9 votes

The musicians helping revive the Cornish language

3 comments

  1. DanBC
    Link
    The "Cornish language" (kernewek) is a bit controversial because it was dead in the 18th Century and the version that exists now is a recreation. This website goes into some detail....

    The "Cornish language" (kernewek) is a bit controversial because it was dead in the 18th Century and the version that exists now is a recreation.

    This website goes into some detail. https://www.omniglot.com/writing/cornish.htm

    3 votes
  2. vili
    Link
    Gwenno, the artist briefly featured in the video, had a wonderful debut album that remains one of my favourite releases of the last decade. It's called Y Dydd Olaff and was inspired by a dystopian...

    Gwenno, the artist briefly featured in the video, had a wonderful debut album that remains one of my favourite releases of the last decade. It's called Y Dydd Olaff and was inspired by a dystopian science fiction novel of the same title. Unlike her second album, which is in Cornish as the linked video mentions, her debut was primarily in Welsh with just one song in Cornish, and while I don't understand a word of either language, the soundscapes, her voice and the translated lyrics build absolutely stunning visual images about a pretty scary and alienating future. Or maybe it's already the present. I love it.

    Here's one of my favourites from the album, with a lyrics translation available in the video description. The album as a whole has this kind of a twinpeaksy dream pop vibe, combined with a minimalist electro pop production style.

    Her second fully Cornish album Le Kov is excellent as well, but the debut still hits me harder and I keep returning to it quite frequently.

    3 votes
  3. vili
    Link
    Language revival is a pretty fascinating subject. I think a dead language has been successfully brought back into wide use only once, in the case of Hebrew, but Cornish is an interesting current...

    Language revival is a pretty fascinating subject. I think a dead language has been successfully brought back into wide use only once, in the case of Hebrew, but Cornish is an interesting current example of a language that is in the process of attempting something similar, albeit on an arguably much smaller scale.

    From a linguist's perspective, these kind of efforts are particularly interesting as human languages are currently undergoing something of a rapid mass extinction. Our best estimates suggest that by the end of this century we will have lost somewhere between 50-90% of the roughly 6000 languages that are spoken today.

    While it's natural for languages to come and go, the speed with which this change is currently happening is quite unprecedented, and the number of living languages that we will have at the end of this century will be the lowest that it has been for a very long time indeed. Moreover, what is particularly important for linguistics, each lost language means a missing data point that could help us better understand how the human cognitive language apparatus functions. As a result, there is something of a race to document endangered languages, which in itself brings problems as resources are spread thin, leading to situations where some of the collected data sets are less robust than they probably should be.

    In this light, language revivals like Cornish give us important information about how "dead" data sets convert into "living" languages, i.e. how an academic representation of a language might end up functioning in the real world. This is in many ways very valuable information.

    This, of course, is purely a linguist's perspective of the topic as a scientist. For those actually campaigning for language revivals on the ground, so to speak, the main concerns are typically very much elsewhere, such as in questions of cultural, ethnic and/or regional identity.

    3 votes