Some will snigger to hear that the Welsh and the Scots have persuaded the European Union to let them use Welsh and Gaelic when communicating with some EU offices.

They will see this bid to ape the recent success of Spaniards to have Catalan, Basque and Galician accepted in certain EU dealings as a triumph of national pride over pragmatism - especially when you consider that English is already the preferred working language of the majority of EU officials. The EU undertakes to translate or interpret into the 23 official languages of its 27 member states. Will this latest language demand not provoke demands for Cornish, Letzerburgisch and Corsican to be similarly recognised, creating a modern Babel in Brussels?

But rather than mock a move that will give the 580,000 Welsh and 60,000 Gaelic-speakers the right to communicate with Brussels in their native tongue, why not celebrate how, in an increasingly Anglophone world, the EU is proving to be a vault for safeguarding vanishing tongues?

In a wave that began with the export of Hollywood movies, swelled with the Beatles, and which has reached a new pitch with the growth of satellite television and the internet, English threatens to smother all other languages. Already multinationals in Germany and France use English as their boardroom lingua franca.

Language offers a passport into a country's literature and culture. When a Frenchman speaks to you in French he tells you more about himself than when he speaks through the mask of English. So as far as welcoming Welsh into the backrooms of Brussels goes, “o budded i'r heniaith barhau”: may the language endure for ever.