CORNISH LANGUAGE FOCUS GROUP: LATE / MODERN

Tuesday 22^nd. February 2000 19:00 – 20:30: Conference Chamber F 116, Truro College.

Persons present (in order of signature on sederunt, with own description):-

John Burn Student

Michelle Cousins "Worldwide" Student

Yvonne Allcott Student

Paul Oliver " "

Lynne Gulliford Student

John B. Brailey "

Jessie Curnow Study Cornish at St Austell Was Lady of Cornwall (Bard ceremony)

Phili Vivian Student of Kernuack, Cornish by descent (at least 1212 A.D.)

Neil Kennedy Sec Cornish Language Council

Lilian Polkinghorne 1st learned Cornish 25 years ago and doing a refresher course.

Mike Polkinghorne Study Cornish at Truro College

Dave Dunne 1^st learned the language 10 yrs ago. Presently trying to get it taught at my local primary school.

Chris Chynoweth Student

R.J. Ormond Cornish Language student for about 10 yrs. Still not fluent but would like to be. I am also a parish councillor for Mullion and would like to promote the language through the council.

Elizabeth Sampson Beginner

Kitto Sampson First sang in Cornish at Gorsedd about 1952. Now wish to find out more about the language.

Pauline Howard 1^st Year Cornish.

Margaret Hooking Beginner (but tried to teach myself some 20 yrs or more ago).

Kim Cooper Beginner (Librarian at Cornish Studies Library, Redruth).

One other not signing sederunt

Total persons present: 20

Proceedings:

Neil Kennedy: Introduction stage, just in time so: This is Professor Ken MacKinnon and the reason for him being in Cornwall is that the Government is considering whether Cornish can be included as a minority language in relation to the – what’s it called ? - European Convention… European Charter for Minority Languages.

KM: Minority and Regional Languages…or Regional or Minority (I’m not sure).

Neil Kennedy: Whatever. Really, Ken has been asked to look into the state of the use of Cornish, how it’s been used and so on. You can talk about it yourself. I’m going to scurry off and get probably another half-dozen cups…. We’ve got a mixture of people…. To find out their names you say Peth ew hanow che. We’ve got a mixture of people here. Some from the nearly relative beginners, from the Truro class, here, most people, a couple of people from the classes in St Austell, a couple from Pendeen and Dave, over there, I haven’t seen him for about 10 years, he was in my class in Helston some years ago. That’s great. Let’s go and see if we can go and rustle up some more tea and that.

KM If anyone wants a cup of tea with a sweetener pill in it, there’s one over there.

KM: Anyway, that’s really what we’re here for and I’m running what is called a focus group, which means that this gets everybody a chance to say what they want to on different topics. I’ve got like, prompts, which raise certain areas that we would like your opinion, more information on. Don’t let that inhibit you from saying what you might think to be important because at the end, you know, at least, I hope to have opportunity to say, look, is there anything we have overlooked? What we should be communicating to the Government in this report? Because it’s really the first time the Government has ever set up any sort of official enquiry into the Cornish language or sought the views of Cornish speakers, learners or users on this issue. I’m very conscious of doing this, this is the history lesson, 300 years after Edward Lhuyd came to Cornwall, anybody ever come across Edward Lhuyd? Archaeologica Britannica. Simon James has observed that the time he came to Cornwall, 1700, he went down as far as St Just, where I went this morning, and saw Dickon Gwyn, the Cornish scholar, and conferred with him on the state of the Cornish language. (Just a splash, mate.) Simon James observes in his book, The Atlantic Celts, that it was Lhuyd who took up the idea of the Celtic languages. It was originally identified by Hector Boece, a Scotsman, 100 years or so before- or 200 years before. He linked up the speakers of these related languages in the British Isles with the ancient Celts and their language and he called them the Celtic languages.

At the time that the British state was being formed, when there was money being put in to bribe the Scots Parliament to merge with the English Parliament, and this idea of Britishness was coming about. He provided like a countervailing ideology, so that the separated peoples who weren’t English, might have a common identity, a common cause, and he, as it were, sort of popularized this idea of the Celtic languages, that they’re related, as of course they are. And, I think he did very well, because 300 years later we’ve managed to maintain our identities even if perhaps, you know, there’s been a lot of language loss. We’ve managed to retain our identity in the face of the, sort of, nationalistic or imperialistic Anglo-British identity, and here we are 300 years later, being our own people. So, I think that Edward Lhuyd did very well, and I’m very conscious of the fact that here I am 300 years later. So, I hope that I can at least, you know, do something which will be a stone upon the cairn of his memory and perhaps a practical step forward for the Cornish language.

Right, well, we’re going to have a look at, first of all, things like the past and the revival. We’re going to concentrate though, on current use and we’re going to end up by looking at the three present-day versions of Cornish and what that implies. So, I’m going to put a series of questions to you. Feel free to chip in and make observations…

So, why do you think the language died?

Fem voice: Probably Prayer Book and that sort of thing. Landlords

KM: Landowners.

Male voice: Lack of a written language as well.

KM: I mean it’s bound up with prayer book, there wasn’t one in Cornish and the Bible, there wasn’t one in Cornish.

Male voice: …….virtually written down, but a lot of people ?

Fem voice: Or nothing left.

Male voice: Well, it was all burnt.

Fem voice: It was there but…

Male voice: The other thing to remember about the Prayer Book Rebellion that nearly half of the able bodied male population was killed in it.

Male voice: That would reduce a language quite considerably.

KM: Indeed, indeed.

Fem voice: We lost a lot of people overseas over hundreds of years ago.

KM: So, you’ve got, you know, some sort of image really of the history of the language and crucial events in its.

Male voice: Being the second class citizens maybe.

Male voice: You know, because you couldn’t speak English or you didn’t speak English, probably you would have

KM: Would you like to sign on, and what you are in the Cornish movement. Anyway I’m very, very pleased that there’s been such a very good turnout fir this meeting. It really is heartening that there are so many of you here tonight and I do very much appreciate you making the effort to get here. Now, turning to the revival, how and why do you think that these different varieties of revived language came into being? How do you see the language actually as being revived? When I said, why did the language die one of the other groups said, "Well, did it die?

Fem voice: I’m not sure it totally died out because you here pockets from a couple of people here and there that are still using but it wasn’t used generally, was it? Not enough as a community.

KM: I don’t know whether there’s any really any evidence that pockets of actual speakers survived as such, but it did survive in various ways, I would say. How aware are you of this?

Male voice: Got an awful lot of odd bits survived in country districts that have been talking mainly their own.

Fem voice: But a lot of our dialect words partly come from the language, you wouldn’t know it was necessarily from the language but I’m using them, place names.

NK: In one sense language can only die if it’s alive and since languages aren’t alive, how can they die? Well, they fall out of use.

KM: Yes, I think this idea of language death is a bit of a metaphor anyway.

NK: But what we do seem to know is that language survived longer than people imagined it did. The thing is antiquarians in the 18^th century, they certainly had a sort of, a reason to pronounce it dead, they had an invested interest in pronouncing it dead. Cornish commentators themselves saw it as part of Cornwall’s sort of modernist progress to pronounce it dead, people like David Gilbert and so on. You know, everybody was looking for the last aboriginal speaker. You know, all over Europe people were looking for these sort of last example of things. So, we do know there was considerable, sort of use in the latter half of the 19^th century. That isn’t the same thing as a community of speakers.

KM: No. The last person to reputably have traditional Cornish up to some conversational level is reputably; don’t let me tell you, you tell me.

Fem voice: Dolly Pentreath, but she.

KM: No, I’m going to go a century later than Dolly Pentreath 1777.

Fem voice: There was a man on the north coast, was it ??

KM: Yes, there was. Anybody know his name?

Fem voice: I thought it was John something, I can’t remember.

KM: Yeah, John Davy of Boswednack.

Male voice: And there’s a bit of, a bitter in his name, there’s a beer in his name. Redruth Brewery

KM: Is there? John Davy.

Male voice: Yeah.

KM: Not Humphrey Davy?

Male voice: No, there’s John Davy bitter.

KM: Is that right, well.

Male voice: There’s a road named after him down Redruth as well. Yes, it was named by…

KM: Well, I have to report to you today that on my way round to St Just, I went to Zennor Church and the plaque which commemorates him has been removed. I don’t know why, it might have fallen down, it might have lapsed into desuetude, or it might have been removed on purpose.

Male voice: It was there in the summer.

KM: It was there in the summer, I know, because one of my students took a photograph of it for me.

NK: I’m related to him.

KM: Who, John Davy?

NK: Yea.

