Note: This blog post was first published at Swansea University's English Language and TESOL blog.

A new year brings with it new starts, new ideas, and new questions—both in everyday life and in the world of research. On the 8th of January, the Welsh Government published its much-anticipated Cymraeg 2050 Areas of Research Interest (ARI) document. The document is not a new language strategy, nor is it a list of funded projects. Instead, it sets out the questions the Welsh Government sees as most pressing in supporting Cymraeg 2050: Miliwn siaradwyr, its long-term strategy to reach a million Welsh speakers. In doing so, its gives us an understanding of where policymakers believe the evidence base is strongest, where it is thinnest, and where future research could most usefully inform future decision-making.

The ARI is about setting out questions rather than answers. It isn’t trying to tell researchers what to conclude, or to lay down solutions in advance. At a practical level, the document helps guide what kinds of research get commissioned, gives researchers a clearer sense of the evidence priorities behind funding calls, and flags where the biggest gaps in our current knowledge are. As such, the scope of the ARI is wide. It ranges from early years provision and compulsory schooling through to post-compulsory education, adult learning, workplaces, public services, and the everyday use of Welsh. The Welsh Government also makes clear that this isn’t a one-off. Like many other documents, the ARI is to be reviewed and updated over time as priorities evolve and new evidence comes into view.

For some, it's worth briefly stepping back and asking why documents like this exist at all. Areas of Research Interest are one of the main ways governments try to be clearer and more transparent about the kinds of evidence they need. Rather than commissioning research in an ad hoc way, or reacting to issues only once they become urgent, ARIs set out a more deliberate picture of where knowledge is currently lacking and where new research could make a difference. They also serve an important coordinating function. By laying out priorities across a wide range of topics, ARIs encourage alignment across disciplines and research traditions. In short, they help economists, sociolinguists, educational researchers, and many others see where their work might speak to certain policy concerns, even if they approach them in very different ways.

At the same time, it's important to be clear about what ARIs are not. They don't guarantee funding, they don't prescribe particular methods or approaches, and they don't privilege certain institutions or researchers over others. Instead, they act as a kind of 'bridge' between policy and research. Seen in this light, the real interest of the Cymraeg 2050 ARI is less about the format itself, and more about what the document tells us about where Welsh language policy is now focussing its attention—and what it reveals about the state of Welsh language research.

Why this ARI is interesting now

The ARI is organised, conventionally, around sectors and life stages. This includes early years provision, compulsory schooling, workplaces, and other services. But within this structure, many questions gesture toward the messier reality that language practices don't stay neatly within these categories. Questions about confidence recur across education, workplace, and social contexts. Several questions explicitly ask about transitions between settings, or about how use in one domain relates to use in another. While the structure reflects how policy organises itself; the questions reflect growing awareness that language doesn't work in a straightforward way. If it did, linguists might be out of a job.

Another interesting characteristic of the ARI is its emphasis on use, rather than learning alone. While acquisition remains central to Welsh language policy, many of the questions now being foregrounded are about whether Welsh is actually spoken, where it is spoken, and under what conditions. This moves the focus away from questions of competence as an end point, and towards long-standing linguistic concerns with practice, norms, and interaction.

Closely linked to this is the ARI's focus on transitions rather than isolated stages. The document looks at moments of change—leaving compulsory education, entering further or higher education, moving into work, accessing services—as points where Welsh language practices can shift. From a linguistic perspective, this highlights the importance of studying change over time, rather than treating language use as a fixed attribute of individuals or particular groups. It also draws attention to the social and institutional conditions that make some forms of language use appear easier, safer, or more legitimate than others.

Another striking feature of the ARI is its emphasis on confidence, opportunity, and motivation, alongside—and sometimes instead of—competence. Many of the questions raised cannot be answered by measuring linguistic ability alone. They require an understanding of how speakers feel about using Welsh, what opportunities they have to do so, and how these factors interact in real contexts such as workplaces, public services, and social spaces. For linguists, this reinforces the value of research that looks beyond language as a system, and instead treats it as a social resource shaped by power, expectations, and everyday interaction. The document reflects a growing recognition that institutional provision on its own does not guarantee language use. Education, training, and services matter, but they do not automatically translate into sustained speaking practices.

