its people and languages and uses the language appropriate for the area. Scotland never was conquered, it gave the English a king. It kept a lot of its own ways, its own laws etc… So has the confidence to do more and more. It always looked outward to the old alliance with France! Yet even so, it has not quite summoned up the ‘get up and go’ to get up and tell England where to go!
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This is a super-interesting discussion … unfortunately I had submitted my article before everything kicked off in Catalonia! I didn’t know about Jailtacht - this is COMPLETELY FASCINATING.
Thank you @aran for the pointer towards Rhegiadur 
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Thinking back to the anecdata, it occurs to me that it may also depend a bit upon how you define a minority language and the territory where it’s spoken, in that all my old tutor’s examples of radically mutually-incomprehensible languages also happen to be ones which are in the minority even in their historical heartlands: Catalan, if you take the ‘territory’ to be Catalonia, rather than the Spanish state, is probably a majority language anyway. To get that to work for Welsh, though, you’d probably have to be arguing for Venedotian Independence… [ETA: Just to clarify – I was thinking about this precisely because you were careful with your definitions in the article.]
Where I first came across Jailic (although I didn’t hear that name till later) was when I used to share a house with someone who was a self-professed ex-member of the UVF. I’m sure some of his reminiscences were grandiose confections, but I’m equally sure there was at least some truth in some of them. He reckoned he’d spent some time in Crumlin Road and/or Long Kesh (the Maze) – something which I think was true, because despite disagreeing with ‘the Provis’ and everything they stood for in quite, errm, colourful language, he nonetheless professed some considerable respect for the way that Republican prisoners conducted themselves in jail. He told me how you’d hear them shouting messages to each other in Gaelic between the wings at night, so that the guards wouldn’t understand – only every so often you’d hear the message stop, and someone say, “but I thought you had to lenite [i.e. do a mutation] after [some word or other]” – and then they’d go back to Gaelic again
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Damn, rumbled…
But on the bright side, anecdata is my new favourite English word…
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mine too!