KM: Are you really? I also found out that there’s a, on the corner of the road in Boswednack, there’s a, what looks like a cow house and it’s called the old school house and I think that might be where John Davy taught as the Schoolmaster. That also is pretty ruinous, there’s a roof on it but there’s ivy running through it, and I feel that that is, you know, somewhere where Cornish was last being passed on, say to school children and I would like to see that, all the brambles cleared, I’d like to see it spruced up and I’d like to see it as a Cornish Language Heritage Centre – I hesitate to say it - Information Centre Power Centre.

Male voice: There’s a lot of places that have got history throughout Cornwall that are recognised.

KN: One of the things I found quite interesting is the way the language is portrayed by people, it’s portrayed as this quaint, peasant language and the last person who spoke it, of course was an old fishwife or whatever, not a mathematician. The last speaker, the last known traditional speaker of Cornish was a mathematician who taught mining engineers, and that’s kind of, suddenly you’ve got a completely different perception of what the language is.

KM: I might be wrong in supposing that the old school house is where Davy taught, but anyway I think it would be marvellous if we could have somewhere in Boswednack which commemorated Davy and took tha language further forward. Anyway, that’s just me. This is my notions, I’m after your notions.

KM: What do you think was the main driving force behind the revival? What do you see is the main driver? What do you see as the main driving force behind your revival?

Fem voice: We claim our right to our heritage, our right has been taken away from us, why?

KM: What do you think move people like Jenner and Nance, you all know about Jenner and Nance?

NK: Not necessarily.

KM: Really. I won’t ask you who’s heard of them or not, we’re not running a class.

NK:: Yeah. There is quite a discontinuity with that early revival name. Is it worth going round putting people on the spot?

KM: Yeah. Put me on the spot and say, why are you learning Cornish?

Male voice: As individuals, because this some people won’t say anything.

KM: Just give a word.

Fem voice: Because I’m Cornish.

Male voice: Because I’m not English.

Fem voice: Yeah.

Male voice: Slight difference there, isn’t there.

KM: Yes, we’ll go round.

Male voice: I’m not English.

Fem voice: Because it’s there to be learnt, why not?

Male voice: Identity, really.

Fem voice: I’m going to give a longer answer, I work in a Cornish study’s library in Redruth.

Male voice: That’s what we need, employment reasons for learning Cornish.

Fem voice: We get so many enquiries about, of people just wanting to name their house in Cornish, even name their dog, a Cornish name, I mean, I know it’s pretty basic but there is that definite interest in people wanting to get back in time to Cornish words and you just feel very stupid when you’ve got absolutely no idea at all, so, that’s why I’ve got to.

KM: Very interesting, that’s good.

Fem voice: I just want to be as Cornish as possible, when I think it’s part of the Cornish heritage.

Male voice: It’s part of my heritage.

Male voice: Tradition.

Male voice: I’m Cornish and I’m proud of it, and I think anything which the Cornish can do to enhance the Cornishness in the world wide setting is a good thing, important thing.. I tried to learn it once before and I got so bored I kept falling asleep at all my lessons. So, after 25 year lay off I’ trying again.

KM: Right, good.

Male voice: It don’t make you fall asleep .

KM: Are you in his class?

Male voice: I mean I might be mad but you can’t fall asleep.

Fem voice: I’m Cornish and I’m going to hang on to everything that there is.

Male voice: You said one word, heritage.

KM: Right.

Fem voice: When I came to Cornwall, about 45 years ago. You probably know Craig Weatherhill

KM: Yes, Craig Weatherhill. Yes, I don’t know him but I know his book very well.

Fem voice: He’s one of my regulars and we were talking and he was talking about starting up Cornish language lessons, and I wanted to keep it going and not see it die out basically, so that’s what we did, that’s what we started up.

NK: It’s a great book.

KM: I always travel around Cornwall with that.

Fem voice: When I was 18 I was asked to be Lady of Cornwall, which I’m not too keen on the term, I think a lot of people just stereotype as one thing.

KM: Did you put that on the sederunt? As past Maid of Cornwall.

Fem voice: I did, so, I had to learn quite a bit of the Cornish language but then I forgot it all when I went to University and I came back and I really, really wanted to learn it. Now I work for the Environment Agency and I work in writing a local plan and you can’t really write local plans without concentrating on the local language so we’re working to get the language more into our documents, so, I’m learning for that.

KM: Very good, there’s an old chart somewhere up the Brannell country which describes the boundaries of this estate, you know that one, up to Carrack-an-Gowg and it says underneath, ye rock of ye cuckoo and so on, you know.

NK: What’s interesting about that is that at a time when the language, we’re all told, oh, the language wasn’t spoken in mid Cornwall at this date. There’s someone writing tin-bounds and they’re saying, to Mean Platt or the flat rock, to Pol Ebilly or the pool where the colts do drink. It’s obviously the person writing this chart could speak Cornish and they were in Blackmoor .

KM: That’s not too far from Brannell is it?

Male voice: We sort of missed Chris there.

KM: Yea, we did, I was coming back to it.

Male voice: I’m Cornish and I’m proud of it and I want to speak my own language.

KM: Yes, I think you chipped in first.

Fem voice: Yes, sorry. I’m Cornish, I’m not English and I came across prejudice when I was still at school, trying to stop me knowing my place names, my language and denying that it was necessary or even existed.

KM: They tried to stop you?

Fem voice: Yeah, that just made me more stubborn.

KM: Now then, you can see what we’re doing, why are you learning Cornish?

Male voice: When I was about 17 I sang in Skinner’s Bottom for a male singers choir to sing at the Gorseth. I think it was the first one I after the war, type of thing, and I sang the song in Cornish, didn’t have a clue what I was singing and thought, well, now that I’m not doing a lot else I’ll try and find out what I was singing.

Fem voice: Well, everybody says that it is a dead language but I thought well if everybody started to learn it, it won’t be a dead language anymore.

KM: I think we’ve had you already. Where’s the sederunt gone? So, anybody not signed on? Who they are. What their position is about the language movement, past grand bàrd or past Maid of Cornwall or Secretary of the Cornish Language Council or whatever you are. There might be a lot of modesty.

What do you think about the current use of the Cornish language? How do you see the Cornish language as a living, or if you do see it as a living entity in Cornwall just now, somebody just said, you know, to make it live.

Fem voice: It seems to have been restricted actually. We used to have a column in the paper, it’s not there anymore.

NK: We were just asking why people are learning Cornish.

KM: You tell us why.

Fem voice: Because it’s part of my heritage, my culture.

Fem voice: Me too, I’m Cornish.

KM: Very good, well, what do you see as the main trends in the use of Cornish language over the past 20 years? What do you see as having happened to the Cornish language in the past 20 years? What was it like 20 years ago?

Male voice: Well, this has happened, hasn’t it? 20 years ago there wasn’t this.

Fem voice: You couldn’t go and do anything ? that easily. There were evening classes, I remember there was one in ? College but they were very few and far between to get at them. The books weren’t available tapes weren’t available.

Male voice: They were very dull things to attend. It was easy to fall asleep and difficult to concentrate.

Male voice: 20 years ago, when I was at school, somebody like Dick Gendall was one of my teachers was virtually a bloody voice in the wilderness. We were told from the first day we went to school we were English, and they told us the only Cornish history I actually learnt was from a Londoner and he was teaching us doing the Industrial Revolution in Cornwall and that was the only Cornish history I learnt.

KM: I mean Cornwall is very important for the Industrial Revolution. It started here before virtually anywhere else.

Male voice: You wouldn’t think it. It’s not the way its taught though, is it?

KM: I mean, this was all going full pelt.

Male voice: Nothing happened this side of Brunel Bridge on the Tamar, you know, and ?

KM: Well that wasn’t until 1859.

Male voice: Well, that’s when it started.

Male voice: The steam engine is in 1698

KM: Yeah, there was Newcomen, there was Savery..

Male voice You know that the English have made a concerted attack on all the Celtic races though, isn’t it? The Englishness of the whole islands, and Cornwall being smallish lost out most.

Male voice: In the newspaper, was it yesterday? You’re allowed to kill a Welshman

KM: and they’ve probably repealed that?

Male voice: Only on a Sunday in the Cathedral grounds.

Male voice: That’s the way the English, the Celts is second class citizens.

Fem voice; I can believe that.

Fem voice: Conquered.

Male voice: Athelstan took our money.

Fem voice: Took our money from us

Male voice: Still do.

Male voice: It’s what the English are going for now, they’ve got an identity crisis now. They’re getting involved into Europe and all this here pound, euro and all being euro and all that, they don’t like that now. They’re against all that now because their identity is getting buggered up. So, that’s all they’ve been doing to us for years really. Now they’re getting the same thing, they don’t like it. I’d vote for euro, I would.

