The State of the Cornish Language

 What is the Cornish speaking community like?

I’m not sure how accurate it is overall to talk of “the Cornish speaking community” — there’s actually no settled community anywhere in the world where the Cornish language is spoken on a day-to-day basis as anyone’s primary language. There are families where one or both parents speak Cornish fluently and raise their children to speak it, so it’s spoken in the home and with friends and relatives who also speak it. But overall there aren’t very many people who do or have done this. And even if they speak Cornish at home, they’ll have to revert to English as soon as they go out shopping, or when they go to school or the workplace. There just isn’t (yet?) a permanent and self-sustaining community of speakers who can and do use the language constantly in every aspect of their lives, as can be done with Welsh for those who live in a majority Welsh-speaking area. So yes, the only people who can be said to be first language speakers of Cornish are those few who’ve been raised speaking it at home, but there’s really no “total immersion” environment even for them (except for an occasional day or weekend at a language event).

Learning Cornish will be a challenge. It is not the formal aspects of the language itself. I know enough Welsh and Breton to make it seem familiar out of the gate.

The biggest challenge comes the issue in the passage above. There are no geographic communities where one can reasonably expect to use Cornish throughout the day. Of course anything you do on the Internet will be in English, but that's the same situation you see with many other languages right now, which have official language status in nations with their own governments, armies and navies, and businesses that conduct business in that language. English is threatening all other existing languages that way. It wasn't in a position to do this before the Internet, but especially after social media, it is a trend that is accelerating, even in places like France.

Cornish is actually trying to return from extinction. Cornish speakers would love to have the problems of either Welsh or Breton, both which of are in a many better place than Cornish, even despite the longstanding attempts to wipe out the latter by the French government.  But Breton could disappear easily within another two generations and be where Cornish is now. Cornish may actually succeed because it already bottomed out, and has a dedicated community to revive it over time. The fact that anyone speaks it at all at this point is a great success.

But the goal is always to have a community---a town of some size where one can live one's life for most purposes, and which Cornish is the daily language. That means that when a truck goes down the street for, say plumbing, or heating and cooling repair, that the language on the side of the truck is predominantly Cornish.  This is the true dividing line being languages that are living versus ones that are now. Is there such a place as I describe? 

The key social dynamic for stability is whether mothers speak that language with their infants, and continue to speak it with them as they grow up. If this happens the language survives. When it stops, the language dies.

I have read that historians have noted that the Celtic loan words into English, which were acquired after the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Post-Roman Celtic Britain, skew heavily to the distaff---that is, words that would have been used predominantly by women. That means that the Roman-era Celtic British language (which would evolve into Breton, Welsh, and Cornish), hung on among women longer than men. It was conserving aspect of society at the time. 

I have a rather esoteric mystical theory about language learning that the ease of learning a language depends mostly on how many other people speak it. English is easiest. Chinese likewise is a very easy language to master simple sentences and conversation. It has nothing to do with anything about immersion. It applies even if. you are studying by yourself, with no outside help, from a book or tape course. Somehow the mechanism is not concrete in that sense. But it is. It's like the collective brain waves of everyone speaking that language make a sea of such energy vibrations that are tuned to that language specifically, and that it is easiest to plug into that when it is stronger, and harder when it is weaker. A language like Cornish will have a very weak signal, since at the moment I write this, there are less than a thousand people who speak it fluently. But that's probably enough, I think