Welsh traditionalists fear their language is losing its appeal
Even where language is widely spoken, youth prefer using English on web and social media
There was a time when Welsh was the only language to be heard at the post office in Pontyberem, a former coal-mining village nestling in the rolling hills of Carmarthenshire, southwest Wales.
"It's not really like that now," said postmistress Morfydd Evans. "The older people still always speak Welsh but lots of the young ones don't. They can speak it. They learn it in school, but they choose not to use Welsh. It makes us older ones sad. We're proud of our culture and our language and more needs to be done to protect it."
The older people still always speak Welsh but lots of the young ones don't. They can speak it. They learn it in school, but they choose not to use Welsh. It makes us older ones sad
This is an important time for the language in traditional Welsh-speaking heartlands, both in south-west Wales and across the country.
A report just published by the assembly government, the BBC and the Welsh language broadcaster SC4 has concluded that only half of Welsh speakers aged 16-24 consider themselves fluent, compared to two-thirds of the over-60s. Just a third of the young speakers said they always or usually communicated in Welsh with friends.
The report established that few Welsh speakers, even young, tech-savvy youngsters, are using the language when they communicate online or when they use the internet for research or entertainment.
The study comes after the census revealed that the proportion of people in Wales able to speak Welsh fell from 21 per cent in 2001 to 19 per cent.