Wales’ annual Peace and Goodwill Message was launched in Barcelona on Tuesday, with young people from the country taking the century-old appeal for peace to one of Europe’s most famous football stadiums and putting minority languages at the centre of this year’s campaign.

The 105th message was unveiled at the Spotify Camp Nou by Urdd Gobaith Cymru, continuing a tradition that has been sent every year since 1922. What began as a message in Morse code has grown into a global digital campaign, and organisers say the 2026 edition will be translated into 75 languages and reach more than 40 million people worldwide.

This year’s theme is Minority Languages, with the message written by Marged Tudur in collaboration with students from Ysgol Morgan Llwyd, Coleg Cambria and Wrexham University. The work followed a day of workshops with Sioned Medi Evans and Dr Ianto Gruffydd at Wrexham University, and comes as campaigners warn that half of the world’s 7,000 languages could disappear by the end of the century because of globalisation, migration and climate change.

Urdd chief executive Siân Lewis said the organisation had spent more than a century giving the youth of Wales a platform on major global issues. She said launching this year’s message from the Spotify Camp Nou was a powerful sign of solidarity between minority languages, adding that small linguistic communities can have a massive collective voice and that peace has a chance when languages thrive.

Marged Tudur said working with young people in Wrexham to compose the message had been a profound experience because they understood that language carries culture, history and worldview. She said the focus on minority languages was a declaration that no language is too small to be heard and that protecting linguistic diversity is essential to building a more empathetic world.

Ffion Morgan, who was joined by Dylan Lawlor, Carrie Jones and Rubin Colwill, said sharing the message from an iconic global venue showed that young people are ready to lead the conversation. The Welsh speaker and athlete said peace speaks every language, and that young people in Wales are asking the world to listen.

The choice of the Spotify Camp Nou, described by organisers as Europe’s largest football stadium and a symbol of Catalan identity, gave the launch a wider meaning than ceremony alone. It tied the message to a place where language, identity and public life have long been closely linked — and underlined the idea that the future of small languages may depend on whether younger generations are willing to carry them into spaces this large.

That is the tension running through this year’s appeal. The message is built on hope, but it arrives in a world where hundreds of languages are still at risk. Urdd leaders are betting that a campaign created by young people, and shared in 75 languages, can do more than celebrate Wales’ own tradition. They want it to remind the world that a language does not have to be dominant to matter.