Everything about The Cornish Language totally explained
The
Cornish language (in Cornish:
Kernowek,
Kernewek,
Curnoack) is one of the
Brythonic group of
Celtic languages (Brythonic also includes
Welsh,
Breton, the extinct
Cumbric and perhaps the hypothetical
Ivernic). The languages
Scottish Gaelic,
Irish and
Manx are part of the separate
Goidelic group. Cornish shares about 80% basic vocabulary with Breton, 75% with Welsh, 35% with Irish, and 35% with
Scottish Gaelic. By comparison, Welsh shares about 70% with Breton. Cornish continued to function as a community language until the late 18th century, and was revived early in the 20th century.
History
The proto-Cornish language developed after the Southwest Britons of
Somerset,
Dorset,
Devon and
Cornwall became linguistically separated from the West Britons of later
Wales after the
Battle of Deorham in about 577. The area controlled by the Southwest Britons was progressively reduced by the expansion of
Wessex over the next few centuries. According to
William of Malmesbury, Cornwall was subjected to Wessex in the early part of the 9th century by Egberht. Around 930, Cornwall was finally defeated by the Saxon king
Athelstan. However, the Cornish language continued to flourish well through the Middle Ages, reaching a peak of about 39,000 speakers (estimated by
Ken George) in the 13th century. However the percentage of Cornish speakers in Cornwall declined:
| 1050AD |
1200 |
1300 |
1400 |
1500 |
1600 |
1700 |
1800 |
2008 |
| 95% |
86% |
73% |
61% |
48% |
26% |
5% |
0.5% |
0.1% |
The earliest written record of the Cornish language, dating from 525 AD, is a
gloss in a
Latin manuscript of
De Consolatione Philosophiae by
Boethius, which used the words
ud rocashaas. The phrase means "it (the mind) hated the gloomy places".
At the time of the
Prayer Book rebellion of
1549, which was a reaction to Parliament passing the first
Act of Uniformity, people in many areas of Cornwall didn't speak or understand
English. (The intention of the Act was to replace worship in Latin with worship in English, which was known, by the lawmakers, not to be universally spoken throughout England. Instead of simply banning Latin, however, the Act was framed so as to enforce English.) In 1549, this imposition of a new language was sometimes a matter of life and death: over 4,000 people who protested against the imposition of an English Prayer book were massacred by the
King's army. Their leaders were executed and the people suffered numerous reprisals.
The rebels' document claimed they wanted a return to the old religious services and ended 'We the Cornishmen (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly refuse this new English'. (Altered spelling.)
Edward Seymour, Duke of
Somerset, replied to the Cornishmen, inquiring as to why they should be offended by services in English when they'd them in Latin, which they also didn't understand. Through many factors, including loss of life and the spread of English, the
Prayer Book Rebellion proved a turning-point for the Cornish language. Indeed, some recent research has suggested that estimates of the Cornish speaking population prior to the rebellion may have been low, making the decline even more drastic.
By this time the language was already arguably in decline from its earlier heyday, and the situation worsened over the course of the next century. It is often claimed that the last
native speaker of Cornish was the
Mousehole resident
Dolly Pentreath, who died in
1777. Notwithstanding her supposed last words, "Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don't want to speak English!"), she spoke at least some English as well as Cornish. The last known
monoglot Cornish speaker is believed to have been
Chesten Marchant, who died in 1676 at
Gwithian. It does, however, appear to be true that Dolly Pentreath spoke Cornish fluently and may have been one of the last to do so before the revival of the language in the
20th century. There is also, however, evidence that Cornish continued, albeit in limited usage by a handful of speakers, throughout the
19th century and into the early
20th century. In 1875 six speakers all in their sixties were discovered ; some claim that John Davey who died in 1890 should be considered the last traditional speaker . Others, however, dispute this, saying that
Alison Treganning, who died in 1906 was the last traditional speaker and by this time the revival was well underway. Fishermen were counting fish using a rhyme derived from Cornish into the
1940s . It has been suggested by Cornish linguist
Richard Gendall that some dialects of
English spoken in Cornwall (especially the dialect of
West Penwith, where traditional Cornish was last spoken) display strong lexical and prosodic influences from the Cornish language that almost certainly go back several centuries.
Traditional Cornish
The
Southwestern Brythonic, or Southwestern Brittonic, language evolved into Cornish, shrinking from the whole southwest of England into the western tip of Cornwall with time.
Kenneth H. Jackson divided this long period into several sub-periods having different linguistic innovations.
