ERIC ED594611: Cornish: The Cornish Language in Education in the UK, 2nd Edition. Regional Dossiers Series

2018·1 MB·English

by  ERIC

The Cornish language in education in the UK
European Research Centre on
Multilingualism and Language Learning
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CORNISH
The Cornish language in education in the UK
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This document was published by the Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism Albanian; the Albanian language in education in Italy
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© Mercator European Research Centre on Multilingualism Cornish; the Cornish language in education in the UK (2nd ed.)
and Language Learning, 2019 Corsican; the Corsican language in education in France (2nd ed.)
Croatian; the Croatian language in education in Austria
Danish; The Danish language in education in Germany
ISSN: 1570 – 1239 Frisian; the Frisian language in education in the Netherlands (4th ed.)
2nd edition Friulian; the Friulian language in education in Italy
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The contents of this dossier may be reproduced in print, except for commercial purposes,
German; the German language in education in Alsace, France (2nd ed.)
provided that the extract is proceeded by a complete reference to the Mercator European German; the German language in education in Belgium
Research Centre on Multilingualism and Language Learning. German; the German language in education in Denmark
German; the German language in education in South Tyrol (Italy) (2nd ed.)
Hungarian; the Hungarian language in education in Slovakia
The 2001 first edition of this regional dossier was compiled by Arjan Hut. The 2018 second
Hungarian; the Hungarian language in education in Slovenia
edition was compiled by Irish; the Irish language in education in Northern Ireland (2nd ed.)
- Dave Sayers (University of Jyväskylä, ORCiD no. 0000-0003-1124-7132) Irish; the Irish language in education in the Republic of Ireland (2nd ed.)
Italian; the Italian language in education in Slovenia
- Merryn Davies-Deacon (Queen’s University Belfast, ORCiD no. 0000-0003-4636-6860)
Kashubian; the Kashubian language in education in Poland
- Sarah Croome (SOAS University of London, ORCiD no. 0000-0001-6008-1242) Ladin; the Ladin language in education in Italy (2nd ed.)
Unless otherwise stated academic data refer to the school year 2017–2018. Latgalian; the Latgalian language in education in Latvia
Lithuanian; the Lithuanian language in education in Poland
Maltese; the Maltese language in education in Malta
Acknowledgements
Manx Gaelic; the Manx Gaelic language in education in the Isle of Man
The authors wish to express their gratitude to a number of civil servants (mentioned Meänkieli and Sweden Finnish; the Finnic languages in education in Sweden
throughout) for their kind assistance in clarifying a number of factual matters. We also thank Nenets, Khanty and Selkup; The Nenets, Khanty and Selkup language in education
in the Yamal Region in Russia
Jon Mills for his thoughtful comments on a draft.
North-Frisian; the North Frisian language in education in Germany (3rd ed.)
Occitan; the Occitan language in education in France (2nd ed.)
Polish; the Polish language in education in Lithuania
Romani and Beash; the Romani and Beash languages in education in Hungary
Romansh: The Romansh language in education in Switzerland
Contact information of the authors of Regional dossiers can be found in the Mercator
Sami; the Sami language in education in Sweden
Database of Experts (www.mercator-research.eu). Scots; the Scots language in education in Scotland (2nd ed.)
Serbian; the Serbian language in education in Hungary
Slovak; the Slovak language in education in Hungary
Slovene; the Slovene language in education in Austria (2nd ed.)
Slovene; the Slovene language in education in Italy (2nd ed.)
Sorbian; the Sorbian language in education in Germany (2nd ed.)
Swedish; the Swedish language in education in Finland (2nd ed.)
Turkish; the Turkish language in education in Greece
Anna Fardau Schukking has been responsible for the publication of this Mercator Regional
Ukrainian and Ruthenian; the Ukrainian and Ruthenian language in education in Poland
dossier. Võro; the Võro language in education in Estonia
Welsh; the Welsh language in education in the UK
Contents Contents
Glossary 2
Foreword 3 Glossary ..............................................................................2
1 Introduction 5
2 Pre-school education 14 Foreword ..............................................................................3
3 Primary education 18
4 Secondary education 22 1 Introduction ...........................................................5
5 Vocational education 24
6 Higher education 26 2 Pre-school education ..........................................14
7 Adult education 30
8 Educational research 32 3 Primary education ..............................................18
9 Prospects 33
10 Summary statistics 35 4 Secondary education ..........................................22
Education system in the UK 37
References and further reading 38 5 Vocational education ..........................................24
Addresses 43
Other websites on minority languages 45 6 Higher education ................................................26
What can the Mercator Research Centre offer you? 47
7 Adult education ...................................................30
8 Educational research ..........................................32
9 Prospects............................................................33
10 Summary of statistics .........................................35
Education system in the UK ...................................................37
References and further reading ..............................................38