KM: You’d vote for Euro?

Male voice: Oh, yes.

KM: How do the rest of you feel about this?

Fem voice: No.

Male voice: I would for the same reasons as Dave.

KM: Tell me no why not?

Fem voice: Why wouldn’t I vote against Europe.

KM: Yes. Well we are in Europe.

Fem voice: Well I was not anti-European market but I think we treated the commonwealth disgracefully. I don’t want some bloody German or Frenchman that we don’t get on with anyway, you know, giving out those silly directives and things like that, some of them are stupid.

Male voice: Too late. Help, poor old Butcher had to stop doing hog’s pudding because some German said you got to put it into the bloody fridge.

Fem voice: Exactly and they send all those blooming people in Brussels earning an incredibly amount of money tax free, for what?

KM: Is it tax free?

Fem voice: Yes. They’re not going to turn round and say we’re not, we don’t want ……..(lots of people talking) and what’s it for? What are we going to do with it?

Fem voice: It might be useful to use rules that we’ve got

Male voice: It’s a step in the right direction.

KM (sotto voce) It’s a very lively meeting, isn’t it?

Fem voice: …. Money we paid in to Europe, we paid more in to get out.

Male voice: Here, you’re taking us off the track a bit there..

KM: I’ll bring you back, and I’ll say, right, you’ve got Objective 1. We had it in the highlands and islands for 7 years. Actually the company I’m working with, working with me on this project, were instrumental in getting Objective 1 for the Highlands & Islands. They were also instrumental in getting for Cornwall as well, because they do a lot of work down here, EKOS. And what I am going to say to you is when the Highlands & Islands of Scotland we used a lot of that Objective 1 money, raised matched funding from things like Council Grants, Leader money, which is also European, LEC money, which is Government money coming through Enterprise Companies, and lottery funding and many other quite ingenious sources for match funding. We’ve got a lot of things going for the Gaelic language, we’ve got a University which is putting Gaelic courses, that is not courses about Gaelic, but courses taught through the medium of Gaelic, amongst its first degrees on Regional and North Atlantic Studies, Media and Television Production, Creative Arts, Business Studies, all of these taught through the medium of Gaelic.

Fem voice: Which we haven’t got.

KM: Because we’ve got so many companies up and running now in Cultural Tourism, in Gaelic Festivals, in Gaelic Arts, in various forms of community development as well as small scale manufacturing industries, some of which actually has got a bit of a Gaelic image, and all this stuff is going ahead. We’ve done it through Objective 1. How many people are there in the Highlands & Islands of Scotland?

Fem voice: Not that many.

KM: Any ideas?

Fem voice: Probably the same as Cornwall.

KM: About 350,000.

Male voice: Less than Cornwall.

KM: Smaller than Cornwall. So, I think actually, I’m not sort of saying you’ve got to do what we did, you do what you do, but there’s an example there to look at.

Male voice: What’s the make-up of their County Council then?

KM: Well, we’ve got 3 island councils, Highland Region, as it was. It’s now Highland Council and Argyll & Bute. So, there’s about 5 or 6 councils.

Male voice: The Chief Executive of each of those? What nationality?

KM: Well, they change over from time to time but for most parts, Scots, I would say. But not always Highlanders.

Male voice: But what have we got?

Fem voice: But we’re lumped in with Devon all the time and it’s all controlled up country.

Male voice: As far as the Government is concerned the South West finishes at Bristol. Start and finish at Bristol.

Fem voice: Objective 1, we need that, we need all the help we can, getting to know how to get match funding so I don’t think we’re going to get it out of that lot up there,

KM: Well, you know.

Male voice: The challenge is actually getting control.

Male voice: I mean there is the matter of the Cornish assembly. Andrew George is on the Cornish Assembly.

KM: What’s the relevance to the language to all this that we’ve been talking about, hard nosed economics?

NK: Well, it did actually have quite an impact on Objective 1 because they had to go through something called Nuts 2. Can’t forget that can you, before they got Objective 1 and they used Cornwall’s culture distinctiveness, and you may not think that, and they used the language in that, they even included a paragraph or two in Cornish and they used that to win Nuts 2, which was the necessary steps for them to go onto Objective 1. They secured Objective 1 because they were supported by two Breton MEPs who identified with Cornwall because of its language. So, without the support of this Breton MEPs we wouldn’t have got it. Without getting through Nuts 2 in the first place we wouldn’t be even considered. So, you know, it’s quite a factor really.

Fem voice: We need all the help we can get from other Celtic countries.

KM: What do you think ?

Fem voice: We need all the allies we can get from other Celtic countries where they’re ? on Irish, Welsh.

KM: Right, now the reason why you got those allies in the other Celtic countries is because of Edward Lhuyd 300 years ago. You see, he gave us this idea, and it’s been there for 300 years and it’s now increasingly coming into its own and people do identify between the Celtic countries and you do get mutual help, and there is no doubt about that.

Male voice: You were talking just now about the degree courses in Gaelic

KM: Through the medium of Gaelic.

Male voice: Yeah, therefore they must learn their language in school presumably, to be able to cope with that sort of thing.

KM: Yes. We’re talking…

Male voice: The schools don’t teach Cornish.

KM: There are some which do to be fair, there is some Cornish teaching in schools. There isn’t a lot but it is there.

Male voice: I used to teach at Pool School and we used to have a GCSE.

Male voice: It was medieval isn’t it?

Male voice: It was mode 3, you know about the different modes?

KM: Yes, mode 3 GCSE.

Male voice: A Southern Examinations Board, they scrapped it because they said it was too expensive to administer, end of exam.

KM: I think the Welsh took it on then, the Welsh Board.

NK:: Then something else came in then and what happened then is that it had to be offered throughout the country to be considered.

Male voice: Your Welsh isn’t ?

Male voice: It didn’t continue at Pool School until I retired nine years ago.

Male voice: It can’t happen, can it?

Male voice: It died the death.

Male voice: It’s an impossible obstacle in its way.

Fem voice: Have the Welsh got an Examination Board that we can use by them.

Male voice: They’ve got the Welsh Language Act, which is

KM: Well, you see, yes they have and I think for a time the Cornish exam was moderated by the Welsh Board, but then you see increasing pressure of finance meant that you had to have a certain number to be viable for a subject and Cornish fell by the wayside as a result of that because it hadn’t, you know, developed to a sufficient pace in the schools.

Fem voice: But pace is obviously picking up a bit although not the same school, but.

Male voice: If you’re not told about these things how do you know.

NK: What’s interesting is the growth in interest because some years ago if you tried, if another teacher tried to offer Cornish language in this College and advertised it and re advertised it and re advertised it never got a quorum, never got enough people to run it and it didn’t happen. Okay, there was lots of other provision going on but that doesn’t happen now, it’s sometimes quite difficult to get people out on a winter’s night but you know, we’re not quite

KM: Do they have winters down here?

Male voice: Well, sort of.

Male voice: Easier if you could park your car.

Fem voice: You won’t blow away too much.

Fem voice: Why does it happen in primary schools with Cornish language? Is there anything other than just Cornish language clubs after school and lunch times, does anybody know?

KM: Yes, Jeff Briggs did a survey in the past two or three weeks. He volunteered to do it and he did this survey and he’s got returns in. I haven’t had the time to analyse them yet, but there looks like something like a dozen schools where something is happening, whether either it was in minority time, within the school day or an after school club or a lunch time club. There is something happening in round about twelve schools.

Male voice: In Porthleven my daughter class, her teacher is from London, I spoke to him on the subject of Cornish. He wants to have it taught to his class, that’s nine year olds. He also wants them to learn, sort of, Cornish history, he thinks that they should learn Cornish history.

Male voice: Tell you what’s interesting Dave is that one or two current and former teachers in the classes now that I’d like to get together and have a little meeting on their own to talk about possibilities.

Male voice: My daughter’s teacher, the subject that they’ve been set for the year for history is The Tudors. It wasn’t till we had like four rebellions in Cornwall. He’s all for the kids actually learning that and he’s asked me if I can come in, sort of, half an hour a week and run them through it and Carol give them a little bit of Cornish. So…

Male voice: Excellent, for trying. Every little bit counts.

KM: It might surprise you but I went to school in Cornwall.

Male voice: We did hear that.

KM: You did.

Male voice: The little birds sing very loud songs to us.

KM: I’m surprised the bush telegraph has gone round on this survey , but there you go. Anyway, I was a war evacuee, first in Summercourt and then down at St Ives. The London school I went to in St Ives had a Cornish teacher, I was in her class, we got quite a bit from her. Trelawney, sort of stories about Tregeagle, and that sort of stuff. Cornish folk songs. We got, you know some sense of we’re being in Cornwall and it was drawn to out attention there was a Cornish language. When other London kids went back the rest of us were just put up to the Stennack School and they formed a class of us. We had a Cornish teacher called Mr Chirgwin, and he was somebody who taught us about the place, the streets round about got Cornish names and the Cornish motto in Cornish and English. So, I did get some sort of awareness of this as a child down there, as a war evacuee.