"Primitive Cornish" existed between about 600 and 800 AD but nothing survives from this time. The "Old Cornish" period was between 800 and 1200 AD, for which there's a Cornish-Latin dictionary (the Vocabulum Cornicum) and various 10th century glosses in Latin manuscripts such as the Bodmin manumissions giving the Cornish names of freed slaves.
The "Middle Cornish" period between 1200 and 1578 has many sources of information, mostly religious texts. There are about 20,000 lines of text in total. Various plays were written by the canons of Glasney College intended to educate the Cornish people about the bible and the Celtic saints.
The "Late Cornish" period from 1578 to about 1800 has fewer sources of information on the language. In this period there was considerable input from the English language. In 1776 William Bodinar, who had learnt Cornish from fishermen, wrote a letter in Cornish which was probably the last prose in the language. However, the last verse was the
Cranken Rhyme written down in the late 19th century.
Further information on traditional Cornish can be obtained from the place names of Cornwall. The place names have been analysed into elements for which meanings have been inferred.
Cornish studies
In the late 17th century a group of scholars, led by John Keigwin of Mousehole, tried to preserve and further the Cornish language. They left behind a large number of translations of parts of the Bible, proverbs and songs. This group was contacted by the Welsh linguist
Edward Lhuyd who came to Cornwall to study the language.
Early Modern Cornish was the subject of a study published by Lhuyd in
1702, and differs from the mediæval language in having a considerably simpler structure and grammar. Such differences included the wide use of certain modal affixes that, although out of use by Lhuyd's time, had a considerable effect on the word-order of mediæval Cornish. The Mediæval language also possessed two additional tenses for expressing past events and an extended set of possessive suffixes. Edward Lhuyd theorises that the language of this time was heavily inflected, possessing not just the
genitive,
ablative and
locative cases so common in Early Modern Cornish, but also
dative and
accusative cases, and even a
vocative case, although historical references to this are rare.
Robert Williams published the first comprehensive Cornish dictionary in 1865, the
Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum. As a result of the discovery of additional ancient Cornish manuscripts, 2000 new words were added to the vocabulary by Whitely Stokes in
A Cornish Glossary. William Borlase published
Proverbs and Rhymes in Cornish in 1866 while
A Glossary of Cornish Place Names was produced by John Bannister in the same year. Dr Fredrick Jago published his
English-Cornish Dictionary in 1887.
Revival
During the 19th century the Cornish language was the subject of antiquarian interest and a number of lectures were given on the subject and pamphlets on it were published. The first successful attempt to
revive Cornish was largely the work of
Henry Jenner and
Robert Morton Nance in the early part of the twentieth century. Jenner published his "Handbook of the Cornish Language" in 1904 while Nance published "Cornish For All" in 1929. A S D Smith produced "Lessons in Spoken Cornish" in 1931.
Different forms of Cornish
The resulting system was called
Unified Cornish (
Kernewek Unyes) and was based mainly on Middle Cornish (the language of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — a high point for Cornish literature), with a standardised spelling and an extended vocabulary based largely on
Breton and
Welsh. A dictionary of Unified Cornish was published by Nance in the 1930s. For many years, this was
the modern Cornish language, and many people still use it today.
Shortcomings in Unified Cornish had to do in part with the stiff and archaizing literary style Nance had employed, and in part with a realisation that Nance's phonology lacked some distinctions which must have existed in traditional Cornish. In the 1970s,
Tim Saunders raised a number of issues of communicative efficiency, but his initiative had no influence and later developments are entirely independent.
In the early 1980s,
Richard Gendall, who had worked with Nance, published a new system based on the rather limited works of writers such as
Nicholas Boson and
John Boson, William Rowe, Thomas Tonkin and others, few of whom spoke Cornish as their first language. This system, called
Modern Cornish (
Curnoack Nowedga,
Kernowek Noweja in UCR) by its proponents, differs from Unified Cornish in using the English-based orthographies of the 17th and 18th centuries, though there are also differences of vocabulary and grammar. It is sometimes called "Revised Late Cornish" as well. Writers of Late Cornish often wrote Cornish using the English orthographic equivalent of the nearest equivalent English sound. For instance, the word for 'good' typically spelt
dâ 'good' could also be written
daa, and the word for 'month' could be spelt
mîz or
meez. The need for standard spelling when learning a language has led the Cornish Language Council to adopt the Revived Late Cornish spelling standardised by Gendall and Neil Kennedy. This makes sparing use of accents (as did writers of Modern Cornish at the time).
