WIKITONGUES: Elizabeth speaking Cornish

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• published: 12 Feb 2015
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Recorded in Truro, United Kingdom. Good evening, I’m Elizabeth and I live in Cornwall, I’m Cornish and I speak the Cornish language. I’m a Cornish speaker. So, I began to learn Cornish when I was... around about seven years old, I think. My mother was learning Cornish at evening classes and she came home and taught me and my brother to speak the language. Then my father learnt it too. And we all spoke the language together at home, when we were eating together and so on, ‘pass me the salt’ etc. And we went to lots of events together, like Cornish Language Weekends organised by the Cornish Language Fellowship. These events were for people who wanted to learn Cornish and I remember going there with my brother and playing with all the other children who were learning Cornish. There was a large group of us in those days, and all those children have now grown up, like me, and some of them are having children of their own now, so that’s the next generation of people learning Cornish as children, from their childhood. So that’s very good. The language did die out, about two hundred years ago, but after a hundred years of nobody speaking it as a community language people began to revive it and over the last century more and more people have learnt it. When I came back from university I... well, I wanted to return to Cornwall and do something, I didn’t know what, but I was in the right place at the right time and in 2002 Cornish was recognised as an official language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and for the first time ever there was funding, some money for the language. And because of that there were some new jobs, to do things with the language, and I was the second person to get a job developing the language. So I was a language officer. But now, well, I live in Truro, here. I don’t work with the language any more, I don’t earn my living from it, but I still do things like this. Tonight I am leading a Yeth an Werin (conversation group) with some people who are learning Cornish and some who are more fluent. Sometimes there are lots of us, other times there aren’t so many, but people come every fortnight to chat together. So I lead this. And also I present a radio programme, ‘The News’ on BBC Radio Cornwall, so I present that and that’s very, very good. It’s the only programme in Cornish on an official radio station. There’s another programme but that’s only available online. Besides that, well, I work at Truro Cathedral and I have a cat. My cat is called Ted. And I have a partner called Ross. So yeah, that’s all from me, I think. I can’t remember, I can’t think of what else to say. So yeah, that’s all. Goodbye!