CORNISH LANGUAGE FOCUS GROUP: ÜNYS / UNIFIED–REVISED

Saturday 19^th February 2000 15:00 – 16:30: Church Rooms, Lostwithiel

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

Richard G. Jenkin Former Grand Bard.

Audrey Randle Pool, Treasurer Agan Tavas, Language Board, etc.

Steve Thorn, Self-employed businessman. Isen Cornish (Kernow Designs),

Language giftware throughout Cornwall

Ray Chubb Secretary Agan Tavas, Chairman Celtic Congress

Laurie Climo, Committee member Agan Tavas, Committee member Celtic Congress

Mary Jones, member Agan Tavas, novice teacher.

Mr. Sam Nankervis, member Agan Tavas (learning 18 months)

Mrs Ros Prigg, Agan Tavas member & many other organizations interested in children’s groups.

Elaine Gill: P.R.O Agan Tavas / recent committee member Celtic Congress / Cornish correspondent Dalriada Celtic Heritage Trust, etc.

Kathleen Clayton, member Agan Tavas – learning the language, speak to my fellow students and to visitors to my gallery..

Helen Williams PRO Agan Tavas (student of Cornish language) Strong believer in the opportunity to choose to learn + use the Cornish language..

Andrew Climo-Thompson Caderyor / Chairman Agan Tavas

Man and woman arriving after sederunt.had circulated.

Total persons present:14

Richard G. Jenkin: Introducing Professor Kenneth MacKinnon, who has come down here to find out about the use of Cornish, because the authorities that be don’t really think it exists, and we want to show him, and through him, show them that we do exist, we do use Cornish, and it’s being used more and more. So here’s our great white hope to prove to the Englishmen that Cornish exists, and we intend to go on existing.

Kenneth MacKinnon: Mür ras dheugh-why…. genough-why oll. I am very pleased to be here today to do this particular group with you. Many names in the Cornish movement are very familiar to me over the years, and one or two people I have known personally for a long time. And I’ll explain two things. Well, one is about myself. I was very fortunate to have a Cornish upbringing. I was a war evacuee in Cornwall . One or two of you know that. First at Summercourt up country, and at St. Ives for the duration – in Downlong – and that was quite interesting. At the London school I attended they had a Cornish teacher called Miss Tregale. She taught us about Trelawney, and taught us the song, and stories about Tregeagle and the leaky limpet shell, and one or two Cornish folksongs and things. And there were all the London kids most of them went back, the rest of us were put up to the Stennack school, which features in Rosamund Pilcher’s ‘Coming Home’. And my teacher was Mr Chirgwin, and he told us about the street names in St. Ives and what they meant, the Cornish motto, what it was in Cornish, and so forth. So, you know, I got a feel for a language which wasn’t English. When I returned home after the war I found that in my own Scottish and Irish family background there were people who spoke these different languages. But they refused to impart a single word to me, because of the attitudes of the time. I suppose that sort of set me out on an interest into these things, which has been life-long and explains why I am here. The other reason why I am here is that the Government have promised to sign the European Charter for European Regional or Minority Languages. This is an international treaty under the aegis of the Council of Europe, which is wider than the European Union. This treaty is about rights for a language, and recognition for a language in its territory. And the Government can sign up for recognition of this, or it can sign up to provide for various levels of support for the language in various domains, like education, the law, media and economic life. It can sign up to a variety of things which can give the language rights to be used by people within this territory. With the Government having promised to sign so far as Irish is concerned in Northern Ireland, interests in Wales and in Scotland said, "Look! We’ve got our own languages too." So the Government said, "Yes, yes, yes, we’ll sign for Scottish and we’ll sign for Welsh – and- oh - it’s Gaelic, right, and it’s Scots, right, we’ll sign for them all, right, right." But then when that had been assured, then there were interests in Cornwall that said , "Wait a minute, what about us down here ? You know, we’ve a language too." So Tony said, "Well, we are not quite sure about that." So, he probably responded to the lobby which was done by various MPs including Andrew George. And the Government wanted really to be assured that there was a tradition of use of Cornish, which is what is in the Treaty as an expression, and that the language had its place within a particular territory where the language had been traditionally spoken, and that the language has a present-day use, and a community of speakers who use the language in various ways in everyday life. So this study has been meant perhaps not just to reassure the Government that there is such a thing as a Cornish language but possibly in that in the political process people start saying, "Well, what about Cornish? It died out and all the rest of it, and that it’s just a dialect. The Government want some sort of substantial document - and this is how it was put to me – that they could point to and say, "Look, here is an independent, academic study of language, and it finds such-and-such. It reports on so-and-so." So it wants to have some sort of authoritative statement about the language that it can, if you like, answer any critics with,

Ray Chubb: Are you aware that we submitted – in fact have submitted - a fairly lengthy document with respect to the Charter, proposing various clauses which would be signed up to?

KM: Yes, I think we mentioned this yesterday.

RC: Would you like to inform me that your…[interruption – inaudible] No, I don’t think we mentioned that yesterday.

KM: I am aware such things having been done

RC: … probably come, depending on the group

KM; Yes

Male voice: The delivery of that document was fairly closely followed by the door being opened for Andrew

KM: Yes, right.

Male voice: We think that might be the first….

KM: Yes, that might be the first step in this process.

Male voice: If you would like that document, then we can get it to you.

Male voice: We can get it to you

KM: I would be very grateful That would be very, very useful.. I have a sederunt which I am going to circulate, and ask you please if you could put your name on it. And also what function you might have in a Cornish language organization. Or if you don’t have a particular office, member of a Cornish language organization. Or organizations. So that we’ve got an idea of the sort of representative spread of people here.

Fem voice: Yes, Richard has got a whole page of them

RGJ: How many of us is due…[laughter]

KM: I know, I very well remember Ann writing, in 1957 I think it was, in New Cornwall, that, "So many of us have got so many offices that we are worn out by them, but we can’t dare drop them, because if we did, you know, what we were doing would collapse."

RJG: That was true at that time.

KM: ‘The fields are white unto harvest, but the labourers are few’ I think it is still, or perhaps not quite so true, but there are still a lot of people doing a lot of things.

Fem voice: It feels like a truth., doesn’t it?

KM: Yes, yes.

RGJ: I suppose they have just put down the foremost…..

KM: That’s fine. If you have got any doubts, put what you might say the highest profile thing. Just as that would betoken that there are other things you had taken on as well. I have got a list of prompts here. This is actually constituted with a focus group….Job like this – you end up with so many papers

RJG: …You can’t find the one you want

KM: You know, it’s buried information…This is not very impressive for ‘the great white hope’ is it ! It was where I thought it was! And here it is. Just another little ‘excuse me’, I did say to people at the last meeting, which was round about midday, "Please, you know, bring your crowst and eat it. Which they did. I left mine in the car.

RJG: You carry on.

KM: I’ve got mine now. So if you don’t mind me munching away, I’d be very grateful.

Fem voice: Would you mind, if we get you a cup of coffee?

KM: If there is one going, it would be very nice.

RJG: They could do coffee for all of us when we want it.

KM: This focus group, the prompts are sort of circling about, first of all the idea of the past, why the language died, why it’s revived, the circumstances of the revival, why it was revived, what sort of people revived it, the current use of the language, how it flourishes today amongst different sorts of people, who they are, how it gets used in everyday and public life, and to what extent the language functions in Cornish life as an especial aspect of Cornish culture, what linkages different Cornish organisations have, within Cornwall, and outwith Cornwall, provision of education in Cornish language, and funders of support for the language, and finally ending up with the fact that we have for various reasons now got at least three - possibly five ? – varieties of revived Cornish which exist, which are used, and we will invite observations and your views upon this situation. So that’s the agenda, as it were, and we are starting off now really actually a quarter past three. How long would we, sort of like this discussion to go on? What do you feel would be a reasonable time schedule for this? What would you feel that you could, as it were, put up with?

Male voice: Originally it was scheduled for an hour, wasn’t it?

KM: OK if you are happy for that

Fem voice: Is it just a discussion?

KM: It is essentially a discussion

Fem voice: See where it takes us

KM: Its purpose where it takes us to is to provide information, evidence for me in writing a report on the Cornish language, which the Government will use to advise itself in signing the Charter. And that’s where it’s directed at. And it is firmly focused upon traditional use of the language, its rightful place and origin on its territory, and the present-day domains of use, and the community of speakers as they are now.. There we go. [Coffee arrives]

KM: Well, that is handsome of you

Fem voice: Just a little bit of sugar – put it there

KM: Mür rās dheugh-why. OK, I don’t take sugar.

Fem voice: Oh, you don’t, I didn’t know

KM: Thank you, yes. So our first question is, which we might never get off, is why did the language die?

Male voce: You are making the assumption that it did die

KM: Well, I am just reading out a provocative leading statement.

Male voice: According to some people the language died. The question is when does a language die? I mean, there were thirty-two people in the last century which has passed, in the eighteen hundreds, who were supposed to, or reputed to have spoken Cornish. Unfortunately, as far as I know there is no actual record of what they said, so we can’t be sure how good their Cornish was. And in any case, I think the forces that pushed the language down also started bringing it up again. The question is, did it ever die?

KM; Yes, Richard.

RJG: There were at least two men in the nineteen-twenties who claimed that they learned nursery rhymes and things like that in Cornish from their nurses.

KM: Do we have documentary evidence?

RJG: Yes, Parson St. Vincent Allin-Collins. His claim was sort of pooh-poohed rather by Morton Nance who did not think it possible. And there was another one in Ireland whose name I have forgotten for the moment but I’ve got a note of it. It’s mentioned in Kernow and I reckoned that from his age – he was an old man – and his nurse was old when she was his nurse – that she would have been young round about 1790 – 1800.

KM: Really!

RJG: A child herself round about that time. How much Cornish they learned of course, for rhymes and sayings are more easily passed on than conversational activity, but it shows there were people who did…

KM: That’s new to me. What you are reporting is new to me..

Male voice: And there is another case as well, and another gentleman in Cornwall who in the nineteen-thirties, a decade later, learned an admittedly corrupt rhyme that went back to Towednack which seems to be on the base a variation of ‘Eeny-meeny, miney-mo". It isn’t quite,. which we actually published in An Gowsva recently. So that’s another case.

Fem voice: There is a Cornish song about another time of the year, that’s in Cornish.

Male voice. There are two other points as well. I can’t remember the date of these, but perhaps somebody here can. A book of poems has recently been published with the compiler being Tim Saunders.

KM; The Wheel

Male voice: Yes, and in that there are two poems much later than anything I have ever heard earlier.

