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Posted on 11/18/2002 10:10:10 AM PST by Loyalist
LONDON - Decades after it was thought to have been consigned to the scrap heap of history, the ancient Celtic language that is spoken fluently by only 100 people is making a remarkable comeback.
Cornish has been granted official protection under the provisions of a European Union charter on "minority languages," paving the way for schoolchildren to be taught and speak it.
Until recently, Cornish was thought by many to be an attractive curiosity ranking some way behind the region's beaches, smugglers' caves and cream teas.
Dolly Pentreath, of Mousehole, Cornwall, the last Cornish monoglot, died in 1777 and at its lowest ebb the language was spoken by only a single person. It has, however, undergone a gradual revival.
This month, the British government added Cornish to the United Kingdom's five other protected minority languages. It joins Scots, Ulster Scots, Welsh, and Scottish and Irish Gaelic. The ruling commits the government to ensuring that lessons in the ancient and obscure tongue are available "at all appropriate stages."
Supporters of the pressure group Agantavas (Our Language), point to the success of the county's Hayle Community School, which began teaching Cornish to 11-year-old pupils last year.
"We are extending the teaching to other years from next year," said Tony Wyld, the school's head of languages.
The government has been accused by critics of giving in to a rising tide of Cornish nationalism. Three members of Cornwall's ancient Stannary Parliament were fined earlier this year for stealing English Heritage signs from local landmarks. They had objected to the word "English" on the signs.
Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St. Ives who lobbied for the language ruling, said it means the government will not be able to discriminate against Cornish speakers.
"It might mean, for instance, that if a Cornish speaker writes to a Government department they should receive a reply in their own language," he said.
The new ruling does not yet give Cornish the status of Welsh, which must used in official documents, be taught in schools and be used on state-owned media under Part III of the European charter, but campaigners believe that this may come.
Cornish is spoken fluently by only 100 people, with 500 more having reasonable conversational ability. About 3,500 are said to have some knowledge of the language and it is used as a mother tongue in just 10 households.
It lags well behind its protected Celtic cousins. Scots is spoken by an estimated 1.75 million people mostly in southern Scotland, and Scottish Gaelic by about 66,000 in and around the Western Isles.
Irish Gaelic is spoken by 1.75 million in Ireland and 131,000 in Northern Ireland, while an estimated 500,000 speak Ulster Scots and 508,000 have some knowledge of Welsh.
The last true native speakers of the original Cornish tongue died in the late 18th century. It was thought that it had gone the same way as other ancient British tongues such as Pictish and Cumbrian -- which historians believe to have died out in 1000 and 1200 respectively.
I was recently in Ireland and Scotland, visiting some of those towns where Gaelic is still the first language. The people there are very proud of their heritage and are vigilant in keeping Gaelic alive.
I would dispute the claim of 1.75 million speakers of Gaelic in Ireland, though. There are only a little over 3 million in the country. Gaelic as a first language is only used in remote parts of the sparsely populated western coast and some of the north. I'd say a great majority of the country does not know Gaelic.
If I'm not mistaken, it is a required subject in Irish schools these days. That may account for such a large number.
Additionally, I am told there has been a push in recent years to use Gaelic in all official government documents alongside English. I know that now you now see Gaelic as well as English on all the street signs, and that did not use to be the case.
Personally, I'm torn on my feelings about this sort of thing. I love the idea of preserving a heritage and culture. But language is one of the things that unites a nation. I don't think it's any better for the United Kingdom to be balkanized than it is for the United States.
Only little bity babies can NOT speak gaelic. It is mandatory in school to age 18 so just about everyone can speak it.
What this article doesn't mention is the deep divide within the Cornish language movement, between those who advocate 'pure', 16th century Cornish, and those who promote the language in the state in which it became extinct, by which time it had picked up a signigficant admixture of English. Last time I looked into it they were at each others' throats.
It may be by grammar. The Turkish language uses Finnish grammar.
Michael
Finnish and Hungrian are indeed representative of the Finno and Ugric branches of Uralic, the others being the Samoyed languages and Sammic (Lapp). The Turkic languages (Turkish, Chuvash,Turkmen, Uzbik, Azeri, etc etc), along with the Mongolian and Tungus (Manchu, Evenki, etc) lanuages, constitute the Altaic family.
Some scholars believe that there is a Ural-Altaic family that unites these, but the late Joseph Greenberg (IMO the greatest linguist of the 20th century) showed that they are two branches of the EuroAsiatic family, which also includes Indo-European, Japanese, Korean, Ainu, Gilyak, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut.
BTW, the Celtic languages are one branch of Indo-European; for some reason a lot of people are under the mistaken idea that they're also related to Basque, which is not closely related to anything else.
Yes, let's maintain separate cultures and identities here in the states while we are at it. All this multiculturalist nonsense leads to further divisions and separatness and tribalism. Food for leftist movements who use it to divide and conquer.
I say that the day that English is the lingua franca in the entire planet can't get here soon enough. American English, that is.
Just as Latin, the lingua franca of its era, fragmented into dialects which became distinct Romance languages, so too will English dialects develop into separate languages.
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