Celtic, one of the Brythonic dialects of Gaelic, was the common language of Britian before the Roman occupation and, surviving as neo-British, it travelled across the English Channel as the population fled the invading Saxons to become the Breton language (Spain). As the Saxons conquered most of England, their Tuetonic language became the foundation of Early English while the Celtic language of the native Britons was preserved in Wales, Cornwall and amongst the Bretons.
The Saxon conquest of Devon in 710 banished the Cornish Celts to the west of the river Tamar which still forms much of the boundary of the county to this day. Although Cornwall was conquered by the Normans in 1066, the Cornish proved stubbornly independent and their native tongue remained in common use.
The decline of the Cornish language was hastened by the Reformation and the issue of Christian prayer books in English which, like the scriptures, were never translated into the Cornish tongue.
By the late 17th century, use of the Cornish language was restricted to older speakers in the western parts of Cornwall and few children. By the mid-18th century, it had become further restricted to a few individuals in the west between Penzance and Land's End. Dorothy (sometimes recorded as "Dolly") Pentreath died at Mousehole near Penzance in 1777 and is reputed to have been the last person who could speak the language although Henry Jenner claims there were others who could speak Cornish into the mid-19th century. Dropping out of common usage excepting perhaps by a few fisherman and landsmen around Penwith and the knowledge of isolated phrases, the language was kept alive, if barely so, by a few dedicated men.
Henry Jenner, working at the British Museum as Keeper of Manuscripts in 1877, discovereda a fragment of early Cornish verse consisting of 41-line on the back of a charter dated 1340. His Handbook of the Cornish Language was published in 1904 and led to a revival of interest in the language, not least by inspiring others such as Morton Nance and A S D Smith. Although no census has ever been conducted, it is believed that there are now about 2,000 speakers of Cornish, perhaps 100-150 being fluent in it.