KM: The Crankan Rhyme was one of them

RJG [Indistinct: sawl mench ?]

Male voice: Yes , I can’t remember the date, but they were very late. There’s also another fact I’ve never been able to prove. It was in one of the books on Cornish history, that in the four sets ( ? ) before the First World War, Truro Cathedral School had Cornish classes.

KM: Really!

Male voice: And it was stopped because it was part of a war effort in the First World War, and afterwards when some of the people went to try and get hold of the books to get them published, they were hand-written, the books had vanished.

KM: Well, that is interesting! Interestingly true, when the see was created, they called the bishop’s palace, in Cornish, isn’t it, Lys Escop. [Assent] And I think that there is some documentary evidence that at a very early date actually the bishop sent a congratulatory telegram in Cornish around this time. So there must have been some celebration and knowledge of the language then.

Male voice: It was an extract, a quotation, from one of the miracle plays, "Take up your visor and don it" And they used it – and later on he uses the same greeting without really knowing what it meant. Inappropriate.

KM: I picked that up somewhere too. Once Nance used the expression ‘ Apostolic succession’ [Actually it was Charles Thomas.] for the way in which the traditional language came through to the community of revivers, and they sort of traced their knowledge of the language through specific people into the traditional knowledge. And I take it that the last of those might have been John Davey of Boswednack, who died in 1891.

Male voice: The Kelynacks at Newlyn might have had a traditional knowledge of Cornish. Probably not to speak and initiate new topics, but they had remembered rhymes and sayings. One of them was made a bard, and given the name of Cof Kernewek , Memory of Cornish, because her family had handed it down to modern times.

Fem voice: I see.

Male voice: Now you mentioned about how Cornish having died out, with which got documented. And that lots of farmers know a surprising amount of Cornish through their field names. It’s like when I started learning Cornish, I went home to my sister’s, who knows no Cornish at all. And I said , "Just have a guess what ‘long’ is." And she said, "Well, I’ve never done any Cornish at all in my entire life, how am I supposed to find out about Cornish? I said, just go on have a think about it." She said, "Is it hyr ?" I said, "Yes it is." One of our fields is called long – hyr." I said, "Guess what small is, little?" And she said byghan." One of our fields is Bean – and another one Park Bean, little field , and another one called Bowjy, cowshed, cowhouse, and so a lot of the fieldnames - and my mother – we’ve got about a hundred fields, and near enough all of those have got a Cornish name, and she’ll know what they all mean. So in effect, without even thinking she knows a hundred Cornish words.

KM: That’s an interesting point actually

Fem voice: And your father can tell that…

Male voice: And things like pronunciations, and things like that that get lost. When I started learning Cornish, I was told that they tend to emphasise the next to the last bit of a word, and one of our fields, Little Bean, and then so it’s pronounced the next little bit, you say Byghan. And I went to our field names and it was BE, hyphen, AN. That’s how it was written down, Be-an.

KM: These people who revived the language, why do you think they did it? What sort of people were they. Richard…

RJG: The main reason they did it was because it was Cornish, and they were Cornish, and they wanted to feel, feel part of the landscape. In a way.

Male voice: All the bits of Cornish that have survived over the many years, like placenames, chy, over many places. And many places beginning with tre-. And things like that. Then, most people find it fascinating just wanting to know what all these little bits mean, Just so they have little bits, and something to expand upon. Whether it is identity, whether it is just a bit of something to chat in a pub, or something like that with their mates. Just identity, so they can put things together as it were.

Fem voice: So because the Celts all together were suiting themselves, instead of losing everything they have worried about. So its better, and they have got sort of a Celtic Revival

KM: You’re trying revival,

Fem voice: …with the other Celts, and of course the Cornish have always been wishing to be among the other Celts, and they are , well, reviving their language, and I think we in Cornwall, well we’ve got our language, we’ve got our culture. And now, let’s, you know, let’s think about ours as well. I think that’s still the fact, that’s true today.

Male voice: There’s two other points. In nineteen-twenties – ‘teens, just after the First World War – nineteen, just into the nineteen-twenties,. My father was up on a farm, during the summer, the farmer’s son, I know the family, and he spoke very, very strong dialect, and every single word as you said was a Cornish name – all in Cornish – and they even called some of the foods in Cornish. The father knew the word bytsys,

KM: Really! Yes.

Male voice …and that’s in Bodmin, just outside Bodmin. That’s one point. You asked why Cornish was revived. You’ve only got to wonder what the English felt back in 1305 when the law prohibiting the use of English was rescinded.

KM: I believe you had John of Trevisa, didn’t you, and Richard Pencrych, and John of Cornwall, and these marvellous Johns and Richards got the English to save their language..

Male voice: Indeed, exactly!

KM: …– from Cornwall!

Male voice: Yes, this is it. I mean, I think personally the English owe it to us to return the favour . We helped them to save their language [laughter] hundreds of years ago. I think they deserve to help us. We deserve the same back in return.

KM: Now you said that with a smile on your face but it is a material point..

Male voice: I was not entirely joking on that.

KM: No, no, I take that on board, and I can see myself putting something on this in the report.

Fem voice: Can I just make a point. I have done recently a course at the college to do with children’s welfare and their A-level course. They were combined for adult education, and we go on landscape and look at landscape, and place names and the teacher gave us, and he could not answer many questions the A-level students were asking, "Why is that called so-and-so, why is that on that map, and he could not answer. But I could come back with the answers when we got back to the classroom and tell them. But the teacher did not know the answers to the children’s questions. It is so important.

KM: This is a difficulty when you start doing it that way,

Fem voice: …and they were just asking . to be fair, and he was saying things, and they were asking him, "What does that mean?" And he had no idea. He was a brilliant man, he was a lovely teacher. Excellent. And he I am sure at some point would like to learn Cornish. He would just want to know, he was not one of those people who were turned off. You know, it was relevant that they were not getting answers to their questions.

Fem voice: Quite right, our children have asked those questions, and still found they were not getting…

Several voices together [separately indistinct]

Fem voice: They were doing A level landscape history and we were only getting part of the course.

KM: :Landscape history, has this a linguistic component to it?

Together: Yes.

KM: And it’s extremely important?

Fem voice: Yes, it is important.

KM: I went up to my family’s farm a few years ago, and got two members of the family that are still there to go round the fields and tell me their names, they were given to me in marvelous Arran Gaelic, which is virtually dead now, but of course they didn’t know what the field names meant. So, does that mean anything to you? Well, I said yes it does, I would say. Then I found out what one or two of the ones they didn’t know, and I didn’t know, were, so, you know, I understand, oh yes, that is where the tinkers used to camp. They meant ‘Tinker Boys’ Dyke’

Male voice: Seems to me that you can try and learn a lot by individual learning, or you can make it easier on yourself, sometimes there is actual humour in this I don’t obviously seek any of the languages that we are about to mention but there is an example in Eskimo, in the Innuit language where apparently there is this hill, which means oh not you again. This fellow came up and asked questions, and what’s that called, and what’s that called, at one point the fellow said oh not you again. And there’s another one up in Scotland, where it’s obviously the person can’t answer what this was, and the name is just hill, ben, and there’s other examples like this, one or two of which are entirely rude. In one case Orkney Islands there is this huge great hole where water comes sweeping in and shoots up in a great smoke and it means apparently (Tyn mur in Cornish), Means a big back-side basically.

KM: Tòn Mòr in Gaelic, yes. On the Isle of Arran and in the news in Northern Island today Tanderagee – Thundergay in Arran – Ton ri Gaoithe - arse to the wind, literally. Anyway, wed better not go into this. Because what sort of people do you think actually were involved in this revival here, why they did it, Jenner reminded us that simply because we are Cornish.

Male voice: Defines what we are, a language defines what we are.

Fem voice: (inaudible at the beginning) but I think it is all become to these ordinary people to make that initiative, who have a huge knowledge of vocabulary, and I think making that available…. Many people had that knowledge.

KM Do you think it is easier to ignore it, as if it wasn’t there?

Fem voice: I don’t know for sure but.

Male voice: I don’t know about Jenner, I wouldn’t like to speak about Jennr but Morton Nance was certainly not the sort of man who had his nose in the clouds…

KM: I can remember of him walking up Skidden Hill with his nose was almost touching the pavement in front of him .

R: Jenner spent a lot of time with Rev Lach-Szyrma, vicar of St Peters in Newlyn, who had written to Jenner saying, a lot of people here know a lot of words and I’m sure they’re Cornish, so Jenner went round there and investigated the dialect of Newlyn, and, in fact that was part of what sparked Jenner’s deep interest in Cornish. Previous to that he’d thought of it as being a dead language which you learned about miralce plays… And when he heard the words actually on people’s lips, he considered it might be possible to revive it.

R: Morton Nance’s Sea Words were actually collected round about 1918 – 1920.

KM: I have the book.

Fem voice: I mean he wasn’t just doing it from …

R: That preceded his dedication to Cornish too..

KM: Why?

R: I don’t know, that must have inspired him to think all his words were here still being used.

Fem voice: He probably knew quite a lot, sea going relations hadn’t he?

R: Well, yes.

Fem voice: At St, Ives he must have heard things on the dialect and words and all sorts of things.

R: And of course the mainly ship’s captains rather than sailors.

Fem voice: Yes, it’s possibly, yes, quite..

R: Sailors.

Male voice: Thinks it’s a motivation today, isn’t it,? Certainly it was a motivation 100-odd years ago, people who have known , people know what these words what the launders are, and that still spurs the people, which is to say, I already know this Cornish, so perhaps I ought to learn a bit more. People are still motivated because they have the traditional usage of Cornish. So, one assumes that that has been true throughout the last 150 years or whatever.

Fem voice: What strikes me is when you come to here – I,m not local - you can’t help but be aware that this is actually somewhere different. Iit isn’t just another County and Cornish people have a sense of being Cornish which is even verging on the feeling that this is their kind of nation, not just their County, it’s a lot more than that. There is no other County I would think in England where people are going to handle it in quite the same way.

R: Yorkshire gets a bit close.

Fem voice: Yorkshire is a bit close, but I always say that, maybe Cornwall it’s maybe simply the geography of the place. So there is that very strong sense of identity which is different to anywhere in the country and I think what goes with that is culture and language and in an ideal world I think people would come up with what is their local language, what they feel to be their language,and ideally maybe a world language as well, in an ideal world everyone would have one that gave them their sense of personal identity and ability too…

(Indistinct) discussion

KM: I think very much on your lines myself actually that we will need at least two.