In 1986
Ken George developed a revised orthography (and phonology) for Revived Cornish, which became known as
Kernewek Kemmyn (lit.
Common Cornish). It was subsequently adopted by
the Cornish Language Board as their preferred system. It retained a Middle Cornish base but made the spelling more systematic by applying
phonemic orthographic theory, and for the first time set out clear rules relating spelling to pronunciation. The revised system is claimed to have been taken up enthusiastically by the majority of Cornish speakers and learners, and advocates of this orthography claim that it was especially welcomed by teachers. Nevertheless, many Cornish speakers chose to continue using Unified Cornish. Despite later criticism by
Nicholas Williams (see below), Kernewek Kemmyn has retained the support of many active Cornish speakers.
In 1995 an alternative revision of Unified Cornish known as
Unified Cornish Revised or UCR (
Kernowek Unys Amendys) was proposed by Nicholas Williams. UCR built on traditional Unified Cornish, making the spellings regular while keeping as close as possible to the orthographic practices of the mediæval scribes. The rationale behind UCR was that only attested Cornish can serve as a guide to its phonology, and that other attempts at regularisation had on the one hand introduced alien elements and on the other hand not known how to interpret the variations in extant material, which it turned to explain in accordance with the assumptions of nineteenth-century Middle European philology. In common with Kernewek Kemmyn, UCR made use of Tudor and Late Cornish prose materials unavailable to Nance. Williams published his
English-Cornish Dictionary in this orthography in 2000; the second edition was published in 2006. Like the other orthographies, UCR also has its adherents and its detractors.
In practice these different written forms don't prevent Cornish-speakers from communicating with each other effectively. Cornish has been successfully revived as a viable language for communication. Nevertheless there's still much scope for improving the standard and accuracy of the spoken language. The language is spoken mainly with the older generations, but is currently being taught at some Cornish primary and secondary schools.
In response to the orthographic mayhem, the
Cornish Language Partnership has initiated a period of review. In 2007 an independent Cornish Language Commission consisting of sociolinguists and linguists from outside of Cornwall was formed to review the four existing forms (UC, RLC, KK, and UCR) and consider whether any of those could be suitable to be a Single Written Form for Cornish, or whether a new fifth form should be adopted. Two groups made proposals of compromise orthographies. The group
UdnFormScrefys ('Single Written Form') proposed an orthography called
Kernowek Standard which is based on traditional orthographic forms and also has a clear relation between spelling and pronunciation, taking both Middle Cornish and Late Cornish dialects of Revived Cornish into account. Two members of the CLP's Linguistic Working Group, Albert Bock and Benjamin Bruch, proposed another orthography called
Kernowek Dasunys which endeavours to reconcile UC, KK, RLC, and UCR orthographies. In May 2008 the Partnership agreed on a single written form to be known as "Standard Written Form", to be used by Cornwall County Council authorities for the purposes of education and public life.
Current status
In the
20th century a conscious effort was made to revive Cornish as a language for everyday use in speech and writing (see below for further details about the dialects of modern Cornish).
The study by Kenneth MacKinnon in 2000 suggested that there were then about 300 people who spoke Cornish fluently, for example, were able to talk at ordinary speed on everyday matters. The Cornish Language Strategy project is in 2007 commissioning research to provide quantitative and qualitative evidence for the number of Cornish speakers. Due to the success of the revival project it's estimated that 2000 people are fluent as of spring 2008. A few people under the age of 30 have been brought up to be bilingual in Cornish and English.
Cornish exists in place names, and a knowledge of the language helps the understanding of old place names. Many Cornish names are adopted for children, pets, houses and boats. There is now an increasing amount of Cornish literature, in which poetry is the most important genre, particularly in oral form or as song or as traditional Cornish chants historically performed in marketplaces during religious holidays, public festivals and gatherings, and executions.
Cornwall County Council has, as policy, a commitment to support the language, and recently passed a motion supporting its being specified within the European charter for regional or minority languages.
There are regular periodicals solely in the language such as the monthly
An Gannas,
An Gowsva, and
An Garrick.
BBC Radio Cornwall and
Pirate FM have regular news broadcasts in Cornish, and sometimes have other programmes and features for learners and enthusiasts. Local newspapers such as the
The Western Morning News regularly have articles in Cornish, and newspapers such as
The Packet,
The West Briton and
The Cornishman also support the movement.