Read through the ARI's three themes, and you'll notice something striking. Many of the questions are fundamentally exploratory. They're not asking "Does intervention X work better than intervention Y?" or "What's the most cost-effective way to achieve outcome Z?" Instead, they're asking more foundational questions: "What are the opportunities, abilities, confidence levels and motivations of different groups?" (Theme 2, Q1). "What factors or approaches motivate adults to learn Welsh?" (Theme 1, Q25). "What are the views of young people completing Welsh-medium education on continuing to use the language socially?" (Theme 1, Q16). These are fundamentally descriptive questions. That is, the kind you'd expect to see answered before moving on to intervention or policy evaluation. The fact that these questions are being prioritised in 2026 tells us that Welsh language research needs to build its evidence base systematically, starting with descriptive work.

Consider the repeated emphasis on confidence throughout the document. The ARI asks about confidence levels (Q1), what affects children's confidence (Q15b), how to build confidence among fluent speakers (Q27), and teachers' confidence levels (Q29). Clearly, confidence matters. But here's the problem: we don't yet have validated, Welsh-specific measures of linguistic confidence. We can't reliably compare confidence across different educational pathways, age groups, or contexts. We don't fully understand how confidence relates to actual use—is it correlation, causation, mediation, or something more complex?

The same pattern emerges with other key constructs. Question 1b explicitly asks: "What is the relationship between these factors [opportunities, abilities, confidence, motivations] and the extent to which Welsh speakers use the language?" This is asking for something quite sophisticated—an understanding of how multiple factors interact to shape language use. But before we can answer questions about relationships between factors, we need to be able to measure each factor. We need conceptual frameworks that show how these dimensions fit together, not just lists of potentially relevant variables.

The ARI is also open about the limits of current knowledge. Across themes, it acknowledges that evidence is uneven, fragmented, and often tied to particular sectors or age groups. Questions about post-compulsory transitions (Theme 1), workplace language use (Theme 2), and Welsh speakers leaving rural communities (Theme 3) all point to areas where we have anecdotal evidence, small-scale qualitative studies, or cross-sectional patterns; but not the systematic, longitudinal evidence needed to understand trajectories, test interventions, or make confident policy recommendations. The document's honesty about evidence gaps is valuable. What it reveals, though, is that Welsh language research is at a foundational stage for many of these questions. We've moved beyond asking "How many speakers?" to asking "What shapes sustained use?".

As a doctoral researcher working on Welsh language use after compulsory education, reading the ARI was a useful reminder of how individual research projects sit within a much wider research landscape. The document's emphasis on post-compulsory transitions, on the distinction between learning and use, and on factors such as confidence, opportunity, and everyday contexts closely reflects concerns that have begun to surface across recent sociolinguistic research on Welsh. My own work focuses on one part of this broader picture: examining how young people's relationship with Welsh changes after leaving compulsory education and how different post-school pathways shape these experiences.

Looking ahead

The Cymraeg 2050 Areas of Research Interest document asks important questions and signals a maturing policy perspective that moves beyond simple "teach more Welsh" solutions. But it also reveals—honestly and usefully—that we're still building the foundations needed to answer those questions properly. For researchers, this can be energising. It creates space for exactly the kind of research that might seem 'merely' exploratory but is actually essential. And perhaps that's fitting for a document published in January. It's less about announcing what we know than about setting out what we need to discover in the years ahead.

Want to know more?

• Welsh Government (2026). Cymraeg 2050: Areas of Research Interest.
  The full ARI document setting out current Welsh Government evidence priorities across education, use, services, and the life course. https://www.gov.wales/areas-research-interest-cymraeg-2050-html

• Welsh Government (2017). Cymraeg 2050: A million Welsh speakers.
  The long-term Welsh language strategy that underpins the ARI and frames its priorities. gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2018-12/cymraeg-2050-welsh-language-strategy.pdf

• Welsh Government (2022). Cymraeg 2050 Research and Evaluation Framework. Useful background on how progress under Cymraeg 2050 is assessed, and the assumptions and challenges involved in evaluating language policy.