I’m lucky enough to be one of just 0.01% of the world’s population who speaks Welsh as their mother tongue. Its survival over 1,500 years is remarkable, living cheek by jowl with English, the most dominant language on Earth. The Welsh language faces a genuine threat; it is classed as “vulnerable” by the Endangered Languages Project and “potentially vulnerable” by Unesco. The latest census showed that despite huge expense and effort, in 2021 there were 24,000 fewer Welsh speakers in Wales than a decade earlier, with the proportion dropping to a record low of 17.8%.
The Welsh government partially subsidized Welsh being added as a learnable language on Duolingo, then duo says they’re going to cease development of it as it doesn’t get the traffic of larger languages like English, Spanish, French, etc. According to their metrics, 3 million people attempted to learn Welsh on Duolingo but that isn’t enough.
One thing to note is, the 3 million mark was reached AFTER Duolingo announced they were halting development and the subsequent publicity campaign. There’s no indication how many (or few) users there were of Welsh prior to that.