28 Facts About Cornish language

However, knowledge of Cornish language, including speaking ability to a certain extent, continued to be passed on within families and by individuals, and a revival began in the early 20th century.

Cornish is a Southwestern Brittonic language, a branch of the Insular Celtic section of the Celtic language family, which is a sub-family of the Indo-European language family.

Cornish language evolved from the Common Brittonic spoken throughout Britain south of the Firth of Forth during the British Iron Age and Roman period.

Mark Stoyle has argued that the 'glotticide' of the Cornish language was mainly a result of the Cornish gentry adopting English to dissociate themselves from the reputation for disloyalty and rebellion associated with the Cornish language since the 1497 uprising.

In 1776, William Bodinar, who describes himself as having learned Cornish from old fishermen when he was a boy, wrote a letter to Daines Barrington in Cornish, with an English translation, which was probably the last prose written in the traditional language.

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Traditional view that Dolly Pentreath was the last native speaker of Cornish has been challenged, and in the 18th and 19th centuries there was academic interest in the language and in attempting to find the last speaker of Cornish.

In 1929 Robert Morton Nance published his Unified Cornish language system, based on the Middle Cornish language literature while extending the attested vocabulary with neologisms and forms based on Celtic roots found in Breton and Welsh, publishing a dictionary in 1938.

In 2010 a new milestone was reached when UNESCO altered its classification of Cornish language, stating that its previous label of "extinct" was no longer accurate.

In 2017 the ONS released data based on the 2011 Census that placed the number of speakers at 557 people in England and Wales who declared Cornish to be their main language, 464 of whom lived in Cornwall.

In 2002, Cornish was recognized by the UK government under Part II of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

In 2014, the Cornish language people were recognised by the UK Government as a national minority under the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities.

In 2016, British government funding for the Cornish language ceased, and responsibility transferred to Cornwall Council.

Until around the middle of the 11th century, Old Cornish language scribes used a traditional spelling system shared with Old Breton and Old Welsh, based on the pronunciation of British Latin.

Middle Cornish language orthography has a significant level of variation, and shows influence from Middle English spelling practices.

Criticism of all of these systems, especially Kernewek Kemmyn, by Nicolas Williams, resulted in the creation of Unified Cornish language Revised, a modified version of Nance's orthography, featuring: an additional phoneme not distinguished by Nance, "o in German schon", represented in the UCR orthography by ?ue?; replacement of ?y? with ?e? in many words; internal ?h? rather than ?gh?; and use of final ?b?, ?g?, and ?dh? in stressed monosyllables.

The grammatical features most unfamiliar to English speakers of the Cornish language are the initial consonant mutations, the verb–subject–object word order, inflected prepositions, fronting of emphasised syntactic elements and the use of two different forms for "to be".

Cornish language nouns belong to one of two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, but are not inflected for case.

Cornish language uses inflected prepositions: Prepositions are inflected for person and number.

Cornish language names are adopted for children, pets, houses and boats.

Currently Cornish language is spoken at home, outside the home, in the workplace and at ritual ceremonies.

Cornwall has had cultural events associated with the Cornish language, including the international Celtic Media Festival, hosted in St Ives in 1997.

In March 2008 a course in the Cornish language was started as part of the Celtic Studies curriculum at the University of Vienna, Austria.

The Cornish Language Practice Project is a level 4 course approved by Plymouth University and run at Cornwall College.

Cornish language was one of the first to realise the language was dying out and wrote detailed manuscripts which he started working on when he was 78.

Early Modern Cornish was the subject of a study published by Lhuyd in 1707, and differs from the medieval language in having a considerably simpler structure and grammar.

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The medieval Cornish language possessed two additional tenses for expressing past events and an extended set of possessive suffixes.

In 2002 the Cornish language gained new recognition because of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.

The result was creating a new form of Cornish language, which had to be natural for both new learners and skilled speakers.