NK: You’ve got rather complex identity really.

KM: I have.

Male voice: A sort of Scottish, Londoner, Gaelic speaking Londoner, educated in Cornwall.

KM: Brought up by my Irish grandparents. So, I think that might be not altogether without its advantages. But, I’m going to ask you now for your ideas on your perceptions of the, if you like, the significance of the Cornish language around us. First of all I’d like your views. I think I’ll come back to the reasons, you know, what has happened to the Cornish language in the last twenty years if I do get on to that. What do you say is happening in the last twenty years to the Cornish language?

Male voice: Reborn.

Male voice: Upsurge.

Fem voice: People have become more aware.

Male voice: There’s an upsurge in the national identity everywhere, isn’t there? The Welsh are up on their back legs, the Irish, Scots, everyone is getting up because they don’t want to be ganged up with the English.

Fem voice: I think also with the Cornish language and the time when I moved away people were starting to hear that, "Oh, you’ve got a language in Cornwall, haven’t you?" "Can you speak Cornish? I know quite a few people who speak Cornish." And then I came back and now where I work, I think there is about seven people who can speak Cornish really quite well and I can see wherever I go now there’s more and more people. And it’s not something that when I was growing up people were hiding away from them, oh you know, they can speak Cornish.

Fem voice: Made an outcast. Whereas now you’re not an outcast anymore.

NK: That’s quite amazing you see because given the exclusion of Cornish people from professional jobs that we talked about and so on, even so just within the environment agency where you work that there can be seven people who can speak Cornish quite well.

KM: Really?

Male voice: It’s true, different forms of Cornish you know.

KM: Amazing.

Fem voice: We can all communicate although they sound different, they do take the mickey out of me but you know, different Cornish, there we are.

KM: Well, that is interesting. Would you say that this trend has still got a lot of pace in it, do you see it as some of us do, on the way up.

Fem voice: There is some schools as well because my son was saying it’s not just him, there are two other kids in school want to know more about it. They don’t get information but they want to know more about it, they are aware of that.

KM: Once we sign this, if this charter gets signed, if I can do a half descent report and the Government actually acts on it, there’s two ifs. Then I would say once the ink is dry, wait until it’s dry, then I would think an initiative in education looks to me very much like a priority. This has to be shifted on you know. It really does have to be cracked open.

Male voice: It would be brilliant, that would be, that.

KM: I can remember like about 15 years ago it had to be cracked in the Highlands & Islands.. There was some Gaelic teaching I mean, but things like Gaelic medium education had to come in. They had to get new policies, new orientations, the thing had to be cracked open, it had to be taken that much further forward. I mean, it was, we had conferences about it.

NK: It just seemed that development just in the Late Cornish side of things because I was the first person to start teaching Late Cornish when Dick who started promoting it as well and there are kind of two people here from those early days because it’s only about ten years ago, isn’t it really, that we really started doing it in earnest. 1980s it was the time of the Tin Crisis, 1986 and then I was teaching in Helston with Dave and their little band, in Andrew George’s house, in his kitchen. In his kitchen but he never turned up himself. Because when he did turn up we all went on about him being under the thumb when he did turn up. There was what, about half a dozen of us, most of the blokes were either kind of in or out of work or unemployed and eventually some girlfriends who mostly worked in shops started turning up. So that was that group. That’s fair enough, roughly what it was like and then the group Dick was in, was just, you were all in work weren’t you? You all worked in building trades and allied construction and stuff and several of you, until recently, worked in Crofty. Bernard was teaching as well, that’s right. And from that we’ve got to the stage where we’ve got these classes running in the colleges, we’ve still got the unofficial classes going on as well, other people are starting to teach like Gus Francis, you know, and so on.

KM: How many classes have you got running in, say in Kernewek Dewethez?

NK: Let me see, we’ve got one in Pendeen

KM: Is that Mervyn Philips? Give him my regards when you see him.

Male voice: Yes.

Fem voice: Apparently they’ve started a conversation group in the (indistinct)

Male voice: Yes, that’s with Craig, isn’t it?

Fem voice: No, Andrew, I can’t remember his name, Andrew …

Male Voice: Andrew Climo-Thompson?

Fem voice: Yes.

NK: So that’s a hybrid one in between two kinds of Cornish, which is quite good.

KM: Really, that is interesting.

NK: It’s Greg, he’s set up a web site which is in both forms of Cornish as well. So we’ve got a kind of secret agenda that one day there’s going to be instead of three kinds of Cornish there’s going to be two.

KM: Well, that’s progress isn’t it.

NK: But there’s that lot, there’s the Truro College lot which sometimes splits into two groups, there’s St Austell College and then there are other groups that sort of meet at times of the year.

Fem voice: There’s one that meets in Camborne - just a conversation class, every Thursday.

NK: Right.

Fem voice: There’s Agan Tavas

NK: Yes, that’s a different

KM: Agan Tavas - that’s Unified.

NK: Unified, yeah, and Frances Bennett is still teaching a small group of people from her home on and off and then there’s Gus’s group, which at the moment isn’t meeting but meets in Redruth.

Male voice: One in Helston as well, isn’t there?

Male voice: Not in Late Cornish.

Male voice: Yea, there’s the guy that runs the book shop .

Male voice: Yea, but that’s not in Late Cornish though.

KM: How many classes all told?

Male voice: I’d say five really but there are…

KM: You mentioned more than five.

Male voice: Yea, it depends what you mean through the whole year or currently meeting this week. So, within the year we should be teaching Late Cornish classes in about six places.

KM: I see, okay, that sounds very, very progressive. Now I’m going to ask you of your impression of the Cornish speakers throughout Cornwall. We’ll just take throughout Cornwall as the area. How many people do you think can speak Cornish effectively in the sense of being able to carry on an ordinary conversation on ordinary topics at reasonable speed? How many people, now, I’m going to ask each of you just to say what is in your mind, not what you think your neighbour thinks, but what you think.

NK: I’d be interested to hear that.

Fem voice: Are you meaning generally from people we know or just

KM: No. How many people do you think there are all told?

Male voice: Inspired guess.

KM: Your impression.

Fem voice: Fluently?

KM: Fluently, yes, but ordinary every day fluently not sort of, like some great sort of star performer.

Male voice: Talk about reasonable things.

KM: Yea, in a reasonable speed, an ordinary person’s conversational ability.

Fem voice: Some of them can sing a piece at the Gorseth, but they can’t have a conversation.

KM: Well that’s right, we’ll come to them in a minute.

Fem voice: I mean it would be a complete shot in the dark: anything between 300 and 800, I don’t know, probably 300 fluent.

Fem voice: 30.

Fem voice: I really don’t know probably more than

Fem voice: But this is for all types of Cornish.

KM: Yeah, all varieties of Cornish throughout Cornwall who could converse fluent. What do you think?

Male voice: It’s got to be 100 upwards, I honestly don’t really know.

Fem voice: I think about 500.

Male voice: Probably much the same.

Male voice: I haven’t a clue but I’m going to guesstimate about 500.

Male voice: I don’t know, 150.

Male voice : I would have said between 500 and 1,000.

Fem voice: 200.

Male voice: 60.

Fem voice: 150.

Male voice: 1,200.

Male voice: 80.

Fem voice: No idea.

KM: What do you think, Neil?

NK: Well, it does depend on definition, but I think I, we sat down and tried to come up with names, people who could talk about everything, they might be quite halting, they might get stuck but they could talk about everything if they thought about it, they might make some grammatical mistakes and things like that, that came to about 500. It wasn’t always possible to say which kind of Cornish they spoke because sometimes it was all mixed up. We think roughly 10,000 people since 1979 have attempted to learn Cornish but we don’t know if we’re counting the same people twice because, you know, you might be counted twice for example but several thousand at least, we could be conservative and say 4,000. There’s probably up to 1,000 people who cold have some kind of extended conversation but that would be limited to the weather and you know, what they wanted to eat.

Male voice: Cats sitting on tables.

Male voice: Yea, that sort of thing and very limited because we just don’t know how much people retain. We know there’s a scene, there are lots of little scenes but those scenes only contain about 1,000 people, but what’s happening outside those scenes? There are people I meet, there’s a person called Mervyn Davy I was speaking to the other day, he’s not part of any scene, he doesn’t go to any Cornish language event, he still speaks to me in Cornish.