Fem: And a very interesting thing about the reaearch into how we acquire language when we’re young and in which I am very interested in Ireland, is that we are able to acquire several languages, it’s not a problem, the brain is tuned to do it.

KM: Most of the world’s inhabitants can do this quite well

Fem voice: It’s only the English who can’t.

R: The thing that I was going to say was that even abroad this status quo is known. My sister in law has a book called Reisenführer, which is a book for a guide, a travel guide, and this particular Reisenführer is for Cornwall and it says in the translation, "as we approach the River Tamar we are leaving England and entering the Celtic country of Cornwall, where to this day people still speak the ancient Celtic Language of Kornwallisisch, and then it actually says that in the book and actually gives you a few expressions German on one side Cornish on the other. Guten Tag

KM: Well, that’s interesting that you know the, potentially the Germans had some tradition of Celtic scholarship, Kuno Meyer, Zeuss, Wündisch, and all the rest of them.

R: Firstly they studied the Celtic language, 1760 or something, the, something like the Keltische Philologie.

KM: Well, actually it was really Edward Lhuyd who got this idea of the Celtic identity of these similar languages in the British Isles, firmly pinned as Celtic. He did a good job in my view in providing us with a sense of unity against a fairly powerful Anglo-British unified state, which was being created at the time, 1707, and all that, and I think Lhuyd did a good job. He was in Cornwall too and he did a good job here and I’m very, very cognisant in the fact that I’m doing this exactly 300 years after he did that. It’s a very sort of sobering thought really.

Fem voice: I think it’s very interesting that people who aren’t Celtic don’t think themselves Celtic because I belong to Bredereth Sen Jago and…

KM: I know who you are Hilary.

R: Audrey.

KM: Audrey, OK.

Fem voice: (Inaudible), and I went there with Hilary and they generally looked very proudly at us, and then they said we’re Celtic and we looked from the back and said we’re Celtic too, That gave us great satisfaction, you know we understand that case. (inaudible) and they took us all off and you know we were all sort of brothers and sisters together, because of that. And I think that the …

KM: We used to celebrate that day in London, with little grottos in the street. We called it Grotto Day . It was the feast day of St James of Compostella Anyway, we won’t go down that too much.

KM: Why do you feel that the, I mean, do you feel that, you know in Cornwall there has been, you know, parts of the aspects of Cornish and aspects of Cornish society which has been stronger from the revival and perhaps less stronger or even opposed to it in various ways? Do you feel any sense of there being sort of blank holes in Cornwall or you know some sense of those who are agin it, and will frrustrate it?

R: I think Cornwall as a County, (inaudible) going back to it, more or less all the people in Cornwall. It’s a very cultural county, as it were, and it’s a sense of belonging to the County, as it were, and anything Cornish as it were.

Fem voice: I agree with that because I mean, I’m not Cornish born, but since we’ve been learning the Cornish language, the more people you talk to about it with the more people who are interested and I haven’t once spoken to any person, either Cornish or non Cornish that live here who hasn’t expressed an interest in the fact. "Oh, that’s absolutely brilliant, you know, where are you learning it?" And others have expressed an interest as well, because as you say, it does start to explain all the things that, feelings that moved here because they enjoy living here and they are are part of it, and they want to know more and more about it.

R: Whoever you speak to in Cornish, you start a conversation, "Oh, I’m learning Cornish at the moment." I should think that on nearly every single occasion they’ll say, "Oh, that’s really good", and they’ll bring up at least a few words and they’ll say, "Do you know what this means?"

Fem voice: Exactly.

Male voice: Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they’ll bring up a few words and they’ll say, "What does this means?"

KM: What were you going to say now?

Male voice: Just going to back up Andrew (?) in what he was going to say, which is that there is a colossal reservoir of good will and it’s way beyond our ability to tap into it, I mean it’s just a colossal wall, a reservoir of good will. I think what was behind your question is, are there people who are indifferent or hostile? Yes there are, and I think it is a sad reflection on some of the people who have actually got, holding senior positions, that some of that hostility comes from those people. It’s not all the people in authority are all against Cornish, that’s not true, but there are some people in senior positions who are definitely hostile and they are on record saying fairly unkind things about the language. And I think that’s to their misfortune really.

Male voice: All this hostility, I think, comes back from a propaganda that passes through history in stages.

Fem voice: Plus the fact that, I know that my experience at school was, not to the language so much but the people who were Cornish, weren’t worth anything. You didn’t speak with an English accent and that came up when you went to London. I try not to sound Cornish because of that.

Male voice: That was my experience as a child as well.

(Various people speaking at the same time, unclear as to what is being said.)

Male voice: Can we just re-cap, I think we have got three distinct issues now, there’s what we call the elite dominance effect, right, you’ve got a few people who are exerting undue influence by the positions that they hold, there’s the state education system which is not structured in a way that it could positively engage with Cornish and the third thing is the sort of fear of being seen as being seen as second rate citizen.

Fem voice: I mean the interesting thing is that the language probably partly died out for the same reason people weren’t speaking the accent either, English has really become the language of power. You would have had to have learnt English to have got on.

Male voice: There is something else with this though, I think this comes back actually to the Civil War, the force of the war, the majority of the aristocracy involved were Cornish speaking, they were Cornish. After the civil war and going into the Interregnum, Cromwell replaced the Cornish aristocracy, he replaced them with English aristocracy, they weren’t necessarily affluent aristocracy, English people, people from England who were not Cornish speaking, who weren’t interested in Cornish and indeed regarded anything to do with Cornish probably with great suspicion. And it’s recorded that they insisted upon people speaking English and there are examples recorded where parents wouldn’t speak Cornish to the children and the children, well, there’s one example I remember reading, I think it was in Berresford Ellis’s book, about a child who, from 1700-something, who could hear the parents speaking Cornish when they got to bed but wouldn’t speak Cornish with them face to face. Iit was a language they used behind their backs to pass on information so that the truth wouldn’t be understood.

KM: This is a common feature in languages which are in this situation. I neglected actually to scribble down your third point.

R: It was, it’s fear by ordinary Cornish people, fear of being seen as being a second class citizen by virtue of the language and in this century by the fact purely by the sound of your voice.

Male voice: You know, I’ve actually had that against me when I had to go and live in Cambridge and I used to actually deliver internal mail to all the Universities there and I actually resented my accent because I felt humiliated by people just physically made fun of you. And, yea, I’ve got an accent now, but it’s nothing compared to what it was like beforehand because I actually come from a fishing family in Falmouth and it is a very, very strong accent. And in the end I actually left after two years because it was just, if you want to say, prejudice. It was dreadful.

KM: I remember as a child being mocked for not being able to pronounce my Hs by people who could not pronounce their Rs .

Fem voice: Yes, there is a fear also in the opposite direction, that if somebody is speaking a language that you don’t understand, it’s quite sort of frightening and also is used against you so if you don’t have it you probably don’t want people to start speaking something that you don’t understand, it’s quite a sort of frightening experience and it’s, certainly it doesn’t help you when you’re in authority over these people and they can want with their language.

Male voice: Particularly the English attitude, I mean, English people go to Wales, they don’t like people speaking Welsh because they don’t know what they’re talking about. They might be talking about them.

Fem voice: But it’s a power thing, isn’t it? If you have no language, you have no power. So, I mean if the English consider themselves fairly superior, you know, you go Wales, you’re not, so consequently if we lost our language then we’re powerless.

KM: There’s a Cornish proverb about that .

Male voice: Yes, indeed, and there’s a Breton one which will do just as well so (Heb yezh, heb Vreizh) Without Breton, no Brittany. But, I have to say one thing we want to be very cautious of being too sweeping in out statements, I’m living in Somerset, and to be quite honest, there is a terrific amount of support the concept of Cornish in Somerset.

KM: Really.

Male voice: If ever there’s a need to speak Cornish then we’ll always, without a doubt, not quite to that exception, one person was against it, he got very nasty when I crossed a cheque bilingually, he’s the only person, everybody else said, "Ooh, how interesting, do you really speak it, that’s marvellous." And these are English people, they’re not sort of Welsh people who’ve lost their accent or second generation Welsh or anything like this, they are actually English people .

Fem voice: We are more acceptive of other people’s languages, cultures or whatever, now, even in the 21^st century.

Male voice: I’m not entirely sure I would say exactly the opposite. In Winersh when there was somebody came on speaking with a Welsh accent and something in Welsh I’ve heard some of the most fluent absolute obscene language that was the sort of thing that comes out of the gutter.

Fem voice: We should be trying to steer away from that.

Male voice: Absolutely fluent, absolutely bigoted, so it’s not entirely, it’s not all white or all black, no, it’s in between there’s a complete variation. In my experience in Somerset, it’s been very, with one exception, this person who got really, really snotty about this bilingual cheque.

KM: How do you feel the situation has changed over the past twenty years so far as attitudes to Cornish are concerned and what do you think would be the main trends in the development of the Cornish language in the last twenty years?

Male voice: Well, I can, I had this discussion with someone before we came in here. At school I actually had the chance to learn Cornish in Falmouth and the reason why I didn’t, one of the reasons, was if you learnt Cornish you were sort of seen as going back twenty odd years, it was a little bit militant as such, yes? And now I say if you learnt Cornish now it’s more of a cultural thing and it’s an identity, the County, as opposed to, this is my personal point of view, as opposed to being suddenly it’s like anti-English or anti-England. It’s a cultural thing as supposed to being militant twenty years ago. That’s my personal point of view.

KM: OK

Fem voice: And it’s a chance to learn a second language at school. It would be nice if it’s Cornish rather than French because like, you know, like you were saying, once somebody learns another language, once you, you can learn as many languages as you like, it’s getting rid of that barrier thinking it’s another language isn’t it.

Male voice: I still worry about the institutionalised side of this, I mean, the gentleman is now departed from County Hall and the previous Chief Executive made great delight taking the bilingual, the most successful Cornish tourist advertising campaign that ever been run, which had Inspirational Cornwall Kernow a’gas Dynergh - Cornwall Welcoms You, subtitled, had great delight in, the following year, in taking the Cornish out, and his views are again on record. So, there is still an institutional problem that needs to be overcome, because whilst people in authority like that, can make those kind of decisions not be challenged. I think that’s what really worries me, wasn’t challenged, the we have a problem. We have blocks being put in out way that are actually impervious to anything we do.

