Resurgence in Cornish Language

The most common vision of a nursery is perhaps the children playing with some toys and the teachers combining this with rudimentary word and numbers tasks. However, a Cornish language crèche has recently opened which teaches its pupils the Cornish language, whose last native speaker died over 200 years ago.

The Cornish have long been avid proponents of preserving their language, if not for practical use then certainly for prosperity. The Movyans Skolyow Meythrin (Nursery Schools Movement) is part of the language’s revival, which includes road signs in the county written in both Cornish and English, and the news in Cornish on the local BBC website.

It is a language that very few people are able to speak fluently, with only 300 people currently able to. The question that might spring to mind is - why? The movement argues that it goes a long way in providing a sense of community, history and culture.

Rhisiart Tal-e-bot, a teacher who will run the crèche, which will be on Saturday mornings while their parents are taking adult Cornish language courses, said “Traditionally the language was seen as for academics or people with beards and the community of bards. Now there’s more of a cultural connection. There was an independent study into the language in 2000 and one of the recommendations was teaching it to pre-school children for it to flourish.”

Cornish was officially recognised as a language by the Government in 2002, under the European charter for regional or minority languages, and has also seen an increasing amount of adults begin learning it. This recent resurgence has come as a surprise to some, particularly those who saw it as a bit insular when they were growing up.

However, these small movements may one day add up to a language that is as prevalent in its area as Welsh is in Wales. For this, inevitably, funding is required. The crèche is funded by the college within which it is run, as well as being part funded by the Cornish Language Partnership. It is this kind of investment that may see the language taken up by an increasing amount of people, and become more widespread.