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A very short article on how The Saith Seren Welsh centre in Wrexham has become the first location in Wales chosen to be a "bilingual town" in a scheme to promote the use of the Welsh language.

The film "Language Matters" asks what we lose when languages die and how we can save them. It was filmed around the world: on a remote island off the coast of Australia, where 400 Aboriginal people speak 10 different languages, all at risk; in Wales, where Welsh, once in danger, is today making a comeback; and in Hawaii, where a group of Hawaiian activists is fighting to save the native tongue.

Writer JRR Tolkien took bits of his favourite real-world languages and spliced them together. Listen carefully to the dialogue in the forthcoming movie of Return of the King and you might recognise some old English, a Welsh lilt here and there, and even some Finnish. "They are invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound," says Fred Hoyt, a linguistics researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who also teaches a course on Elvish.

The accents we take for granted in our fantasy stories are informed, like almost all of the genre, by J.R.R. Tolkien's influence. Tolkien, author of the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy had his orcs speaking with a working-class Cockney accent, whereas dwarven language reflected Semetic language inspiration, and Elvish, Finnish and Welsh roots. When Tolkienʻs stories were adapted as radio plays and films, the dwarvesʻ accents took on a Celtic character, whereas the elvesʻ accent reflects the upper-crust accent associated with English royalty.