KM: How many people do you think have got like a few words and a few phrases?

Fem voice: Oh, loads, thousands, even a child, a lot of them, a lot of us could maybe sing a song or a poem or something, don’t know any more than that but we’d be able to do that, so there’s thousands like that.

Fem voice: Most people who grew up down there will be able to say something.

Male voice: Almost everyone in Cornwall could do it, just by doing place names and not even realising it.

KM: Well that’s so, they’ve got to be able to realise it whereas most people can come out with Anglo Saxon place names but they wouldn’t know what they were.

Male voice: I think there are about 50 to 60,000 people who could produce a sentence or phrase.

KM: Really.

Fem voice: Yeah.

KM: If I went back to 60 years myself to when I was a child here in Cornwall I don’t think people would have said that.

NK: All that might be is Kernow bys vyken or Onen hag Oll or ? I mean anybody who works for Cornish County Council should be able to say Onen hag Oll, because it’s written on all they’ve got.

Fem voice: I mean most people know that.

KM: And Onen hag Oll is in Kernewek Dewethez, isn’t it?

Fem voice: And how many say crowst for lunch?

KM: Yes, well, actually it’s a word I’ve been used to using since being a child in Cornwall. I thought it meant your crust, but anyway. That was your crowst. It was a pasty.

Fem voice: One of the problems with using it is you only tend to use Cornish if you’re meeting somebody that you know, he’s going to respond. We ought really should just be using it to anybody because they might be able to respond.

Male voice: We talked about introducing some little … What do you have for Gaelic? You use some kind of pin don’t you?

KM: That’s, I was only thinking about that the other day, that’s really died a death. There used to be like a little ring with a bar through it, a bit like London Transport.

Male voice: Makes it all a bit clubby doesn’t it?

KM: With the ends cut off, but I mean, it’s really died a death now.

Male voice: Did it serve its purpose?

KM: Well, it did in a way but it never really got going. The person who took it over didn’t do anything with it after an initial impetus, and you know, it just sort of died a death. I’ve still got my pin but I mean I don’t wear it now.

Male voice: We thought of one or two places it would work.

KM: There used to be a thing called in Cornwall, Urth an Besont, you know those little brass studs paper clips, it looks like a Cornish bezant on the coast of arms, well, the idea was that you wore that in your coat buttonhole.

Fem voice: Duchy of Cornwall, that.

Male voice: If you’ve got one.

KM: Maybe it is, but it’s Cornish County Council as well.

Fem voice: Yea, but it’s a bit too much like Duchy for me.

KM: These sort of paper clips are very easily come by. You don’t have to buy an expensive pin.

NK: We’ve also talked about this idea, was like a simple logo based on the letter K and you know, you can stick it on the till in shops where some … It’s one of the commonest occupations people learning Cornish is working in a shop.

KM: We have got that. There’s a G and ‘Gaelic spoken here’ sticker, you see that on tills.

Fem voice: That’s a good idea because when you think ‘Gaelic spoken here’ it shows that someone can actually speak the language.

Male voice: It’s also a little advert for all the other people, I might get round to that.

KM: There’s also like a diamond with a G in it.

Fem voice: Black and gold with a K that.

KM: Alright, well that wouldn’t be a bad idea actually.

Fem voice: Black and gold everyone knows all over the world.

KM: Yes. What sort of, I think we’ve got some sort of an idea of the sort of people who come into Cornish language classes just now. You see, we’ve got a very good cross section here, I mean a lot of working class, a lot of, dare I say it, non working class, in the sense of unemployed.

Male voice: We’ve got a real cross section, I mean here tonight is not probably not very representative but still almost representative. Is quite representative the people who come to the organised evening classes as opposed disorganised evening classes. Most of them are disorganised, it’s quite typical of the ones who come to at Truro College and St Austell College and not particularly the ones outside, the kind of little small groups. I mean, the obvious people that are missing tonight are all the ones who’ve got babies, most of the ones who’ve got babies, that’s quite a high proportion.

KM: Isn’t that a good thing?

Male voice: Yes, very good.

Male voice: Commonest reason for dropping out of Cornish classes at one point was having a baby. Not at the moment, that’s not true of the evening classes in the College, so be careful.. But that’s not true of the classes in these colleges, it is truer of the groups outside, like the group I taught in Falmouth in someone’s house last year. I still do that stuff like I did in Stuart’s place because I get a grassroots intake which then feed in to these. But we have got a good cross section, you know.

Fem voice: I mean you said like students and shop workers, whatever, some of us cover all of that in one go. You know, a lot of us here have probably gone through the problems of being on the dole in Cornwall, you know, work ?.

KM: I’m going to ask you now about the Cornish language in social life, the use of the language in things like different aspects of everyday life. What about the language actually used in people’s homes, to what extent can you see Cornish being used in the home as a home language? I mean, could you see a couple living together, a family with children or even John Davey. I asked, how did they know that John Davey was the last Cornish speaker. And, what was it, "Ah, well, you see, ’tis like this my dear, John Davey did used to speak Cornish to his cat." Everyone laughs at that but I’ve done a lot of hard nosed research in language communities, especially the Gaelic language community, and I’ve been surprised when I looked, you know, in the questionnaires at what people use the language for and using the language with pets and domestic animals is a very important aspect, especially where the language is tending to weaken in certain respects. That’s one of the areas in which it stays strong.

Male voice: There’s that Maryon McDonald thing on Breton what she got castigated for. It’s really quite good. She’s looking at when people used Breton in the kind of rural areas where Breton was still used, and just Breton had low stages and French had high stages. Quite interesting, she looked at one woman on a farm who spoke Breton to her cows and chickens and stuff because they had low stages and spoke French to the bull and the dog because they had high stages, and didn’t even notice she was doing it.

KM: Well that is interesting.

Fem voice: There’s another story I heard is an Irishman, it’s a real one, that he was a herdsman, cowherd, they’d only respond if he spoke in Irish Gaelic, they wouldn’t respond to anything. I thought that was wonderful.

KM: Well you see once upon a time the cow would only yield if there were certain Gaelic songs would be sung for milking, and the cows would only yield when these songs were sung. So, anyway, to get back to general use in the home, how many homes do you think where Cornish might actually be used in the home?

Fem voice: In how much use do you mean.

KM: Yeah well, sometimes or a lot, I don’t mind.

Fem voice: As many as there are speakers I suppose.

KM: Do you think so?

Male voice: A lot more than that because we’ve all inherited words like towser I mean I’ve been using that since I was a kid and that’s a hell of a long time ago.

Fem voice: We must be using words that we use.

Male voice: We haven’t recognised them as Cornish but they’re still being used and there’s people who are not learning Cornish still

NK: What about articulate Cornish conversations on a daily basis, say a number of houses where people might speak Cornish to each other for ten minutes in the day.

Fem voice: About 250.

Fem voice: Yeah, probably.

Male voice: I think that’s very reasonable.

Male voice: You think that will be about right about 250.

Fem voice: Yeah.

Male voice: 10 minutes, if you’re talking about 10 minutes, but I don’t think that’s the number of houses which regularly speak Cornish.

KM: What about children being brought up to speak Cornish. How many children?

Male voice: Very few, there are…

KM: At the moment how many children do you think might be being brought up to speak Cornish?

Male voice: A couple of dozen.

Fem voice: Yeah.

KM: Well that, we’re all guessing because there’s never been a census. There’s never been, if you like, a proper study of the social use of Cornish.

NK: There are people doing it in different ways, there are different models because I can’t think of many couples where both parents speak Cornish and most of the places where that is happening it’s one parent one language. It’s quite good really, it seems to work, seems to work in a sense that it will mess up their English.

NK: But there are others where they’re actually not speaking to their kids all the time in Cornish but they’re teaching them Cornish, which is what I got actually.

Fem voice: That’s true because I mean I don’t know a lot, I did the other Cornish and then this Cornish and I brought my son up with some of the Spots books and the other books since he was tiny. So, he can’t hold a conversation but he’ll understand bits of it since he was born. He’s twelve now.

Male voice: Spot is in the cupboard. Where can he be?

Fem voice continues: I mean that’s very limited so when you say to hold a conversation, maybe not, but they’ve been brought up hearing it, understanding little bits of it, so there’s still that identity still there and they’re still my son ?

Male voice: I’d like to be able to offer my grandchildren, I’ve got one grandson, he lives way, way up that way.

KM: Up country.

Male voice: I would like to be able to, you know, when I see him, to be able to say, spend a little time with him, not bore him to death, but spend a little time with him to point out a few things about Cornwall and the Cornish language, and give him some Cornish language, and whether he wants it or not that’s entirely up to him. But I’d like to have the opportunity to give it to him.

