To understand Cornish, or Kernowek as it is colloquially known, is to understand a key part of British history. Before the arrival of the Romans and the Anglo-Saxon expansion and long before English took on the mantle of the dominant language in the British Isles, variations of a language known as Common Brittonic ruled the roost.
Just as its Celtic sister language Welsh has enjoyed rapid growth in recent times, Cornish is now being given a new lease of life.
Considered a branch of the Celtic language family, Cornish is a Southwestern Brittonic language. For centuries, Cornish was the leading language spoken in Cornwall, before seemingly going extinct by the 1800s.
Like the proverbial phoenix, however, Cornish is rising from the ashes, with a push to revive it for future generations…
The early rise and fall of Cornish
Cornish has a longer history in the British Isles than the English language itself. In fact, Britain’s history itself is a study in the perils of reducing a nation to a single language – surprising for what is now seen as such a monolingual nation.
Early forms of Cornish give you a good idea of what you might have heard being spoken in much of England during the Iron Age and around the time of the Roman occupation. But like any language, Cornish has evolved over the centuries, as the population of Cornwall travelled, grew and adapted to the profound changes of the world around it. At its height in the Middle Ages, it is estimated that Cornish was spoken by 38,000 people, equivalent to just over 73 per cent of the local population at the time.
The English of its time would have been fairly unintelligible to a modern-day English speaker during much of the Middle Ages, offering us a snapshot of a time long gone.
However, by the time of the English Civil War in the 1650s, while the population of Cornwall had doubled, the number of Cornish speakers had halved. By 1700, as few as 5,000 people were recorded as active speakers, before dropping to almost zero by 1800.
The return of Cornish
Although folk memory of the language remained, Cornish was considered extinct by the 1800s. However, just enough knowledge was preserved to allow the publication of the book “A Handbook of the Cornish Language” in 1904. This book is often credited with helping aid the revival and return of Cornish from the 1900s onwards.
By the turn of the new millennium, it was estimated up to 300 people spoke Cornish fluently, and continued growth has led to an estimated 3,000 people being capable of basic conversations in Cornish in more recent years. Such growth led to UNESCO redefining Cornish as “critically endangered” in 2012 as opposed to “extinct”, a sign that the language was undergoing tangible signs of recovery in Cornwall. In 2021, Cornish is now classified as the only language spoken in England to be recognised under the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
Investing in the future
The Cornish language received a fresh boost from the UK Government when, in 2019, it was announced that £200,000 had been allocated to help preserve the Cornish language as part of Cornwall’s heritage and culture. The bulk of this figure, £150,000, was spent in schools, teaching the next generation of Cornish children how to speak the language, keeping it alive for many more years to come.
There is always a chance for a second life for any language, so long as the willpower is there and traditions are maintained. At Bubbles, we know all too well about the importance of localisation (or in the case of Cornish, hyper-localisation), as countries all over the world can show tremendous diversity in the way they communicate. For example, India is home to over 1.3 billion people with 19,500 languages spoken as mother tongues, with 121 of those languages spoken by at least 10,000 people.
Tapping into new languages and new markets
When breaking into overseas markets, sensitivity is required to ensure you capture opportunities in as many languages as possible and as we’ve said before, associating a border of a country often doesn’t match perfectly with languages spoken within those political and geographic boundaries.
Rather than regretting a missed opportunity, it pays to seek a language translation services provider who can help you reach markets you might have felt unable to speak to before now.
Bubbles have helped translate over 80 languages since 2003 for customers such as Seiko, Virgin Atlantic and the New York Times, to name a few, so we are more than happy to help your business reach its full potential, helping translate your messages further than ever before.
As specialists in communication in a variety of tongues, we strongly encourage you to get in touch, so we can start the conversation to best help you in meeting your language translation requirements.
