The Act of Uniformity, which decreed that only English was to be used in all church services including those in Cornwall and Wales was passed in 1549. This instigated the Cornish prayer book rebellion which took place a few weeks later. This lead too many battles mainly in Devon, where around 4000 Cornish speaking men lost their lives. This loss of life began the demise of the Cornish language, as recent research indicates that prior to the rebellion the number of Cornish speaking people may have been low making the decline in numbers even more severe for the language. (See fig.1)
Between 1555 and 1558, there was a brief Catholic Restoration under Mary Tudor. During this time, John Tregear translates Bishop Edmund Bonner's Homilies into Cornish. This translation, at 130 pages, is the longest piece of historical Cornish prose. By 1602, however, the systematic efforts of the state were successful in driving the Cornish language into the western extremities of Cornwall.
The Late Cornish period began in about 1620 and lasted to about 1800. In 1660 a short story Jowan Chy An Horth (John House of the Ram) by Nicholas Boson was published and in 1707, Edward Lhuyd published his Archaeologia Britannica which describes aspects of the language such as grammar. Between 1730 and about 1750 Cornish continued to be used only in small isolated communities in the extreme west of Cornwall and Cornish speakers became increasingly rare. Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole who died in 1777 was supposed to have been the last Cornish speaker, although it is widely thought that the last native speaker of Cornish was John Davey of Zennor who had learnt the language from his grandfather and died in 1891.
The revival of the Cornish language was first successfully attempted by Henry Jenner and Robert Morton Nance when they published A Handbook for the Cornish in 1904. They used what is know as Unified Cornish or Kernewek Unyes, and is largely based on Middle Cornish from the 14th and 15th centuries, which was a high point for Cornish literature. Kernewek Unyes had standardised spelling and an extended vocabulary that is mainly based on Breton and Welsh and for a long period was the modern Cornish language and many people still use it today.
The second revival came over 70 years later in the early 1980s Richard Gendall, who had worked with Nance published a new system based on literary works of native writers such as Nicholas and John Boson, William Rowe and Thomas Tonkin. This system became Modern Cornish or Curnoack Nowedga. This differs from Unified Cornish by using the English based orthographies of the 17th and 18th centuries, though there are differences in vocabulary and grammar. More recently it has come to be known as Revised Late Cornish, as writers of Late Cornish often wrote Cornish using the English orthographic equivalent or the nearest English sound. For example the word good typically spelt dâ could also be written daa just as the word for month could be spelt mîz or meez. The need for standardised spelling when learning a language led the Cornish Language Council to adopt the Revised Late Cornish spelling standardised by Gendall as it made sparing use of accents.
In 1986 developed a revised orthography and phonology for Revived Cornish, which became known as Common Cornish (Kernewek Kemmyn). It was subsequently adopted by as their preferred system. It retained a Middle Cornish base but made the spelling more systematic by applying phonemic orthographic theory, and for the first time set out clear rules relating spelling to pronunciation. The revised system is claimed to have been taken up enthusiastically by the majority of Cornish speakers and learners, and supporters of this orthography claim that it was especially welcomed by teachers. Nevertheless, many Cornish speakers chose to continue using Unified Cornish. Despite later criticism by , Kernewek Kemmyn has retained the support of perhaps 80% of active Cornish speakers, according to the .
In 1995 an alternative revision of Unified Cornish known as Unified Cornish Revised or UCR (Kernowek Unys Amendys) was proposed by Nicholas Williams. UCR builds on traditional Unified Cornish, making the spellings regular while keeping as close as possible to the orthographic practices of the medieval scribes. The rationale behind UCR is that only attested Cornish can serve as a guide to its phonology. In common with Kernewek Kemmyn, UCR makes full use of Tudor and Late Cornish prose materials unavailable to Nance. Williams published his English-Cornish Dictionary in this orthography in 2000; the second edition was published in 2006. Like the other orthographies, UCR also has its adherents and its critics. It has not however become the standard for all users of Cornish.
In the a conscious effort was made to revive Cornish as a language for everyday use in speech and writing. The study by Kenneth MacKinnon in 2000 suggested that there were then about 300 people who spoke Cornish fluently, i.e. were able to talk at ordinary speed on everyday matters. The Cornish Language Strategy project is this year commissioning research to provide quantitative and qualitative evidence for the number of Cornish speakers. A few people under the age of 30 have been brought up to be bilingual in Cornish and English, and in daily life use English with non-Cornish-speaking people.
Cornish exists in place names, and knowledge of the language helps the understanding of old place names. Many Cornish names are adopted for children, pets, houses and boats. There is now an increasing amount of Cornish literature, in which poetry is the most important genre, particularly in oral form or as song or as traditional Cornish chants historically performed in marketplaces during religious holidays, public festivals, gatherings, and executions.
has, as policy, a commitment to support the language, and recently passed a motion supporting its being specified within the European charter for regional or minority languages. The language has financial sponsorship from many sources, including the . Increasingly, churches have notices in Cornish and English. The take-up of the language is now becoming so widespread that language organisations are finding it difficult to keep up with demand. One organisation, , promoted the language to pre-school children. There are many popular ceremonies, some ancient, some modern, which use the language or are entirely in the language. The language has been recognised as one of the five languages of the British Isles. This recognition should lead to greater access to funds from a variety of sources. Some of the supermarkets, municipal buildings (including public lavatories and council chambers) and even nightclubs in Cornwall now have a limited use of Cornish signage, an initiative made possible by a generous EU language and cultural heritage grant.
Fig.1
The shifting of the linguistic boundary in Cornwall 1300-1750.
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