Male voice: This is very much a chicken and egg isn’t it? You’re not going to get people talking a lot in the home until the dam thing gets off the ground, further than it is at the moment.

KM: Actually there’s been

Male voice: Actually it isn’t even a second class language at the moment, it’s an afterthought.

Fem voice: They’re not even accepting its existence.

Male voice: Have you seen the Truro College leaflet?

Fem voice: The other thing is using the internet and e-mail.

KM: Yes, that’s a domain where it’s been used.

Male voice: Have you seen this one? Truro College’s leaflet on languages, and for the first time we’re there. We’re only just there but we are right enough there.

Male voice: Do you have the Cornish language?

NK: Yes. When you had, when your kids were small what did you do, because you’re Cornish you were just a beginner in Cornish weren’t you? Did you do anything?

Male voice: All three of mine wanted to learn it, they kept asking me to give them something, teach them something like taught it. They all learnt it. My eldest boy was in his class messing around, telling his teacher I can speak Cornish just as the Headmistress and the School Inspector walked in. The teacher said, okay, do some Cornish. He did this little rhyme one to ten.

KM: Nice one. What about the public domains? Use of Cornish, you know, out with the home, in the community at large. Can you see it being used at all?

Male voice: I would like to see more brought in by, like your local radios. Two Saturdays ago Paul Wills was on about he didn’t believe people had e-mails. He wanted people to send him in e-mails. My wife was listening on the radio and he says, "Oh, this one is in Cornish, I can’t read that."

Fem voice: tough.

KM: Well, have a go.

Male voice: He didn’t. Didn’t even bother, you see. But somebody was sending him an e-mail in Cornish.

KM: you were saying?

Fem voice: Tough. I say we should go for web page, for e-mail for officialdom. Because the kids and the youth, that’s the way forward. The internet, the web-pages and e-mail, then it’s available world wide, people cannot say you don’t use that.

Male voice: You’ve got that very strange building down the road there. I was in there for four years as a Councillor. The Education Department, you go in and say it in Cornish. They are not interested at all.

NK: We have got to change, tail is still wagging the dog. They’re employed by the Councillors not the other way round and that’s.

Male voice: The Councillors are actually private people.

Male voice: Oh, yes I know.

Male voice: I don’t want to get into personalities, when you see some of the Councillors.

Male voice: I know.

KM: Nowadays, did you know

Male voice: If he was in hospital, he would be pronounced brain dead, he would.

KM: Did you know that under the Parent’s Charter, the schools have got to provide what the parents want? Did you know that the schools in Cornwall, that schools throughout well England, these are devolved into local management with local budgets, with their own local policies and governors who are there to represent the parents. Now, if you knew all these things, can you not use them?

Male voice: And did you not know about examination results and e-tests.

KM: Oh, yes and OFSTED and national curriculum.

Male voice: National curriculum, if you tried to stray outside it there isn’t an hotel (?)

KM: And did you know

END OF FIRST SIDE OF TAPE

SECOND SIDE OF TAPE

NK: Let’s assume that they are interested.

Fem voice: Well, no, I’ll just say that they don’t know that they’re English, they’re home county, they’ve moved down here, they’re mixing with our kids and they’re just not asking …

Male voice: I find sometimes when they are exposed to it that they are interested.

Fem voice: No.

Male voice: And now can we, we’ve got to start from that premiss really.

KM: In Gaelic-medium education about one third of all children, their parents are incomers, no Scottish or Highland connection at all.

Fem voice: That’s fair enough but it seems that the other way round that they’re reversing our identity.

Male voice: It’s kind of…. we got to be

KM: They want Gaelic because they want to show commitment to the local community. They want to show that they’re prepared to adopt a local identity.

NK: You know about the Isle of Man, don’t you? Because you spoke about the Isle of Man. You talked about reculturisation a lot or something, that kind of idea of trying to establish new roots or put down new roots. So, I think we’ve got a lot of things going for us and it’s a case of making representations.

Fem voice: In schools importantly. They do do some because my boys at Penair in year 7 last year, in Penair in Truro, they have to do an enrichment week every year anyway, that in year 7 last year is on Cornwall. It is very limited. At least they go out and they visit places and do something, but that could be so much more, that could be part of it.

KM: Yes. Good

NK: I was just thinking, we’re so used to people saying no to us over a long time that we kind of assume it’s still like that.

KM: Twenty five years ago this was all true of Gaelic Scotland, where there was a living speech community.

NK: But I think the attitude has changed, I mean I’m teaching Cornish Studies now at degree level in two or three different places, and at one time, that would just be, even a few years ago, it would have been laughed at. A few years ago I was frightened to put it on my CV, you know, and now people can’t get enough of the stuff you know and we’re still …. What the problem is now we’re still so used to people saying no we’re not asking the questions anymore. We’re not making the demands anymore because we think that they’re going to say no. I actually think attitudes have changed. I mean they’ve changed because

Male voice: Because they could like to speak to the School Governors.

Male voice: Yea.

Male voice: Or whoever.

Fem voice: To tell you the difficulty, I’m just thinking of the funny thing you said about that, when I was working in the Tourist Information last year, and they’re all saying about doing, you know I have to go off and do these Courses, you know, to involve your work and all this work and they’ll say yes they’ll do French, they’ll do this, I said I want to go off and do Cornish then. "Oh, no you can’t do that, what’s the use of that." Well thanks very much, I had to do it in my own time because they wouldn’t allow me any time off during the day to do a course to Cornish which has relevance to place names when people want to know them. We were often asked about that sort of thing, Cornish heritage, place names was a big thing. "Oh, no you can’t learn the language. That’s no use to tourism." Well, thanks.

KM: Interestingly I came across Caradon Council which had been sticky on recognising Cornish, for the new policies. Caradon put a class for their employees. They got a class up. Martyn Miller taught it, and this was for Caradon employees Cornish language. We’ve got three examples here of Cornish being used in a work related situation.

NK: And if Rachel was here we’d have another one.

KM: We would.

NK: I mean this is one of the things that’s changed. So, for instance, Ken works for the Library Service and it would be really good, that’s why I was so interested in you getting them to pay, because if you got them to pay, just you, it would mean Sally could then apply because she works for them as well, and then you would establish a precedent that it was a job related qualification to learn Cornish.

Male voice: Bet it didn’t happen.

NK: She didn’t ask. That’s the only reason. If we don’t ask we don’t get. We just whinge instead and its, Rachel as well, I mean, she goes to University to pay for her to come to Cornish classes. Then you establish the idea that it is a job related.

KM: Well, I mean the Institute should pay her to go to Cornish classes.

Male voice: Well, yeah, and she’s doing it for her job, partly.

KM: Absolutely.

Male voice: You were asking just now about Cornish in the community. The Western Morning News does have an insert each week on Cornwall and it does have an article written in Cornish every week with the English translation alongside. Probably find Neil writes it.

Fem voice: It is the only one that does.

Male voice: I was just thinking though, Dick, didn’t you do a few jobs for Timmy and speak Cornish when you were at work?

Male voice: Yeah. My Cornish came along in leaps and bounds with that, so pleased with that extension, weren’t we?

NK: That’s like building extension.

NK: I had the same experience at Daniel Rowe because I built a stone wall down the road with Tim, the same bloke, and we spoke Cornish to each other. I was there for five days and we spoke Cornish to each other all the time.

KM: On the job?

NK: But then people were stopping and listening to us and as they wandered off they go, ‘Er, er, er.’ And they’d come back and say. It was quite obvious that people were just sort of just standing there kind of trying not to make it too obvious that they were listening to us.

KM: Really.

Male voice: They probably thought you were talking German.

Fem voice: Or thought you were Welsh.

Male voice: I don’t know.

KM: What about if you went into a pub and there’s Cornish being spoken, does this happen?

Male voice: Yes.

Male voice: It does in Mullion

KM: Does it?

Male voice: We make a point of it.

KM: Do you really?

NK: This is quite interesting because this group is nearly all beginners. Obviously you get different perceptions from intermediate or advanced learners but, you reckon already you’re starting to use it in

Fem voice: We use it in the club, yes.

KM: What club is that?

Male voice: The Social Club.

KM: How about Cornish in cultural activities in Cornwall? Does it get much profile?

Fem voice: I would say that thing that’s been going a while.

KM: Oh, yes, Kan rak Kernow

Fem voice: That’s been going a while and Lowender Peran – that the Festival

Fem voice: There’s a choir that we are members of that sometimes does songs in Cornish. We don’t always know what we are singing about, but never mind.

Male voice: Particularly carols in Cornish.

Fem voice: Thomas Merritt’s carols in Cornish and things like that.

Male voice: Because every Christmas there is a service in Cornish.