Male voice: Can I make two quick points to that? First of all, whilst I’m not in favour of it, I’d like to see all the blocks taken out, nevertheless, can I say that the experience in Wales was that more obstacles were put in the way and more successful Welsh were getting what they wanted. So, in fact, actually, there is something in most people’s spirits, but certainly in the spirit of the County’s people, they won’t give up when they’re given obstacles. By having those signs taken down made a lot of people angry, it will eventually result in the Cornish movement being strengthened, was the first point.

There was another point which I wanted to make which is at a tangent to this, is the value of language. Something which I noted down in 1986 was at that in the time three-quarters of the translators for Britain, who came from the Welsh-speaking population of Wales, and I worked that out. With about 600,000 Welsh speakers, there are 60 million people approximately in the country, so that means the Welsh speaking population is approximately 1% of the population of the United Kingdom. That means that 1% of the population provides 75% of the translators in London, Strasburg and Brussels.

KM: Interesting point.

Male voice: So, by being bilingual they are aiming to contrive with authority. That I think is the strength of the reasons for bilingualism, and you’re never going to get people involved in bilingual English and French, or English and Spanish, or English and German. The only other language which the Cornish where everything will become bilingual is Cornish.

KM: What privileges do you think, or changes or perhaps not improvements for the language, for provisions for the language, you know, the cultural infrastructure for the language, have changed in the past twenty years?

Male voice: Not a jot, I would have said.

Fem voice: You get personal initiatives like you get bilingual centres, but they are very few and far between.

Male voice: Bottom up, all bottom up. Nothing top hand whatsoever. I think that’s one of the reasons you see there is this colossal reservoir of good will but the ability to do anything with it that depends on the people who are coming up through the ranks. We talk by the very small number of teachers that we’ve got, if you doubled the number of teachers. If you doubled the number of classes you’d double the number of people taking Cornish, it’s as simple as that. And I see no sort of let up in that, you could keep on putting new teachers in you get massive growth of Cornish. I can’t see any end to that, just purely because the demand is so great, and I’m satisfied.

Male voice: Well, a good example of this in the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man had, according to the Manx Government, no interest, Manx people had no real interest in the Manx language. Brian Stowell was given the job of being the Manx Language Officer. He was given that job to fail, the person who gave him that job wanted it to fail, they under funded it. He managed to succeed in that job despite being under funded and about the time he left it almost every school in the Isle of Man is teaching Manx. The number of people who are learning Manx has actually mushroomed, because the people wanted it. They were forced, apparently there was only initially a 2 year trial thing and then it was to be cut. The amount was so great that they didn’t dare or they would have been put out of office. So I think this shows what can be done and I agree with Andrew that we do need more teachers and it hasn’t happened .

Male voice: I think in Cornish groups over the same period it’s practically got worse because the National Curriculum and we can’t find time for Cornish because of the national curriculum.

KM: Obviously I will be making mention of the term national curriculum in my report.

Male voice: On our way up here we were discussing why we started to learn Cornish, very interested in Cornish and Cornwall and everything like that but the impetus that got us to actually start learning it was because the opportunity was given to us. Someone came up to us and said , "Would you like to learn Cornish?" If it wasn’t for that I would not have done Cornish but by giving the opportunity.

KM: You wouldn’t have learnt Cornish, if precisely?

Male voice: If I hadn’t been given the opportunity to do it.

KM: I see.

Male voice: Someone came up to me and said, "Would you like to learn Cornish?" and that’s when we thought yes, I’ve always had the interest and, but, now I’ve been given the opportunity to actually do it it would be very nice for me to …

Fem voice: …to give somebody the opportunity….. and if the choice is there …

Male voice: Yes, I think we’ve got the interest in Cornwall, it’s been a very cultural County, everyone is interested in things Cornish. It is really giving them the opportunity to take one step further.

Fem voice: Yes, we do seem to be short of people to teach.

Male voice: It’s got to some from the state education system, I mean it’s the only infrastructure that’s capable of transferring the language to that number, to satisfy the demand in that way. I think we do extremely well as a language movement, I mean, whatever that actually means, but I mean, every time somebody runs a class, you know, there’s always people to populate it, there’s no problem with that. You don’t have teachers turning up and no pupils, that never happens.

KM: Seen like in a shop, we’re starting Cornish classes in so-and-so and so-and-so, …two local places, would you like to join? Contact.

Fem voice: Is it, am I right in saying that the County education service refused to make a survey?

Various voices: Correct

Fem voice: You talk to most parents and most parents would like their children to have the opportunity to choose, to learn, at least, some Cornish.

Fem voice: In that way we don’t have a choice.

Fem voice: If parents might choose for their children, the children might choose to learn French instead of Cornish, they can’t do both, they don’t have a choice.

KM: No.

Male voice: The same was true in the sixties in Wales , if you happen to live in an area which happened to have one of the very, very few Welsh-speaking schools, these also were tending to one places and people were driving their children long distances to get them, they were all full, and they started campaigning after 1963, all the schools, and they succeeded. There’s continuously there have been people trying making Welsh Units within an English Language school and it doesn’t work every time. You get the children go out in the playground and start speaking English. The same sort of thing happened in Wales with every single one of the attempts to get Welsh Schools going or schools teaching Welsh as a subject even. In many of the schools they would arrange the curriculum so that they, so that it wouldn’t be possible. They’d have other things that you had to have who’d study Science you couldn’t study Welsh or studying French you couldn’t study Welsh and they’d put it in so that the only thing you could do Welsh is if you weren’t doing anything else. If you were studying to become a PE Teacher or something like that, then you might have been able to learn Welsh. But otherwise you wouldn’t.

KM: a very interesting point.

Fem voice: Even on a normal every day level a friend of mine’s daughter wasn’t sure whether she wants to take up law or medicine and by the time she does two of her O-levels, I mean, no way are they going to teach her History. I mean, while you’ve got that sort of system going it’s not surprising that something like Cornish gets rather sidetracked when you have that complication. But, you can’t even do your History O-level for possibly because of the system.

Male voice: I think , have been considering what Ray’s experience some years because he’s got two bilingual sons, I’d be very interested up to now because I never really known it, whether the County Council has recognized the needs of your two lads and actually supported them in any meaningful way, because de facto they are bilingual children.

Male voice: Unclear I said they are bilingual and got no reaction to that at all.

Male voice: I find that absolutely appalling, I mean, if that in fact is not an abuse of civil rights, I don’t know what is. And that deeply worries me that that can happen because it does give you an indication of the sort of built in inertia, if you’re being kind, that exists within the system.

Male voice: a graduate support…just outside Taunton in a school there, the Headmaster, and he actually encouraged them in all sort of ways, happened to be a Cornishman I mean they are Cornish, who were Headmasters in schools in Cornwall and it doesn’t have any effect.

Male voice: Not so many.

Male voice: No, not so many, I’m not suggesting there were many but there are some.

Male voice: Very few Cornish

Fem voice: Inaudible Your two grandsons are bilingual, aren’t they, Richard?

Male voice: And the other one is a trilingual.

Fem voice: Apart from trilingual.

KM: It’s about half-time, so break off from our conversation and just have a think, just have a think about the Cornish language community out there, all around. I’m going to ask you some questions. It doesn’t matter what anybody else says you just tell me what you think. These questions are about how many of them are now are. How many of them, of you are able, you know, throughout Cornwall, Cornish speakers, how many people are able to conduct an everyday conversation on normal topics at normal speed, how many would you say there were?

Fem voice: In the whole of Cornwall?

KM: Throughout Cornwall, yes, all varieties of the language.

Male voice: Just within Cornwall? Or are you talking about…..

KM: Well, I think we’ll say just within Cornwall for the sake of the argument.

Male Voice: Well, it’s extremely hard, ….can’t say, you don’t meet all of them all the time and you’re not exactly sure what’s happened with all the various people.

KM: Just a number, I tell you what, I’m going to go round and each of you will give me just a number. ….don’t mind what the other people say.

Male voice: 1,500.

KM: Okay.

Fem voice: Is this fluent is it?

KM: Well, it’s normal fluency, everyday fluency.

Male voice: But on everyday subjects as well.

KM: Yes, that’s right.

Fem, I don’t, I honestly don’t against something and not …I’m just starting to learn, I might say several hundred.

KM: Okay.

Fem voice: About 1,000.

Fem voice: I really wouldn’t know.

KM: Right, no idea.

Male voice: I don’t know.

KM: No idea.

Fem voice: I don’t either but if I was asked I would have said several hundred.

KM: Several hundred, put a figure to the several?

Fem voice: 7.

KM: 7, all right.

Male voice: 6 to 800.

KM: That again is around 700, isn’t it?

Male voice: I really don’t know exactly because it depends on how fluent you want people to be

KM: That’s the definition, everyday conversation and …. at normal speed.

Male voice: Then what’s an everyday subject, these days it might be the internet …….or …going down the pub…extremely interesting things like cows just having had foals or something like that.

KM: I’m going to come onto that in a minute, Ray?

Ray Chubb: About 200.

Male voice: I’ve got no idea but I would say from people I’ve met … throughout Cornwall, there’s a lot of people. I’ve never actually thought about a figure, it depends on what you’re saying about fluency, but if you say knowledge of a language then I would say it’s between, around 800 to 1,000.

KM: What about you Audrey

Audrey Randle Pool: 5 to 6 absolutlely fluent.

KM: Five to six hundred How abiut you, Richard?

RGJ: If it’s just an ordinary conversation…

END OF SIDE ONE OF TAPE

SIDE TWO OF TAPE:

Male voice: I’ve actually written down some problems with the counts.

KM: Yes, good.

Male voice: One of the problems over the last ten years is that we’ve moved away from the situation where everybody knew everybody else to a situation where nobody knows anybody else, so you’re going to

Fem voice: You come across people you’ve never met or heard of who can speak Cornish in our own local area.

Male voice: That’s right, I mean, this guy just going down the road to the corner shop suddenly had the, the charity shop, ….just popped out of nowhere, and you find these people because you’re not just talking over the last couple of years you’re talking thirty, forty years.

KM: Yes.

Male voice: So, although it’s tempting to think in terms of the current people on the scene there are still people out there who can bring this Cornish back and still use it.

KM: Interesting.

Fem voice: Oh, yes, there’s an awful lot of people …..

(different voices all speaking at the same time)

Male voice: There’s a lot of people who know a lot of Cornish, maybe three or four thousand that are not capable of, sort of producing it out of their head fluently.

Fem voice: Fluent in about 6 months if they were talking within a class……

KM: How many people, do you think, know a few words and phrases of Cornish?

Male voices: 200,000. Probably several hundred thousand people.

