£1.8m granted to Cardiff University to save the Welsh language

Cardiff University has been awarded £1.8m for a research project to preserve the past, present and future of the Welsh language.

The funding has been granted to the School of English, Communications and Philosophy from the Economic and Social Research council, which is mainly funded by the UK government.

Cardiff University believes that the research will break new ground as a language resource.

But what does it mean?

The project, which will last three years, will be a huge collection, or ‘corpus’ of Welsh language texts, including spoken, written and digital forms, equating to around 10 million words.

The project is to be titled the National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh.

Dr Dawn Knight, from the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, who is leading the project, said: “What we hope to achieve is the development of the first large-scale living and evolving corpus, representing the Welsh language across communication types and informed by real, current, users of the language.

“We will be engaging with the public in a number of ways, and using new technologies to do so.”

What does the second part say?

The project will begin January 2016.