Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda, said: “During the past five years there has been a dramatic fall in the number of students in Wales studying modern foreign languages at GCSE - from 49 per cent to 39 per cent,” he said.

While he acknowledged the validity of teaching Welsh in schools, he feared that the decline in the study of other modern languages would produce an increasingly insular nation.

Mr Bryant said: “A particular danger for Wales is that we may become a nation that is very good at speaking to itself, but not good at speaking to the rest of the world.”