How old is the cornish language

People are writing and performing songs and poetry in Cornish, and the language is taught in some schools and at the University of Exeter. BBC Radio Cornwall have regular news broadcasts in Cornish, and sometimes have other programmes and features for learners and enthusiasts. The first ever feature film entirely in Cornish, Hwerow Hweg Bitter Sweet was released in , and a number of other films in Cornish have been made since then.

The SWF is intended for official use and for formal education. In other contexts people are free to choose the form of written Cornish they prefer. The group is held on Saturdays at the Cornwall College in Cambourne and children between 2 and 5 years old are attending. The children are immersed in Cornish in one room, and their parents learn Cornish in another. The Cornish lessons for the parents focus particularly on language they can use with their children.

Toggle navigation. Home - Blog - The History Of…. Literature in Late or Modern Cornish, the type of Cornish used between and the 19th century, includes folk tales, poems, songs, and translations from the Bible.

Dorothy or Dolly Pentreath is known as the last fluent, native speaker of Cornish. She claimed that she spoke nothing but Cornish until she was 20, although it is not certain whether this was true.

She was a native speaker of Cornish, and was known to swear fluently in the language. Whether she spoke Cornish fluently later in life is disbuted [ source ]. In Daines Barrington , an English lawyer, antiquary and naturalist, received a letter in Cornish and English from William Bodinar, a fisherman from Mousehole, who claimed that he knew at least five people who speak Cornish in Mousehole. He also mentioned another Cornish speak in Marazion - John Nancarrow, who died in the s.

Cornish continued to be spoken during the 19th century by a small number of individuals. The last known speaker of traditional Cornish was John Mann, who died in Many Cornish words and some phrases continued to be used in the Anglo-Cornish dialect into the 20th century, especially in western parts of Cornwall.

Henry Jenner was the first person to try to revive the language. His interest was sparked by the discovery of a number of lines from a medieval Cornish play in a 14th century manuscript in the British Museum. Jenner spent many years travelling all over Cornwall interviewing Cornish speakers, learning Cornish from them and studying any Cornish texts he could find. Then in he published a Handbook of the Cornish language , an introductory textbook for people interested in learning the language.

Jenner also learned to speak Breton and was surprised by the many similarities between the two languages. Jenner's work was continued by Robert Morton Nance , who reconstructed a version of Cornish he called Unified Cornish Kernewek Unys based on Medieval miracle plays and borrowing words from the middle and late periods and even from Welsh and Breton.

Nance also devised his own spelling system. In Nance published his work in a book called Cornish for All. The version of the language they promoted was Unified Cornish and their efforts attracted considerable interest. It is said that Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole was the last person to speak Cornish as their first language.

She died in and with her the Cornish language. Skip to main content. The geographical division between the two was reinforced by the invasion and settlement patterns of first the Romans and then, from the fifth century AD, the Saxons. The Saxon settlement also resulted in large numbers of Brythonic speaking Celts migrating across the sea to the peninsula of Armorica, already a known trading route, taking their name with them and thus founding Brittany.

As a result of the now geographical separation of the languages, they began to diverge and grow independently from each other, and became the six Celtic languages that we are familiar with today.

Early Cornish. Cornish was spoken throughout Cornwall, The Isles of Scilly and to some extent in West Devon and Exeter until, following the battle of Hingston Down in , the Saxon king Athelstan drove the Cornish out of Exeter and declared the east bank of the river Tamar to be the border of his kingdom — a border which is of course still current today.

Despite keeping his kingdom of Wessex separate from Cornwall, Athelstan still interfered with the Celtic monastic system. As the monasteries tended to be the originators and repositories of manuscripts it may be that this is responsible for the lack of extant texts from this early period of Cornish. The period from to is generally referred to as Middle Cornish, and during this time numerous religious plays were written at Glasney College.

They were performed in open air rounds known as plen-an-gwari, some of which can still be found in locations around Cornwall, the best examples being St Just in Penwith and Perran Round near Perranporth. Of the surviving plays, the largest is a trilogy dating from the mid fourteenth century called the Ordinalia, which comprises Origo Mundi, the Origin of the World , Passio Christi the Passion of Christ and Resurrexio Domini the Resurrection of Our Lord.

Notable also is Bewnans Meriasek, a play about the life of St Meriadoc of Brittany who became the patron saint of Camborne; and more recently Bewnans Ke, the life of St Kea, has been re-discovered and published. The Reformation of the English church was a major event that shaped the future of the Cornish language.

A number of battles ensued at various places across Devon, in which an estimated 5, Cornish were killed. This was a devastating blow to the Cornish language, given the consequent depletion of the population of Cornwall. Before the Prayer Book Rebellion, it is thought that Cornwall had been largely Cornish speaking up as far as Bodmin, with a few bilingual pockets further east. Less than half a century later, at the start of the seventeenth century, writers such as Richard Carew and John Norden attested that Cornish was spoken only west of Truro, and that even those speakers knew English as well as their native Cornish by then.

From this period the most noted extant texts we have are the Tregear Homilies, a series of 12 sermons translated from English to Cornish by a cleric named John Tregear followed by a patristic catena in Cornish and Latin.