The language has financial sponsorship from many sources, including the
Millennium Commission. A number of language organisations exist in Cornwall including (in alphabetical order)
Agan Tavas (Our Language), the Cornish sub-group of the
European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages,
Gorseth Kernow,
Kesva an Taves Kernewek (the Cornish Language Board),
Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek (the Cornish Language Fellowship), and
Teere ha Tavas (Land and Language). One organisation,
Dalleth, promoted the language to pre-school children. There are many popular ceremonies, some ancient, some modern, which use the language or are entirely in the language.
The language has been officially recognised as one of the languages of the British Isles (
see European recognition
below)
Culture
» See: Cornish literature
Cornwall has many other cultural events associated with the language, including the international
Celtic film festival, hosted in
St Ives in
1997, with the programme in Cornish, English and French. There have been many films, some televised, made entirely, or significantly, in the language. Some shops, such as Gwynn ha Du, in the town of
Liskeard, sell books written in Cornish. Many companies use Cornish names. The overnight physician's service in Cornwall is now called
Kernow Urgent Care. Cornish is taught in some schools; it was previously taught at degree level in the
University of Wales, though the only existing courses in the language at University level are as part of a course in Cornish Studies at the
University of Exeter, or as part of the distance-learning
Welsh degree from the
University of Wales, Lampeter.
The Cornish language has been recognised as a minority language by the UK government under the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This follows years of pressure by interest groups such as
Mebyon Kernow and
Kesva an Taves Kernewek.
A first complete edition of the New Testament in Cornish,
Nicholas Williams' translation of the
Testament Noweth agan Arluth ha Savyour Jesu Cryst, was published at
Easter 2002 by Spyrys a Gernow (ISBN 0-9535975-4-7); it uses Unified Cornish Revised orthography. The translation was made from the Greek text, and incorporated John Tregear's existing translations with slight revisions.
In August
2004, Kesva an Taves Kernewek published another Cornish translation of the New Testament (ISBN 1-902917-33-2), translated by six Bards of Gorseth Kernow under the leadership of Keith Syed; it uses Kernewek Kemmyn orthography. It was launched in a ceremony in
Truro Cathedral attended by the
Archbishop of Canterbury.
The
Celtic Congress and
Celtic League are groups that advocate cooperation amongst the Celtic Nations in order to protect and promote Celtic languages and cultures, thus working in the interests of the Cornish language.
The English composer
Peter Warlock, an enthusiast for the Celtic languages, wrote a Christmas carol in Cornish. Cornish electronic musician
Richard D James has often used Cornish names for track titles, most notably on his
DrukQs album.
European recognition
On
November 5,
2002 in answer to a Parliamentary Question, Local Government and Regions Minister
Nick Raynsford said:
After careful consideration and with the help of the results of an independent academic study on the language commissioned by the government, we've decided to recognise Cornish as falling under Part II of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The government will be registering this decision with the Council of Europe.
The purpose of the Charter is to protect and promote the historical regional or minority languages of Europe. It recognises that some of these languages are in danger of extinction and that protection and encouragement of them contributes to Europe's cultural diversity and historical traditions.
This is a positive step in acknowledging the symbolic importance the language has for Cornish identity and heritage.
Cornish will join Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Scots and Ulster Scots as protected and promoted languages under the Charter, which commits the government to recognise and respect those languages.
Officials will be starting discussions with
Cornwall County Council and Cornish language organisations to ensure the views of Cornish speakers and people wanting to learn Cornish are taken into account in implementing the Charter.
Sounds
The pronunciation of traditional Cornish is a matter of conjecture, but varieties of Revived Cornish are more or less agreed about the phonology they use.
Revived Cornish
Consonants
This is a table of the phonology of Revived Cornish as recommended for the pronunciation of Unified Cornish Revised (UCR) orthography, using symbols from the (IPA).
Vowels
These are tables of the phonology of Revived Cornish as recommended for the pronunciation of Unified Cornish Revised (UCR) orthography, using symbols from the (IPA).
Grammar
Cornish is a member of the
Celtic branch of the
Indo-European family of languages, and shares many of the characteristics of the other Insular Celtic languages. These include:
- Initial consonant mutation. The first sound of a Cornish word may change according to grammatical context. There are four types of mutation in Cornish (compared to three in Welsh and two in Irish). These are known as soft (b -> v, etc.), hard (b -> p), aspirate (b unchanged, t -> th) and mixed (b -> f).
Further Information
Get more info on 'Cornish Language'.
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