THE Welsh language is still among one of the world’s endangered tongues, says an official UN atlas published yesterday.
But Unesco's designation of Welsh as an "unsafe" language is higher than the "definitely endangered" tag it held in the last edition published in 2001.
Figures show more than 750,000 people across Wales, the UK and elsewhere speak the language and will need help if it is to survive the 21st century, experts said.
Welsh language activists gave the atlas a cautious welcome.
Dafydd Morgan Lewis of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg said: "I am confident the Welsh language will survive for hundreds more years but it will have a better chance of doing so if the Welsh Assembly and Westminster Government ensure proper legislation is in place to give it official status in Wales."
The Welsh Language Board says there are about 500,000 speakers of the language in Wales from census data from 2001 and expects these figures to grow when the next survey is taken in two years time.
Unesco’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger describes Welsh as being unsafe, a language where "most children speak the language".
The organisation hopes the online atlas will aid research into the preservation of under-threat languages.
Unesco director-general Koichiro Matsuura said: “The death of a language leads to the disappearance of many forms of intangible cultural heritage, especially the invaluable heritage of traditions and oral expressions of the community that spoke it – from poems and legends to proverbs and jokes.”
Other Celtic languages, like Manx and Cornish have already been declared “extinct” languages although there are about 500 speakers left in the world.
The Manx language was thought to have died out in the mid-19th century but there are now believed to be about 600 active speakers. There are thought to be just 300 fluent speakers of Cornish left in the world.
Unesco said about 30 linguists worked on the Atlas. Away from Britain, it found that the greatest language diversity was in sub-Saharan Africa, where approximately 2,000 languages are spoken, almost one third of the world total.
Christopher Moseley, a linguist and editor-in-chief of the atlas, said: “It would be naive and oversimplifying to say that the big ex-colonial languages, English, or French or Spanish, are the killers, and all smaller languages are the victims.
“It is not like that: there is a subtle interplay of forces, and this atlas will help ordinary people understand those forces better.”