Addresses ...............................................................................43
Other websites on minority languages ...................................45
What can the Mercator Research Centre offer you? ..............47
Education and lesser used languages
Glossary
DfE Department for Education
EYFS Early Years Foundation Stage
GCSE General Certificates of Secondary Education
FE Further Education
Ofsted The Office for Standards in Education
SWF Standard Written Form
The Cornish language in education in the UK
Foreword
background Regional and minority languages are languages that differ from
the official state language. The Mercator Research Centre on
Multilingualism and Language Learning uses the definition for
these languages defined by the European Charter for Regional
or Minority Languages (ECRML):
“Regional and minority languages are languages traditionally
used within a given territory of a state by nationals of that
state who form a group numerically smaller than the rest of the
state’s population; they are different from the official language(s)
of that state, and they include neither dialects of the official
language(s) of the state nor the languages of migrants”. The
Mercator Research Centre aims at the acquisition, application
and circulation of knowledge about these regional and minority
languages in education. An important means to achieve this
goal is the Regional dossiers series: documents that provide the
most essential features of the education system of regions with
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a lesser used regional or minority language.
aim The aim of the Regional dossiers series is to provide a concise
description of European minority languages in education. Aspects
that are addressed include features of the education system,
recent educational policies, main actors, legal arrangements and
support structures, as well as quantitative aspects such as the
number of schools, teachers, pupils, and financial investments.
Because of this fixed structure the dossiers in the series are
easy to compare.
target group The dossiers serve several purposes and are relevant for
policymakers, researchers, teachers, students and journalists
who wish to explore developments in minority language
schooling in Europe. They can also serve as a first orientation
towards further research, or function as a source of ideas for
improving educational provisions in their own region.
link with The format of the Regional dossiers follows the format of
Eurydice Eurydice – the information network on education in Europe – in
Education and lesser used languages
order to link the regional descriptions with those of national
education systems. Eurydice provides information on the ad-
ministration and structure of national education systems in the
member states of the European Union.
contents Every Regional dossier begins with an introduction about the
region concerned, followed by six sections that each deals with
a specific level of the education system (e.g. primary education).
Sections eight and nine cover the main lines of research into
education of the concerned minority language, the prospects
for the minority language in general and for education in
particular. The tenth section gives a summary of statistics. Lists
of regulations, publications and useful addresses concerning
the minority language, are given at the end of the dossier.