KM: Carol Service?

Fem voice: Yeah.

KM: Tell me, are those carols just Away in a Manger translated.

Male/Fem voice: No, no.

Male voice: They’re usually Thomas Merritt translated.

Fem voice: Very complex tunes.

KM: Yeah, it’s the old sort of, the old Methodist style, the old sort of West Gallery style, the old, sort of, people’s own song style, as opposed to Nine Lessons and Carols style.

Male voice: No, it’s not Nine Lessons in Carols style.

KM: I run Carol Services like that.

Fem voice: Mind you, that’s Cornish isn’t it, Archbishop Benson.

Male voice: When he was Bishop of Truro.

KM: Really! Yes it was wasn’t it?

Male voice: It started in Truro Cathedral.

KM: So it did.

Fem (unclear) …they had The Riot didn’t they?

NK: That’s a beauty, did you ever listen to the, when they have the French fishermen there in that, did you hear what he was shouting? He was shouting out in Cornish with a … he did say something in Breton but he was mostly shouting out in Cornish and he was shouting out stuff like Pedn mouzak And he shouted out Ke tha gacka (Go and shit yourself) It was really good, and I was just saying…

Fem voice: It has its bonuses, you can say it in English and they won’t know what you are doing.

Male voice: That’s really good.

Fem voice: It was really quite popular down here that production in the Hall of Cornwall.

KM: What production was that?

Fem voice: It was called The Riot.

KM: The Riot by Knee-High Theatre.

Fem voice: Yea, and there was quite a lot of Cornish language used, and a lot of people have said it was quite moving to hear the language because it was such a popular production. A lot of people went to see it and, oh, you know, Cornish, it’s being used. I heard some of your stuff they keep saying.

Fem voice: It was touring the rest of the country as well and it was in the National Theatre.

KM: Was it?

Fem voice: Which is really good.

KM: So they took it beyond Cornwall.

Male voice: Oh, yeah. It’s just gone off on a tour now of Manchester, Bristol and various places.

KM: Very good.

Fem voice: That’s good stuff, you know, we can get a more high profile.

KM: Well people go and pay to go to a theatrical production, drama production. Now, we’ll get on to economic life. What about Cornish in economic life, business, commerce, industry, tourism, exports?

Fem voice: A lot of businesses like to have their Cornish speakers to their name.

KM: Does it do them any good?

Male voice: It doesn’t really matter if it does them any good with the Cornish, does it? If it projects Cornish outside Cornwall. The more its projected outside of Cornwall the stronger its likely to get in Cornwall.

NK: The argument is it adds distinctiveness to their produce, if they’re trying to make their produce seem Cornish.

Fem voice: I mean I’ve got pasties..(indistinct)

KM: There’s 53 million people out of about 350 million people in Europe, EU, who speak a minority language.

Male voice: About 80 million isn’t it?

KM: It might be bigger now because my figures are based upon the old EU, so I’m quite prepared on an update on that. Let’s say it’s 80 million, there’s 12 other member states coming in, this will go up much higher. So, what about cultural tourism, you’ve got a great potential there.

Fem voice: Yea. It’s not used in an official capacity as it could be, I mean, even like the Objective 1 – he said a paragraph had been added.. I thought that I heard someone that they’ve offered to do a full translation to transcript.

NK: Well, it wouldn’t have been very good in the Objective 1 but it was more tribute to the Nuts 2 that went before and where you could give cultural arguments. The Objective 1 bit had to hard headed kind of economic stuff.

Fem voice: But, it’s just that the principle that official papers are always in English, everything is in English, no translations even offered. If automatically you had to provide a translation of something on an official piece of paper like that you couldn’t escape it, it would be there.

KM: One difficulty’s going to be…

Male voice: Road signs….

Fem voice: Yeah, road signs could be in Cornish all the time.

Male voice: It’s in your face all the time.

Fem voice: When the builders build houses everything is done in English names, there’s no local names anymore.

KM: Well, Cornish local authorities are the authorities who approve the street names, you know, naming a new road.

Male voice: The high proportion of new roads are named in Cornish.

Male voice: They are named in Cornish.

KM: I’ve seen this, you know, increasingly it must be the case. Well, now, to what extent has there been a tradition of use of Cornish in these different areas?

NK: Areas of life?

KM: Yea, these areas of life where Cornish is starting to make itself felt, you know, what sort of tradition of use has there been there. I mean, has it been going on for very long? I mean, would you say that it’s always been like this or has been increasingly like this recently or there’s been a lot of it like this recently? Would you say that, you could say that there has been a tradition of using Cornish in Cornwall over such and such a period?

Fem voice: I would have thought it’s been increasing since the 70s. It seemed to me, and you can throw things at me if you like, but it seemed to me, back in the 70s, it was more like a middle class thing and now its anybody and everybody who wants to.

Male voice: Yea.

Fem voice: I said at the beginning that people were wanting to name their houses in Cornish.

KM: Yes, this is a popular one.

Fem voice: I mean I’ve worked there for about 10 years now and in the last 4 or 5 years this, we have got more requests for that sort of information than there was starting off. So, I think house names, if they’ve moved into a house they want to know what the house means or else they want to give it a new name.

Fem voice: This is just a token gesture though.

KM: What do you think about this as a token gesture?

Fem voice: May be just naming the house, oh, we’ve got a Cornish name for out house.

NK: What’s interesting is that if, it’s kind of little a sign that something is happening if it seems to be increasing, if that token is increasing then something else is increasing as well.

Fem voice: It’s like the pebble in the pond. The ripple will get bigger.

Fem voice: They’ll take it further then.

Fem voice: It will because it’s there, isn’t it? They might not take over but other people are going to go past and see the house name, it’s just like the ripple.

KM; If you do one tokenistic thing in Cornish a day. Then after a while you’re doing ten. Then you’re doing ten ten tokenistic things. At what point do they cease to be tokenism and a real part of your culture?

Fem voice: When it becomes common use.

KM: Yes. I’m going to push on to say, well, I think we have described ways in which the language is actually visible to those who aren’t speakers and learners, because you do see it around a bit. You might have views as you’ve expressed them that, you know, you want to see more of it.

Fem voice: Well, like place names and road signs.

KM: Yes.

Fem voice: Like you get in parts of the Highlands and Islands.

KM: You do.

Fem voice: I lived in Scotland sort of twenty odd years ago and it’s increasing there.

KM: You know what we had to do to get there?

Fem voice: What?

KM: Well, I won’t tell you what I did - but there was a lot of activity.

Male voice: As there is in Great Brittany at the moment.

KM: Is that right?

Male voice: Use of the aerosol can.

KM: Oh, right.

NK: I think it’s worth remembering actually because we always go on about, oh, we’ve got this in Wales we’ve got that in Wales.

Fem voice: Part of our history is that a lot of us have been, well a lot of Cornish sympathisers in some authorities have been killed automatically, or whatever, just for being Cornish. Just for standing up for our rights. Sent overseas.

NK: It’s quite funny actually because when you start talking about these things to Cornish people they think it didn’t happen because they had never been told.

Fem voice: No.

NK: I refer to that 1549 Rebellion to actually be told for the first time in your life when you’re 60 or something that there was this rebellion during the Tudor period where nearly half of all able bodied men in Cornwall were killed in one year and that the Rebellion had, the Rebellion directly referred to language in its demands. It’s actually suddenly can become quite a shock. I find it can be quite a shock to people.

KM: I’m going to pose a problem to you. People have talked about having road signs in Cornish, translations into Cornish on official documents, there are three varieties of revived Cornish, what are your views on that?

Fem voice: For written Cornish or…

KM: Well, both, I mean it’s a language that’s spoken in many forms.

Fem voice: I don’t think it matters which one you use for usage generally, conversation, as long as we’re using it because some people have got a sort of mongrel combination. They’ve learnt one, they’ve learnt another, let’s put them together. When it comes to documents it might be a bit difficult but, it’s the spellings really, but just because it’s not standardised that’s all. Then English wasn’t standardised for donkey’s years, so.

Male voice: The place names are older Cornish, aren’t they?

KM: Well actually we’ve got three forms of standardisation in Cornish. There’s Unified which goes back to Nance, to about 1920. Before that there was Jenner, who had a form which was based more on Late Cornish and then sort of changed in the 1920s with Nance

NK: Finalised in 1938 really.

KM: With a dictionary? Then in the mid 80s you’ve got Ken George coming along with his proposals for pronunciation and spelling, who has got taken up by the people who were speaking using Unified, as I understand it then the Unified people stood out against this and kept their own form going Agan Tavas, and then Dick Gendall and others were going back to like what Jenner did in the first days of the revival and looking at the actual, where the language was at the end of the 18^th century at the end of the 19^th century.