(Lots of people talking at the same time)

Male voice: There was one person that I met in Truro and he never, never gave any indication that he knew any Cornish at all and on one particular occasion, he came in and he spoke to me in something that I didn’t really understand. It turned out, something like in the 1920s or 30s he’d been in the class run by Morton Nance and he had been taught this as a boy. He’d come to the school and he’d run a series of classes for several weeks until a month maybe and that’s how far it had gone. He only knew a few expressions and this was basically a greeting, and I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t until he said it again and I realised that he was speaking Cornish that I made sense of it, I’m fluent. It was the pronunciation and his rhythm was not as I would have expected.

KM: One thing we could say now, how many people go beyond that and put a sentence together in Cornish like… I want you to say in Cornish, you know, the pen of my aunt is in the garden.

Male voice: Grammatically correctly?

KM: Well, pretty well reasonably correctly so that you can understand it, you know. Yes, how many people could do that? No, no, I don’t mean amongst you I mean out there. You can all do that, you know, I mean.

Fem voice: I’ve only been learning for a few weeks.

Male voice: If you added to, I don’t know what you even do to that number, would you double it or add on parts again or whatever but if you just think in terms of the number of people who will do a year or 6 moths or 3 months of Cornish and then pack it up there are an awful lot of it (Lots of voices) thousands and thousands and thousands

Male voice: The other factor, different things is that there’s been correspondence classes, you never see them you never touch them.

KM: Are they going on out there?

Male voice: And the thing that’s happened recently is the internet stuff, just to give you an idea, we’ve got our Agan Tavas web pages been going for 2 years we’ve had 10,000 hits and in 2 years its generated at e-mail and queries on the language which is several hundred.

Fem voice: 381, it was.

Male voice: So, getting on to 400 e-mail queries and we’ve got about 70 people defectively distance learning through the internet.

Fem voice: Could be more

KM: Well, that’s really the good thing, I mean, you could spend a lot of time doing all the, answering your e-mails. (Come in and welcome! tea has arrived)

Male voice: The point I’m trying to make is that it’s again, it’s just another indicator on all those people out there who for instance want to buy dictionaries. How many Morton Nance dictionaries have been sold since 1950s or whenever? 6,000, 70,000? How many other dictionaries including the little dictionaries, another 5,000, 6,000?

Male voice: 500.

Male voice: Don’t forget also that the people read them from the library.

KM: I was also going to ask you, how many people get up and speak on their own special topic in Cornish, throughout Cornwall? I mean, you’ve given me various estimates of the number of people who do an ordinary conversational job but I mean if you are a Methodist local preacher, Cornish speaker, get up and do your sermon in Cornish. If you’re interested in, say, local history archaeology, get up and do your parish relics in Cornish, if you are into the internet to talk about the web-site and your own web-site and so many hits in Cornish, things like that, your own special field. If you haven’t got a special field just think of getting up and giving a talk about what you do in the course of a day.

Male voice: In our own special day?

KM: Yes, in anybody’s special day, in other words, what I’m getting at is what they call registers, in other words, the set of words which are the technical terms of your subject or special area and the particular expressions, that if you’re a lawyer you’re going to talk about conveyance properties, you know, you’re going to tell the local Cornish group about your work. You know, could you do it, are the expressions there? Are there people that who could do this? And if so, how many?

Male voice: Ray and I fixed my car in Cornish on one occasions.

KM: Very good. Well, that’s really an everyday conversation. Not if you get into sort of manifold ratios and that sort of thing.

Male voice: But we were dealing with problems with the heating system.

KM: Pressure ratios and manifolds, yea, Okay. Good-oh! How many people out there could do that? You know, could function at that leveling Cornish?

Male voice: I would say it will be great difficulty to determine that, but, depending on what the subject is and where ?

KM: Their own subject. If you’re a builder, talk about building houses, if you’re an electrician talking about, you know, wiring problems.

Fem voice: As opposed to everyday chat.

KM: Yes, "Oh, the weather is fine today isn’t it, Mrs Trewhiddle." "Yes, it is Mrs Pengelly, and it was raining last night." Not that level, but, you know, "I’ve had a lot of trouble with my manifold"

Fem voice: …. with our dictionaries and everything else… We have got all those words to be able to use them.

KM: How many people could use their words?

Male voice: Out of the number, how many have an additional register or registers they can speak?

KM: Yes, that’s right.

Male voice: Probably somewhere between 1 to 200, I think it’s exceedingly difficult to determine that because, until you actually start talking to people about those sort of subjects you’re very much …. I mean I talk about anything in Cornish I’m into, cooking and everything else, I think in Cornish about everything. If I can’t I go and find the words, I taught myself to swear in Cornish.

KM: Well, actually my problem with Gaelic is that very often I’ve been asked to speak on subjects which there isn’t Gaelic vocabulary and very often asked to speak on environmental subjects and planning subjects.

Male voice: They haven’t had them.

KM: Well, yes I know, but even so, I’ve been finding that, you know, I’ve been saying things, giving Gaelic expressions where for the first time that such and such a thing has been used. It goes beyond me the discipline of thinking of coining a term which can be meaningful to the ordinary Gaelic speaker. I mean I teach statistics and people have great difficulty with statistics, because they have to cope with things like standard deviations and all that sort of thing that means nothing to them in English. Whereas, if I was asked to run a class in Gaelic, a statistics class in Gaelic, I would have to think, well, what do I mean by standard deviation, how can I put that in Gaelic. If I put it in Gaelic it would probably be in a way people could understand it, and I think that they would learn the statistics better in Gaelic than in English. Because of its terminology, but I getting up on my things now.

Male voice: I think fundamental reason why that hasn’t happened so much, I think that number 100, 200 is right, there would be more than that. The fundamental reason why is because we don’t have geographically very tight knit communities where people can rub up against each other enough to use those different registers.

Male voice: Right, so not as often as we should.

Male voice: I mean, there are some people who deliberately learned it, like me, in order to be able to use it and there are other people who’ve learnt it from people like me, I.m only one of many. The majority of people don’t have the opportunity to do that often enough if they’re going to learn it. So I mean I could stand up, as I have done, and talk about computers and I’ve used the words of the various arrangements those are the words I’ve used all the time about the computer in Cprnish, over the phone and so on. I think you’re absolutely right, one of the problems is, that okay, so I might learn the words but as you actually pass it on to other people in speech it’s not going to happen, and the same I think is true with one or two of the other …..

Fem voice: Same as you hear anything, if you keep on talking a language and modern things were invented (inaudible)

Male voice: They are using them but there aren’t enough people meeting all the time.

Fem voice: That’s right, the more people that use it they have to invent a Cornish word for it. (Lots of voices) you’re describing it more like it is or it looks, as opposed to something that the English would say, well that’s that. You know you relate it to what it looks like or what it does.

Fem voice: Actually, because more of our people generally and more and more Cornish people speaking are using the internet it’s a help making people, I would say, that people probably are learning all sort of words through the internet rather more than they are with some other language they used …

Male voice: That’s true.

Fem voice: There’s more say universal through that hole.

Male voice: I can only say I’ve really only got one other register apart from everyday, and that’s computing, because that happens to be my profession. My cousin over here is also a computing professional and also two out of my Bristol class are also, because I work in Bristol during the week, two out of my Bristol class are also computing professionals, so it tends to be a register that you use. If I didn’t use it then I wouldn’t ..

Male voice: I wouldn’t be able to use it.

Male voice: So usage is quite crucial, it’s having the opportunity to use it.

KM: I’m going to ask you now, how many households, do you feel, do you think, there might be out there who are using Cornish as a home language?

Fem voice: We’ve started to.

Male voice: You’re not meaning husband and wife plus children?

KM: It could actually, it could mean any structure of the family, it could even mean a single person speaking Cornish to his cat.

Fem voice: I talk to myself.

Male voice: I just taken a straw poll, I mean, will that be an indicator?

KM: I’m not saying necessarily round here, round the table, round the ring.

Male voice: You might just get a bit of feedback because these people have different fluencies so you might get an indicator of, you know, people’s abilities

KM: We’ll do a ?? "How many people use Cornish in the home here? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. That’s eight out of twelve, well, obviously you’re a learner’s group and, you know, that’s

Fem voice: …and were keen.….(tea & coffee)

KM: Here we are, teas and coffees. We’ll have a bit of a break. I’d be very grateful if you are able to stay on for the two hours because I think it is probably the first time this has ever happened. The Government has ever asked you. Yes, and I was going to refer to an article in that which was mid 19^th century vicar writing about Cornish in his parish.

Male voice: Oh, excellent.

KM: There was this apostolic succession, wasn’t there? [Break for refreshments.]

Male voice: That’s just a few bits and pieces. That’s just to give you an idea of some of the bits and pieces of handouts that we give to people. Actually, very uneven two parts. There weas a bit that ote a couple of weeks ago which is actually bilingual which has actually got the Cornish and the English. And a bit which is relevant to what you were last saying about trying to calculate the numbers. Unfortunately it is oinly in English.

KM: It might be just as well because my Cornish isn’t as fluent by any means.

Male voice: But, anyway, some of the issues, the inhibiters of the uptake of Cornish, the media, and the bit about how on earth you calculate the numbers, you know it’s a problem. Because we need a census.

KM: I mean, in absence of a census, you see they wanted me on this study, to come back to them with some sort of numbers of Cornish speakers, profiles of Cornish speakers, distributions of Cornish speakers. You need a census for that. And I said, "you are the department, your left hand has crossed out that question" , I was on the Committee that formulated the question.

Male voice: They’ve removed …

KM: And it got to such and such a level and then it was removed.

Male voice: I didn’t know that. I thought that they were leaving that in.

KM: No, no it’s gone. And one or two other useful questions have gone as well. At the beginning I’m all too conscious of the fact that this seems to be about the first thing that central government has initiated by way of, you know, going out to the Cornish Community and saying, well, you know, we’d like to know, whether they’ll come back and say now we’d like help.

Male voice: About initiating things. One of your previous questions, what progress has there been in the last twenty years and people sort of kept silence in the room, people couldn’t really think about anything and I think, probably, the reason for that and yet there’s the real enthusiasm and everyone has gone on now on the culture of the County or the enthusiasm of all the people of the County and everything like that. And how many classes there must have been over the years. There’s probably been hundreds of classes set up teaching Cornish three, six months a year altogether, and suddenly if something happens to these little classes like the teacher moves away, or the people being taught they get caught up in different things and something happens and they disband and these people haven’t got anywhere else to go, like there isn’t another local Cornish class that they could join onto and so they tend to disband. And so all these people who know Cornish, some Cornish, the odd few phrases and bits and pieces like that, that they haven’t had the chance to progress from that and the reason, well, the reason I think, is because people teaching Cornish don’t get any backup, no infrastructure to keep these classes going if the teacher who is supplied to the job gets no support. The teacher has to move away for any reason and these things tend to collapse or retires.

