Welsh Language Facts
The Welsh language is a member of the Celtic family of languages, with the majority of the 611,000 speakers living in Wales. The 2011 Welsh Language measure gave the language official status. It is also included among the fifty five languages on the Voyager Golden Record representing earth on NASA’s Voyager initiative, which began in 1977.
Welsh is written using 28 Latin alphabet letters, and contains a fair number of words borrowed from Latin as well. There are some regional dialects, which are detectable in the spoken language and to a lesser degree in the written word. There are also differences between the more formal, literary Welsh used largely in official documents, and the colloquial Welsh used in speech and informal writing.