4
The Cornish language in education in the UK
1 Introduction
language Cornish is part of the Celtic language family, spoken by Celtic
settlers long before the Roman conquest. Cornish diverged
as a separate language during the early medieval period, as
Wales became politically separated from Cornwall. Cornish
continued to be a predominant vernacular in Cornwall until the
early modern era, before dying out during the first industrial
revolution. The Celtic languages are split into two branches:
Goidelic (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx) and Brythonic
(Cornish, Welsh, and Breton). While the Roman conquest
effectively began in 43 AD, Romanisation touched Cornwall
only lightly, thereby enabling cultural continuity throughout the
5th and 6th centuries (Deacon, 2007), together with the survival
of the language, which crossed the Channel to Brittany.
Within post-Roman Britain, Anglo-Saxons gradually drove the
Celts to the margins of the British Isles and eventually overran
Cornwall in the 9th century, establishing a border between
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England and Cornwall at the river Tamar in 936 AD, thus also
separating the Cornish and the Welsh, whose languages then
diverged. The Middle Cornish period (1200–1575) saw a literary
flowering for Cornish, and a maximum number of speakers (an
estimated 38,000, around three quarters of the population).
Partial use of Cornish for religious services from the 13th
century added some stability to the language. During the late
Middle Ages, however, Cornish began to lose ground in east
Cornwall as English influence came to dominate.
Causes were many and varied. There was the advent of the
highly centralising Tudor dynasty of the 15th-16th centuries.
English replaced Latin within the church during the Reformation,
and the Bible was not translated into Cornish – unlike in Wales
where translation was seen as a way to foster Protestantism
and see off Catholic dissent (Khleif, 1979, p.62). Cornish was
abandoned by the gentry, ties with Brittany eroded, and the
historical population was depleted by uprisings and disease,
and churned by the rolling population swells of industrialisation.
Cornish lingered in the westward extremes of Cornwall into
the 18th century but was in steep decline, and eventually faded
Education and lesser used languages
altogether from everyday vernacular usage in the late 18th or
early 19th century (accounts of the famed ‘last speaker’, Dolly
Pentreath, are too vague to rely on).
Since then Cornish has been manually reconstructed from
its scarce written remains – a laborious and ultimately partial
process. Today these reconstructed forms are used by a limited
number of people, mostly in Cornwall though to some extent in
other parts of the UK and abroad.
population In the 2011 UK Census, 557 people declared Cornish their
“main language”: 464 in Cornwall, 12 in neighbouring Devon,
31 in London, 3 in Wales, and the remainder scattered thinly
across the UK (NOMIS, 2013). A survey conducted by the
Cornish Language Partnership in 2008 reported 627 Cornish
speakers, with varying fluency: 45.1% “A few words/phrases”,
41.9% “Simple conversation”, 12.9% “Fluency” (Burley, 2008).
This suggests a lower figure of around 80 people using Cornish
as any kind of main language, though inevitably this survey
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may not have reached all Cornish speakers. This is the most
detailed and recent information about Cornish usage, and so
the remainder of this dossier will not have separate sections
on usage. All Cornish speakers are first-language speakers of
English; most learned Cornish in adulthood, predominantly in
private classes, independent study, or correspondence courses;
although a few were raised speaking Cornish and English
(Renkó-Michelsén, in prep.).
language status There is no specific UK legislation dealing with the Cornish
language, nor any statutory obligation upon schools or public
bodies to provide any services in Cornish.
Cornish, as spoken before its demise around the close of the
18th century, is not well documented. What literature once
existed was poorly maintained, much simply lost. The surviving
historical remains prior to its reconstruction are estimated at
“about 176,000 words” total (George & Broderick, 2009, p.754) –
spread across a highly disparate collection of often fragmentary
texts, written over several centuries, and almost all prose rather
than the spoken vernacular. This leaves an inevitably patchy
The Cornish language in education in the UK
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Figure 1: Geographical location of Cornwall in the UK (2008) (source: Wikimedia
Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cornwall_outline_map_
with_UK.png).
picture of what the language might have been like (Sayers
& Renkó-Michelsén, 2015, pp.23–24). From the 18th century
onwards, those few remains were pored over by a small number
of enthusiasts and philologists with varying levels of linguistic
training, increasingly with a view to filling the many gaps in the
lexicon and grammar in order to reconstruct a full language. The
late 19th century Celtic renaissance saw the founding in 1901
of the Celtic-Cornish Society, Cowethas Kelto Kernuack (Mills,
1999, p.46), superseded in 1920 by the Old Cornwall Society,
which grew into the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies. In
1928, the Cornish Bardic Assembly (Gorsedh) formed, with
twelve Bards and a Grand Bard. In 1967, the Gorsedh and the
Federation founded the Cornish Language Board, Kesva an
Taves Kernewek, to facilitate Cornish learning and formalise
the examination process. In 1979, in order to focus its efforts
on the formal work of exams, the Board founded the Cornish
Language Fellowship, Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek, to conduct
Education and lesser used languages
promotional activities for the language. Growing interest in
the language saw fluent speakers numbering around fifty by
1981 (Shield, 1984, p.336). The long reconstruction of Cornish
from its scant written remains continued into the 20th century;
but this was not a coordinated committee effort; and until the
early 21st century there was profound disagreement over the
most authentic reconstructed form. Cornish activism split into
competing factions during the late 20th century, each supporting
different reconstructed forms of Cornish.
In November 2002, the UK Government recognised Cornish
under Part II (Article 7) of the European Charter for Regional
and Minority Languages (CoE, 2018a). This was unusual for
the Charter, since Cornish had actually died out (before being
later reconstructed for modern use). In this, Cornish benefited
from a technicality: although the Charter “requires that such
languages be used ‘traditionally’ within a territory in the State
… it does not seem to require that such languages must have
been spoken by native speakers up to the present” (Dunbar,
88
2000, p.68). The Charter is a document of the Council of
Europe, not the European Union, and so the UK’s plans (at time
of writing) to leave the European Union will not affect this status
(Cornwall Council, 2017a).
Following Charter recognition, in due course a combined
European-national-local funding package ran from 2006 to
2009, intended to standardise Cornish for education and
official use, and to overcome the impasse over authenticity
noted above. This period saw the creation of the ‘Standard
Written Form’ (SWF), an orthographic compromise between
existing reconstructed forms of Cornish; and the founding of
the Cornish Language Partnership ‘MAGA’ (‘maga’ is Cornish
for ‘grow’ or ‘cultivate’), a public-voluntary sector partnership.
MAGA (and SWF) received all subsequent central government
funding; and the various factional groups generally expressed
support for SWF as a means to promote Cornish widely.
In 2014, the UK Government recognised the Cornish people as
a National Minority under the European Framework Convention
for the Protection of National Minorities – as it had previously
the Scots, Welsh, and Irish – including recognition of the