Male voice: Or becomes too old to do it or too ill.

Male voice: That’s right.

Fem voice: Of course for many remember for many years that we’ve always had a Cornish class in London.

KM: Oh, yes, I’ve been in it. I, once, one night, was asked to take it, because the teacher was off and I was the Gaelic Teacher.

Fem voice: Who was taking it when you were there?

KM: Oh, I’ve forgotten now, but what I did was, I got a couple of them to get their songs out, we did the songs, and actually was getting them to use their phrases and I was getting them to share what they knew with one another and also me.

Fem voice: It’s almost like it’s not quite yet a critical mass, there’s that to it, and

KM: Not quite yet a critical mass, good concept.

Fem voice: But to do something about it, you do need infrastructure or support. Inaudible You’ve got to have something to, somewhere for it to go.

Male voice: Yes, a little bit of a base, setting sort of thing.

Male voice: I keep on coming back to the position I havre seen of the more successful language revival and I don’t mean revival from scratch. I’m thinking Welsh language. In 1962 Welsh was headed towards its destruction, they almost lost it, and Saunders Lewis made a speech

KM : Tynged yr Iaith

Male voice: absolutely right. By the year 2000 would have been dead. If you hadn’t made that speech then it is unlikely the Welsh would now be a spoken language by any more than a few old people. The entire demography has changed in Wales, from having had older people speaking it, middle of the age group people, some speaking it and children not speaking it. We’ve now got the younger age-groups group moving up through.

KM: The largest proportion in the age groups who are Welsh speakers is the 3-15’s.

Male voice: Indeed. If you take, and also up to about the around mid twenties and just getting on to the thirties and you have actually got a gap in the middle, somewhere about forty or fifty something where the number percentage is lower. And this is supposedly, its next census is supposedly the first one in which the numbers of Welsh speakers will actually be increased.

KM: Well, actually in the last census they actually just did.

Male voice: Did they? I beg your pardon.

KM: And, more to the point, if you take a sort of rule of thumb, demographic indicator of language potential, that is the proportion within the speech community who are under 25. If you want to ensure the continuance of a speech community you have to have, at least, one third of your speech community under 25 to produce the next generation and at the last census the Welsh just did it, they just went over it to 34%, 35%. And that was, I thought, the most significant thing about it.

Male voice: That is just from the census, I think the reason why I mentioned this was not to, people harp on about the Welsh because we’re talking about Cornish, the Welsh have already got recognition, the Cornish language, unfortunately, hasn’t. One of the things that happened in Wales was the formulation of all sorts of groups and the Welsh insisted upon Government funding. They march, they lobby, they did all sorts of things like this and the thing that’s happened in Cornwall is that there’s been a great deal of difficulty in getting any of this happening. Although we have lobbied, with Ray and a few people were involved and I think you were involved in speaking to Mr Dennison?? Number speaking, Inaudible, and also the athlete…

KM: Sebastian Coe.

Male voice: He, although initially, I think he did not really have any knowledge about this, he apparently was also supportive. So there are people who are willing to listen, but it never seems to actually go that next stage beyond to actually getting something done by political people who, after all, have their wages paid by us.

KM: True, very true.

Male voice: Can I make an observation about this whole process, is that we seem to coming to the end of things that we can do off our own back if we’ve written to people, we’ve lobbied people, we’ve given them documentations, we’ve spoken to them and we’ve looked for ways of trying to get funding and tried reasonably hard, maybe not hard enough, but reasonably hard. And none of this is happening for us so we are coming to the end of things that we can actually think of reasonably doing to just help jolly things along on their own.

KM: One of the things I’ve been asked to do is to ask you what are the sources of further funding for the Cornish language, the Government wishes to be informed through me of what you can tell them of sources of funding for the Cornish language.

Male voice: Yes, exactly. We contribute mightily to the Treasury how about the Treasury contributing mightingly to us, to the Cornish language. I mean, beside from anything else, we looked at how the Welsh language was funded. They set up the Welsh Office and all the rest of these things and frontally and greatly.

KM: Oh, yes.

Male voice: The equivalent sort of funding, as in Cornwall, tend to be paid into Exeter and Plymouth most of it is for making jobs there.

Fem voice: Objective One money.

KM: Yes, this is something new, but you’ve also got to get matched funding from local sources.

Male voice: The problem with Objective One is it’s a one off (inaudible)

KM: We’ve had Objective One in the Highlands and Islands for seven years. The company that I’ve been associated with was one of the ones which were material in sort of putting forward the case for this. Incidentally, the company who was associated with on this also was material for getting Objective One for Cornwall. Now, we’ve had it in the Highlands and Islands, it can be seen to have done a lot for the Highlands and Islands in terms of bringing in new small businesses especially high-tech business, things like arts and culture infrastructure have been greatly upped. A lot of staff with Gaelic linkage has been created with Objective One funding. A lot of educational resource, especially Gaelic educational resource has come in. Now, this has been capable of being done in the Highlands and Islands, when you look at it, I know we’re the size of Belgium, but we are only 300,000 people I mean it’s very much the same sort of scale as Cornwall. So, people say, "Oh, we’ve lost it, we’ve lost Objective One, oh, dear, oh dear." So, look around you, look how things have improved in seven years and Objective One has been successful. So, I say, "Here now, you guys, you’ve got this Objective One, use it, use it if you like, have a look at what happened in the Highlands and Islands, use it likewise, make it the precedent because match funding was secured so don’t be put off with specious arguments, there’s precedent." Anyway, look, I mustn’t start preaching and I’ve got to get you back on track with your views, not mine.

Fem voice: What sort of funding are they looking for? I mean, where would that funding come from? Where would you look for it on a commercial basis?

KM: A lot of this actually came out of arms-reach government funding like, you have got something like the Highlands & Islands Development Board, The Enterprise, as it’s now called. There are TECs which in Scotland are LECS, Local Enterprise Companies. You have got LEADER.

Fem voice: We’ve got Devon and Cornwall TEC we don’t have a Cornwall TEC.

KM: I know, but then Devon and Cornwall TEC must remember that it is Devon AND Cornwall.TEC.

Male voice: That is a real inhibiter.

KM: I’ve taken this on board, you know, I’m aware of this problem.

Male voice: That’s why I made my comment about it,.

KM: Devonwall

Male voice continuing: … to do these employment things. The Government put, they claim, and I hope I have no reason to doubt it, that they’ve put God knows how many millions into, they say, Cornwall, for employment, but each and every one of those pieces of money, apart from ones that were paid into the west of Cornwall, ones in the north of Cornwall and east Cornwall were paid to Plymouth and Exeter respectively and those two spent most of it on creating jobs in Plymouth and Exeter.

Male voice: Actually, sorry.

KM: I must get on to.

Male voice: I actually live in Plymouth and luckily I’ve been funded by Plymouth Enterprise and I’ve been very lucky the fact that my sort of advisor is Irish, so he’s got an interest straight away. Without the funding that I’ve received and also having subsidised a lower rate, matched it with a bank at reduced rate the business enterprise the lot, and without the help of those coffers then I wouldn’t have got this far as I have got. So, the funding is there, it is just trying to find it and it is difficult to have someone that is sympathetic to the language. If it was someone else I wouldn’t have got it, but because he is passionate about his Irish language as paasionate as you could be,that he’s actually pushed my business and is going very well, that’s all I can say.

Fem voice: We’re all battling very hard in Cornwall to get all sorts of things… as you said our language is overlooked. We have an awful lot of battles to get ourselves recognized with all our problems, we do have really dreadful treatment.

Fem voice: (unclear) funding packages and it seems to me that even to try anything that was specifically for the language it had to be some economic project that benefited the community.

KM: Do it the other way round link the language to economic benefit for the community, that’s what we did in Scotland. Turn it the other way round, show the economic benefit of the Cornish language, show for example the branding, successful advertising companies using Cornish, show them, for example, cultural tourism, Cornish Diaspora, other lesser used languages communities coming into Cornwall, you know, to see us this year. There’s 53 million of them in the rest of Europe. What about all the Cousin Jackies and Cousin Jennies throughout the world. I mean, you’ve got to, I mean is, there’s a heck of a lot of pace that can be made in terms of showing the economic value of a local language, cultural events, arts events, all this sort of stuff, sale of cultural products, world wide sales. I mean if you start firing these statistics at them, so many CDs, so many pop and rock groups, so many tapes, so many books, so many sales world-wide, once they start hearing this news, once they start hearing the words! You know, they start sort of softening up, it’s like a Pavlovian dog, you know, reacting to the sound of the bell. Anyway, I better not sort of go on on this because I must get back to the agenda. There’s, I think I better cut to a couple of questions that I’m going to, sort of end up with, time is marching on.

There are three varieties of spoken Cornish, for whatever reasons, there maybe five. Taking on Jennerian, Unified, Unified Revised, which is represented here.

Male voice: inaudible

KM: Well, what I’m going to say is that now these forms exist, I’m going to ask you what your view is of this situation where the Cornish language is represented by three distinct varieties.

Male voice: Can I just, I quibble a little bit, I mean.

KM: I’d like to, excuse me a minute, I think they’re trying to get in.

Fem voice: We have a lot of communion by complication with different varieties. Our differences are getting smaller and smaller.

Male voice: That was more or less what I was going to say, which is that I think there is

Fem voice: I don’t think we have so much common ground honestly because

Male voice: For ordinary speakers it’s not a problem

Fem voice: That’s right, it’s the …..

Male voice: No, I think the main problem is put some of the organizers in it, but the ordinary speakers of Kemmyn, they come to a lot of our events.

Fem voice: And they invite us to theirs.

Male voice: I just wanted to, that was more or less the point I was going to make, which is that there’s really a continuum, well not even a continuum , there’s a strange kind of collection of different ways that you can put all this together so that you can find people using Kemmyn as an orthography but speak, if I can use that word, in Unified. You’ve got people who are, like myself, who are, who use Unified or a variant of it but tend to speak more like people who are using Nowedja You’ve got the Nowedga people who speak like Unified speakers.

KM: Nowedga is a new term to me.

Male voice: It’s Modern Cornish.

KM: I’ve been trying to get this term and nobody would tell me.

Male voice: So, you’ve got all these different variations and at the grass roots level it doesn’t matter a hoot. And, exactly like Elaine said, I mean we, until recently we have had a Kemmyn person who used to come along.

