Cornish ‘extinct’
By politics.co.uk staff
The languages of Cornish and Manx have been branded as “extinct” by the UN, which comes as a blow to the hundreds of speakers of those languages.
This is according to the new edition of the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, published by UNESCO, which also claims Welsh and Scots are “unsafe”.
“Saying Cornish is extinct implies there are no speakers and the language is dead, which it isn’t,” said Jenefer Lowe, development manager of the Cornish Language Partnership.
“Unesco’s study doesn’t take into account languages which have growing numbers of speakers and in the past 20 years the revival of Cornish has really gathered momentum.”
Cornish as a first language is believed to have died out in 1777, while the last native Manx speaker died in 1974.
Ms Lowe argued that there should be a category which recognises languages which have fallen out of usage but are being revived in the modern day.
“There’s no category for a language that is revitalised and revived,” she said.
“What they need to do is add a category. It should be recognised that languages do revive and it’s a fluid state.”
Editor-in-chief of the atlas, Christopher Moseley, told BBC News: “I have always been optimistic about Cornish and Manx.
“There is a groundswell of interest in them, although the number of speakers is small. Perhaps in the next edition we shall have a ‘being revived’ category.
“[Cornish] is among a group of languages that turned out not to be extinct but merely sleeping.”