NK: And that’s us - and share what you are doing.

Male voice: You wonder if it’s Cornish classes. You just see, you just see right Cornish. classes. So you go along, you don’t know anything about this, except I found that I tried to teach myself Cornish twenty odd years ago when I wasn’t living in Cornwall at that stage and then found when I came to learn something that the spelling was different.

NK: Some people do actually look into it though. I mean, there are people that do actually choose one form but I think you’re right I think 90% plus are probably people who go to a class, they go to the one because they know about it.

Fem voice: If you take another language for example, I lived in Wales for quite some time and the language there, I can speak Welsh, but the language around South Wales is as people say a lot different to the language in the North of Wales and it is. A Celtic language to me is more of a community language, it’s got its own pronunciation and its own ways of saying things and I think it’s the same as English. You could look at English and say there’s different ways os speaking English. It can be a little bit more difficult when you’re actually writing things down but how did the Welsh get round this because they do actually speak and write different forms of Welsh.

NK: Well, they do have to produce different editions of learning books. I know that.

KM: Really.

NK: You know Deskanz noze? We’re using now that’s translated from a Welsh course called Dosbarth ( nos ?) - and it’s, they’ve got a South Wales edition and a North Wales edition of that because of different grammar and vocabulary. The spelling is pretty much the same but sometimes a word will be written different ways.

KM: You’ve got Cymraeg Byw, which is a sort of standardised form

NK: That’s something else again, another thing again.

Fem voice: So, how do they get round it.

NK: They get round it just by the fact that they’re not so different that they can’t read each others.

Fem voice: I don’t think it’s all that different, I mean, there’s spellings and things it’s still

NK: They’re more different than American English and Received Pronunciation in this country.

Male voice: The thing is this, all these standard Cornishes are Cornish aren’t they?

Fem voice: Yea. You can still work it out.

Fem voice: Yea, we can communicate at work with two different names and spelt differently.

NK: That’s quite interesting actually because what you get here as most people are saying (unclear)

Fem voice: Yes, it’s Cornish, the spelling is different, so what. People used to spell, I mean, I think in my surname Vivian. I’ve come across about twenty different variations of spelling one surname, just because they didn’t know what way to spell it. It doesn’t matter. They spell it the same way phonetically. It’s pronounced by people the same. People understood it, so what.

Male voice: I think if you went back to the age when Cornish was spoken and written there wasn’t enough educated, truly educated people in Cornwall, to have a definitive language that it was. You would take West Cornwall, North Cornwall, East Cornwall, South Cornwall and you would get four different languages.

Fem voice: Well that’s slightly??

KM: In Wales though there was I think Bishop Morgan’s translation of the Bible, was that 1580, 1588?

NK: That’s right.

KM: That sort of time.

NK: Got rid of all the Vs and the Ks about that time.

Male voice: That was after all the English Prayer Book?

KM: Oh, yes, I mean the Welsh, you know, secured translations of religious material. You know, because it had to be by royal decree, royal assent and they got it. Cornish didn’t.

Unclear

KM: Which one was that? The one in Devon?

Fem voice: Yes.

Male voice: Another thing, you know, another thing that’s Cornish battle sites - part of our heritage. It’s like Blackheath, how many people outside of Cornwall know about Black Heath.

KM: Well, it’s still there thy haven’t built houses on the actual Blackheath itself, because I used to go there and play as a kid.

NK: The burial mound is still visible.

KM: Is it?

Male voice: Some locals pointed it out. It’s not listed in anyway.

KM: Really.

Fem voice: That sort of thing is something not as a language but it’s something that needs to be addressed at the time.

KM: We’re getting off language now. What say we get an English Heritage Site in Cornwall and, you know, here’s a significant site which relates to Cornish history and you say, right, English heritage, we’ve got to have like, you know, CADW as in Wales, we’re going to have Welsh, Welsh and English. You have this Cornish site, it should be Cornish and English, right. What will be the problem of putting up the sign in English and Cornish?

Male voice: It’s Cornish that’s going to be a problem.

NK: I’ve had a lot of kind of recent experience of this and the only body we’ve got at the moment that represents all three kinds of Cornish is the sub-committee of the European Bureau of Lesser Used Languages which is Eurobureau officially. And all three of them, we sat round this kind of table and about this number of people and we’re speaking in these three forms of Cornish and really all this kind of internal power thing going on about whose got the upper hand, you know. Everybody looking to see if the other lot has got a slight advantage, and what has happened is there’s been this slight move away from that to an acceptance of the idea that Cornish itself is a plural language. That kind of, how can we talk to the outside world about tolerating our differences, if we can tolerate each other’s differences, but there are some people who are more uncomfortable with that idea than others and generally I have to say it’s our group that’s been the more comfortable with the idea. And it’s interesting we’re more comfortable about speaking our language in a variety of ways.

Fem voice: I’d rather see any, I mean I’m not personally bothered about, I’d rather see any form of Cornish written up than worry about it because if you don’t get something there will be nothing. And I’d rather have something up there than nothing at all.

KM: Once Cornish starts getting a greater physical profile there will be the issue of what form the writing will be in. That is something that’s got to be addressed.

NK: What we’re, I think it can’t be addressed by agreeing on one form, it can only be addressed by saying whoever is doing the project.

KM: What if it’s the English Heritage?

NK: Well, it’s who they approach, you see. I mean for instance they’ve recently approached George Ansell for some translations and we have the absurdity of English Heritage being translated into Cornish. But, he’s done that and because he uses Kemmyn it will be in Kemmyn. Had they found my number in the book and rung me it would be in Late Cornish. We need to arrive at the situation where, when that happens, people who speak another kind of Cornish don’t start ringing up their head office in Bristol and say, "It should be in this other kind of Cornish." We are getting to that stage, we are getting to the stage now where people within the Cornish language scenes no longer complain when something is in a different kind of Cornish. If we can do that then it’s okay.

Male voice: Are English Heritage aware that there are three types of Cornish?

NK: Not necessarily.

Male voice: Why not?

NK: All they’re aware of is that people chop their signs down.

Male voice: Why haven’t three lots got together and gone to English Heritage and says, "Look, there are three kinds of Cornish here, can we sit down and work out how it’s going to be?"

NK: We don’t really need to, we just sort of agree, we’ve just kind of almost agreed to differ now between ourselves in a short time, because we have tried desperately hard to reach an accommodation with each other and we’ve not been able to, and so we’ve just had to kind of , we just had to agree that we’ve just got to live with each other’s difference in terms of writing Cornish. We are now talking about people who have been making, so when a group is approached by a body, say we’re approached by the Environment Agency and they want to translate something then the person they approach, the group they approach is what, is who provides the translation, and other people don’t complain about it.

Fem voice: How many people would actually be bothered? I mean, obviously some people have got vested interests but, I mean, it wouldn’t worry me if there were signs in another type of Cornish up somewhere.

Male voice: We spent the whole of the late 80s and 90s trying to outdo each other and literally different groups trying to stamp each other out and you can’t stamp each other out., we’re not going to kill each other, we’re not going to go away.

Fem voice: It’s wasting time and energy worrying about it, it’s better to accommodate each other and say, look, any type of Cornish is better than nothing, whatever variation it is, at least it’s there.

KM: Right, we might be going round and round on this one now but all I’m going to suggest is that I’ve got to make some sort of recommendations to the Government about signing this Charter and I’ve go to, if they will sign the Charter, if they can be assured that as a result of this independent academic study, that you know, a) there is a Cornish language, and b) that it has a traditional use going back so many years in different ways, perhaps a different number of years in different ways, and in certain respects going back indefinitely, in certain respects. So, if for example they could be assured of these things I feel that they will probably sign the Charter, at least so far as its first part is concerned, maybe its second part, but I, they are aware that there are three varieties of Cornish and I feel sure that they would want to be assured that these are all, you know, parts or dialects of a single language. And that these, although they are different entities, themselves all regard themselves as being equally Cornish, and that they can at least manage to form some sort of common purpose amongst themselves. Now, I think I’ve got some evidence which shows that this can happen - that it does happen.

NK: There have been other co-operations. I mean there’s co-operations in television programmes and all sorts of things. We’ve got this little statement here in that in this Cornish language which is, the Council acknowledges the plural nature of Cornish today and looks forward to increased co-operation between individual speakers and organisations who seek to represent them. So, I mean that’s just I think the kind of thing way forward in the short term.

Fem voice: Most people accept that there might be variations on it but common usage doesn’t matter, when it comes down to something written officially, yes there might be differences bit it’s not that important. It’s more important to have a voice.

Male voice: I suspect that in the fullness of time whichever one proves to be the easiest to retain as one