Fem voice: And much younger people that I’ve met, they say, "well what does it matter."

Male voice: Exactly.

KM: Really.

Male voice: At the grass roots level I don’t think people care.

Male voice: All I can say is that I actually sell to Kemmyn shops and there’s no problem with those people I sell to and you know, my products are mixed in with Kemmyn products. So, to me, I’ve got no problem with it, the people I sell to have got no problem, whether, obviously some people have, but the people that I deal with there’s no problem at all. That’s what I’m saying.

Fem voice: Why are there different groups? Just because the individuals have formed a group to form a group doesn’t mean to say they’re in opposition to each other.

Male voice: I think it’s a regional dialect.

Fem voice: Yes, it is.

Male voice: So, you’ve got a different type of dialect structure.

Male voice: Yes.

KM: No ? like there might be, you know.

Fem voice: People feel very passionately about the differences and I respect those views but untimately then survival of the language is far more important than them. I respect Richard’s position in respect of Unified - absolutely, but I would retain my opinion, my personal opinion ultimately, the survival, the nourishing of the language is bigger than anything, that these problems cause.

Male voice: If we could just go back one step, go back ten years in fact, I mean we had various, a political, primarily a political issue that’s caused the split into the language into three distinct movements, based around, what I’m sure you’re aware, Ken George developing Kemmyn, Dick Gendall developing Nowedga and a Unified going off and now developing other strands.

Male voice: Continuing straight on actually.

Male voice: Continuing straight on, as we’ll see. Now, what’s actually happened, those political events that continue to rumble on but life goes on for everybody else, other people have tended just to get on. So, you have got this kind of upper, lower kind of thing going on. Now, if left to its own devices, without any political interference, I’m sure that most people would settle down and my personal feelings is that you’ll probably be left with a west Cornwall dialect that would be, sound like, a little bit like late Cornish, crossed with unified and probably written like a cross between the two. And in the east you’ll proabably have something that sounds a bit like a cross between Unified and Kemmyn you know, again, maybe written like that.

I think if things were left to their own natural devices I think things would proabably tend to sort themselves out. The reason that things don’t get sorted out are because you’ve got individuals who have their preferences, who push them out in front of people and who tend to keep on periodically just stirring up again. But, there are those two layers ordinary people do just get on, get on with it.

Fem voice: We can understand each other, you know, we can use the language, and that’s what matters, that the language is being used amongst all different groups .

Male voice: It’s not as far removed as North Welsh is from South Welsh and since I’ve learnt a fair bit of Welsh, hen OK, there isn’t, there is in fact not much difference really. There’s maybe the odd word in Welsh and Cornish is in fact much less different. The vocabulary is largely identical, there are slight variations some stronger variations, slight variations in pronounciation, dialect and what answers to choices of some words, but aside from that the main difference is the method of writing.

Fem voice: I think different someone with a Geordie accent talking to someone with a London accent.

(Voices inaudible)

Male voice: Yes, that’s much more, much stronger.

Fem voice: There are three sets of people out there who are quite determined that they are going to keep that side and they are hoping, quite quietly, that something is going to happen to the other set of people. And when you come to do their own illustration and so forth and it’s sad really that we have our own side and the Unified people have their side and the Kemmyn people have theirs. We welcome them on their side, but people don’t necessarily tend to come.

Male voice: Some do.

Fem voice: Some do. It’s still three sets of people all wanting something which would be much better really if kept sort of, whatever we were going to do, we would then more straight about things, Unified…with a unity to it.

Male voice: Having said that, that’s because that’s the way they were set up, yet, anyone that’s being taught, doesn’t matter which of the three sections they’re being taught in, anybody that’s being taught just want s to learn Cornish. It’s just people that were involved with the setting up that are a little bit hung up on these different variations, but anyone that’s learning just wants to learn Cornish.

Fem voice: Yes, we have three brothers who have three varieties, and all are,,, whereas we won’t have the….

Male voice: Yes, but I think in so many years time, once all that has phased into the background a little bit, it’ll become a lot more clearer.

Fem voice: We were alright at the Carol Service, weren’t we? We had people representing all of the three different language groups.

Fem voice: Oh, yes, we were perfectly fine.

KM: That was a Carol Service.

Fem voice: Yes. It was completely bilingual, completely in Cornish.

Male voice: There’s a regular pattern of Church Services.

KM: There’s about six a year, aren’t there?

Fem voice: At that Carol Service we were, I was very careful to see, that we did have three, only three sets of speakers and so forth and so on. They’re perfectly happy everyone talks at the end of it but at the end of the day still speaking the same language, three different people.

Fem voice: They basically talk in the same language just with few little variations on..

Male voice: Spell it differently and pronounce it differently.

Male voice: Mostly they don’t even pronounce it differently.

Male voice: Most of it is the same in fact.

Male voice: Mostly they write, for instance, in Kemmyn, they write it differently and say, "That this is how you should pronounce." Having said that they actually go on pronouncing it the way they always have.

Male voice: I know? describe even Ken George himself wasn’t pronouncing it.

Fem voice: Next question, what do we want from each other then? Or is it just the people in charge of it?

Male voice: It’s the people in charge and people who always get caught up in it but I mean for most people, like Sam said, inaudible

Fem voice: I think the time has some to say, to put that aside and that you tell that to the outside and that’s their problem.

Male voice: We tried that, we tried from the very beginning.

Fem voice: It is moving on because younger people or different people are being brought into the language and they don’t have the same prejudices because they didn’t go through that split. Not because, you know, they don’t feel strongly about the language but they’ve come at a different time and the thing is moving on.

Male voice: All I can say is, I mean, I sell through the libraries in Cornwall, I sell through the National Trust, I sell from Torpoint, Saltash to Land’s End and I sell to Kemmyn shops, I know Kemmyn people,. I say Kemmyn, you can put a name to it Unified shops, I sell to anyone, yeh, and I would say that the amount of people that have got a problem with it, they’re not even worth worrying about.

Various people speaking: Not clear

Male voice: I’ve got a successful business, I started a year ago and I sell, I’ve got no, but generally speaking there is no problem. I’m not just saying that, they’ve got no problem with me I’ve got no problem with them, they just their approach to their language. I sell outside Cornwall, actually I do very well in Plymouth as well and I get paid for it, and I say I sell over half my products to foreigners. So, there’s no problem, I don’t foresee the problem. I’ve come in out of the split.

Male voice: If there is a message, and I think there is a message, it’s that, okay, we still need to make sure fair play is done and that doesn’t just mean to unify new speakers but to everybody, but fairplay has done. I don’t just mean to Unified and Unified speakers. .I think the politicians, I think what’s happening Helen alluded to it.. People are turning their backs on it, politicians who are playing fast and loose with the language and don’t care about the language. I think that is a real trend.

Male voice: You’re not actually talking now about politicians with a capital P.

Male voice: No, I’m talking about language politicians. All the people in this room, right, feel very much the same way. People who are jeopardising the language, right, don’t argue with them just going to turn our backs on them, just have nothing to do with them. Because the vast majority of people that are interested in Cornish want that language, want our language to survive, and I think that’s what you see that these people are being. They’re out on their own now and very few people stand behind them saying, "You know, you’re a good chap, we really agree with you that being marginalised," and that’s a trend.

KM: What about Cornish getting over into the public domain, how do you see Cornish functioning amongst the wider general Cornish public? What ways do the wider general Cornish public use the Cornish language?

Fem voice: Take it into …. Nursery rhymes.

Fem voice: Those things accompanied by bilingual shipping like official forms and such….

Male voice: That’s not happening yet.

Fem voice: No.

Male voice: That’s what should happen. We have had programmes in Cornish on the television but since we had the so called Westcountry television I don’t think there’s been any Cornish that I know of.

KM: The Westcountry has now gone out, it’s Carlton now.

Male voice: Well, TSW do in fact do some and the previous one, whose name I can’t remember, Westward.

KM: Oh, yes.

Male voice: Westward did some as well, I’ve got some on video tape.

KM: That’s going back some.

Male voice: If I’d want to identify …. I’d actually say BBC Southwest actually, because I believe that for somebody who’s supposed to be a public service broadcaster, there isn’t a lot of evidence that they’ve been doing anything in terms of public service for Cornish.

Fem voice: If you monitor the news nightly, I would say one in eight items …less than that

Male voice: And the other thing is that if there is a big event on in Cornwall you’ll get less coverage on the Plymouth based television on the BBC and ITV than you will see on the Welsh language programmes as I can receive them, and I actually watched … both, and I watched, I tape recorded the stations that were supposed to have come from Cornwall during the March up to London and every single night on the Welsh television they had items about it. It was too weak for me to record, the signal is not good enough it won’t tape record, and I cant really…. whereas I can watch. I’ve got two video recorders and I recorded the two stations, ITV and BBC1 news, and there wasn’t a single mention, there was more coverage in the national news than there was in the…..

KM: That’s right, I saw items on this in Scotland. The Cornish are Coming.

Male voice: I was up in London at the same time, actually, I watched the local news up there and they covered it quite well.

KM: I’m just taking the BBC national cover which we got on the six o’clock news because we don’t get an opt-out …and you know, they did feature on a couple of days Keskert Kernow…. And on one of those days there was a feature about the Lyverjy in Helston…

Fem voice: They tried out, I can’t remember what the….it’s something, but they tried out…they were very pleased withthemslves in the west … they were trying out a little actual spoken Cornish. I mean it sounds as if, I mean, normally, that the people are trained and have to know exactly what they’re talking about and no way did they, or sound as if they did or going to. It was all slightly funny, you know, the programme went out clever to be able to sort of say that.

KM: Okay, well I, what extent do you think Cornish actually gets used in public events in Cornwall, not specifically tied to the language movemnent, at all?

Fem voice: It gets used as a … where its lost in value instead of its genuine value, like having Andrew George make a speech in the House opf Parliament. He used some Cornish and this was novelty value, I mean, ….thank goodness he did it but the way it ws reported wasn’t, this is a real native language which is being used properly.

Male voice: Even when it’s done for the right reasons and done the right way, the way it’s reported tends to trivialise and …. And I mean, just, we’re sort of bordering on, I know censorship is a bad word to use, I’ll say motive, but we have got a problem in Cornwall, was it five out of six of the mainpapers are owned by the Mail Group, because we know that the Mail Group are not exactly sympathetic to anybody on the Celtic fringe – put it that way. So, I mean, there is a tendency for articles to be almost snide, or a bit joking, which of course tends to provide that negative stereotype that we’re trying to abandon. You know, we can’t seem to win in terms of getting the appropriate publicity.

Fem voice: The other place where people come in contact with and joining people is … or at Gorseth ceremonies or at traditional services and all , yes, there’s a Cornish part to those events and because they are, I mean, people go, yes they enjoy them but they don’t appel to everybody. They are a particular sort of event that you have to be a little bit academic, or a little bit weird or a little bit nationalist or. There’s all sorts of labels that could be attached to you for going to those things. The ordinary person on the street doesn’t tend to go to them unless they have an interest in Cornish culture.

Male voice: What happenes to be in the area.

Fem voice: Yes. Again, the language doesn’t come over well, but the people who go think, oh great, and they’ll probably will go again if it’s somewhere else and they’ll take their friends but the way it’s introduced is very, very slowly. It’s not coming into the public domain with a bang and saying this is great, this is our language.

Male voice: That wouldn’t be covered on the television either. The Gorseth. If there’s any mention of it all it’s going to be hardly mentioned.

Fem voice: ….Ancient historical ceremony … it’s a bit quaint, it doesn’t come over as it properly should should.. conscious it’s not being reeported properly inaudible

KM: So, it would be quite safe to say the most outrageous things about the Gorseth .. and know that you would never really run any risk- libel, slander….

Male voice: Can I say that the Welsh….

Fem voice: It’s the one time when you would be reported if you did come .. If you say something outrageous, whatever it is, extraordinary, I mean then therefore other people think that the Cornish are extraordinary.

KM: Exactly.

Male voice: I tell you we’ve got five minutes of the news in Cornish, I think one of the interesting things about that is inaudible

Male voice: Can I have one comment on one particular occasion we had one of the people came from Wales, visiting Bodmin….. and I stood there and my mouth just about hanging down by my knees. He was stressing the Gorseth process in Welsh, and I thought, my goodness, if only the people in Cornwall could actually understand what he was saying because this was just as they do in Welsh, extremely …. , firy, it really was, I mean it was very, very strongly worded and his translation didn’t do justice when he did say what he was going to say. He toned it down for the English version.

KM: Well, has there been no function for Cornish like the millennium celebrations or at the time of the eclipse or.

Male voice: The millennium hasn’t come yet.

KM: I know it hasn’t come but there’s been people celebrating it. I don’t know what’s going to happen next year but the run up has been, you know, quite a good run in for it.

Male voice: ..to celebrate the real one.

KM: Has there been no function for the Cornish language in these momentous events?

Male voice: All I know is I sold my Cornish language t-shirts

KM: What, for the eclipse?

Male voice: Yea, I did two t-shirts and I did sizeable writing. I did Cornish on the top and one with the St Piran’s. Cross on it and an English translation underneath and not all of this for just Cornwall, and a mug and I sold the lot. I did a roaring trade, it was amazing that I can say that they’re everywhere, all over the world.

KM: Go on! What’s the Cornish for eclipse?

Various voices: Dyfyg howl - lack of the sun

Fem voice: We are having the Celtic Congress in Cornwall this year. I think there’s a terrible, tremendous hunger at the moment …. That’s my feeling about it.

Fem voice: I think it’s all been associated with cultures and whatever, it ought to be developed as a language in its own right, not attached to whether you’re not … or .. or whatever or .. You shouldn’t have to be, as you said, you shouldn’t have to … to get into that…you just want to be Cornish

Male voice: Whats amazed me, since I’ve started this, is the amount of foreign people that know the Cornish language. It amazes me that I have Germans, I have Italians, I have French, I have everyone and people know the language and it amazes me. I go to Brittany a lot, I’ve got Breton friends, and I sell there and do really well.

Male voice: It’s something that I think hundreds edging round which is quite important which is the, if you’d just ask the question in any other way, "why is Cornish the main showcase to Cornish, why they think why the Gorseth, and so on. I think the answer to that is because the Gorseth is one of our own institutions, right, and therefore it’s one of the few places we can actually use it to its full extent. The opportunities for using outside that are very little and therefore that’s one of the reasons we don’t actually get it there. So, it’s almost turning the other way, you’ve got the institutions outside the usual indigenous Cornish ones were actually accepting of the language then we can actually introduce a language into those situations much more readily.

Male voice: Can I say incidently that that was thr reason why in the last century I think it’s something like in 1870 or something that the Gorsedd at the Eisteddfod passed a ruling the Welsh Eisteddfod was run in Welsh and no English was allowed. And the reason for that was, it was quite simply because thee was so many other forces that were militating against the Welsh language that this was entirely within their control, the other was without their control and the point is, within the things that were within their control they said, "We will have no English." They effectively ruled aginst it. And that was very, very successful.

Fem voice: Can I just come back to the original question, how to get Cornish into public domain? You were saying that a third of the speech community needs to be under 25 years old. came to be used must be under 25 years old.

KM: To give potential for the continuation to natural increase.

Fem voice: So where we need to be is in the nurseries, in primary schools and junior schools.

Male voice: It’s a schoolteacher isn’t it, you practically have to get the County Council every time. the education department the LEA.

KM: The Welsh did this, first of all through playgroups, Ysgolion Meithrin….. they started this out with the .

Male voice: That’s so there’s going to be interest at the start.

KM: Yes, and that produced the critical mass of demand for Welsh primary education.

Fem voice: I think the frightening thing is that if parents and children were at this stage, there would be a demand, the demand is there already, it’s just that people who are in the local authority are not going to acknowledge that, they wouldn’t take the risk of coming this early.

KM: There’s no earthly reason, I mean it’s a free country, there’s no earthly reason why anybody should not go out and conduct a public opinion survey. Mind you, it would be very good if you could get it done professionally and that would, as it were like, cost money. But, they’re not frightfully expensive things. In 1981, before all this development occurred in Gaelic, I was asked by a Gaelic organisation, a principal one at that time, if I would conduct a national opinion survey on attitudes towards Gaelic and policies for Gaelic, which I did, throughout Scotland, throughout the general population. And it was very interesting to see what the level of general attitudes were towards the Gaelic language and policies for it, and this was actually used, quite substantially, as amunition and reference was made to it to make cases for advances and advances started to be made very rapidly after this time. You can’t expect, you know, somebody to come and do it like for you, whereas if you wait you, that will never happen. But, this wasn’t a very rich organisation, it was a hand to mouth, it was, well, actually they’d got a little money over from a Scottish Office grant and they approached me and said, "could you do such and such a study on this money?" And I said, "well, yes I could." I was doing it as a favour to them so I wasn’t really charging for my professional services. I employed two field workers, who were students, as a holiday job, and it was quite feasible in terms of the budgetSo, iwasn’t frightfully expensive but a lot happened as a result of it.

Fem voice: How many people did you survey?

KM: A normal sort of quota, such as the MORI polls do, System Three poll, Gallup poll. In the Scottish population we actually interviewed 1,129 people.

Male voice: 6 million isn’t it?

KM: Out of 5 million, 4.9 million. So, if we were doing really the same methodology as the main opinion polls.

Male voice: So, that’s a worked out percentage of the terms of population.

KM: Well, it’s quotaed, you see, you know from the census, so many men, women, different occupation groups, different age groups, so you get quotas of people who youmeet opportunistically say on street corners and we also did some cluster sampling in typical housing areas as well. So, that we got a quota sample of the population, not the best way.

Fem voice: Did you actually put that together as a separate or was it an overall opinion poll? Did you itemise these quotas in those particular…?

KM: Well, I actually put it together as an ordinary opinion poll for them, but I actually did further analysis on it, showing differences between different types of people, which was very interesting, different social groups, people with different connections with the Highlands and Gaelic speakers, and different knowkedge of the Gaelic language. That was quite interesting but I mustn’t talk about me.

Various people talking: Very interesting

Fem voice: There’s actually nothing to stop us doing that that.

KM: No, it isn’t all that much dosh.

Fem voice: How much dosh are you talking about then.

KM: Well, Im talking about 1981, it was done on a budget of £500.

Fem voice: So, a few thousand would do it.

KM: Oh, yes.

Unclear…I think we’ll be talking to you later.

KM: I could recommend you some people to do it. But, I think that, you know it’s certainly worth while thinking about it this, it’s worth while thinking about a strategy for, you know, what is the necessary research to be done in order to conduct effective lobbying on behalf of a language group. I know I’ve had discussion with people like the the Ulster Scots Language Group in Northern Ireland and with the Scots Language Group in Scotland. We’ve had a couple of conferences when we’ve gone over what are the research needs for the, for language development in these two cases.

Fem voice: In saying that, where does your report, who do you report to? What does it actually get established?

KM: Well, actually it was reported to An Comunn Gaidhealach, the Highland Association. It was a publication which was available. It was in the public domain, An Comunn Gaidhealach sold it, it was also a Hatfield Polytechnic research paper and it could be published, it could be purchased through the polytechnic.

Fem voice: You’re talking about through a college or something .

KM: Yea, a polytechnic place, you know, sort of sold it to the public who wanted it and it had to be reprinted. I’m quite certain, you know, something like this, in terms of the Cornish language would excite a great deal of public interest and indeed such a thing as that would raise consciousness in itself. You know, the campaign to get Cornish on the census, the campaign to get the Cornish entity in the ethnic group question, I mean, these all raise consciousness. They mightn’t butter much parsnips in themselves, but it’s you know, …Inaudible

Fem voice: It’s knowing which route to go and who to direct it to is probably the most crucial of all.

Fem voice: What we are going to have is this University of Cornwall and that is, we are going to have to probably have a long battle to get the Cornish language or a Celtic School. They don’t think that the people who are connected with it strike me as being particularly favopurable. Tthey’ve all got their own agendas and some of them are very nice people and all that, But I don’t see that they are very Celtic orientated, Cornish or any other language orientated.

KM: I see, just before this runs out, I’m going to go round and say sound bites. What’s for Cornish in the future? Just a phrase.

Fem voice: Oh, I don’t know.

KM: For Cornish in the 21^st century?

Fem voice: Our children.

Male voice: Opportunities for children … on the National Curriculum

KM: You’re missing out on this. Increase business opportunities.

Male voice: Yes, definitely, I’m all for cultural – give Cpornwall an identity.

KM: Richard?

RGJ: More teaching and more publications.

Fem voice: To carry on and fight on and get where we shall get

KM: Anybody who didn’t contribute that has now thought of a good concept?

Fem voice: To increase tourism.

Fem voice: Yn Kernewek, mar plek!

KM; Yn Kernewek, mar plek.

Male voice: I just think it’s the children thing. I certainly think that one comment was made there

END OF TAPE