Studh an Yeth

Studh an Yeth – a quantitative study of the Cornish language

by Davyth Fear

based on a talk given to 'People and Place', Independent Researchers Conference 2025, organised by the University of Exeter in association with the Institute for Cornish Studies and the Environment and Sustainability Institute, July 16, 2025

Estimates of the relative success of the Cornish Revival are usually confined to figures showing the number of speakers to various levels of proficiency. A brief trawl of the internet brought the following figures:

• 300,000 who knew a few words in 2005
• 3,000 who could manage simple conversations in 2005
• 2,000 fluent speakers in 2008
• 300 fluent speakers in 2000
• 300 fluent speakers in 2010
• 557 spoke Cornish as their main language in the 2011 census
• 300-400 fluent speakers in 2015
• 5,000 had a basic conversational ability in 2015
• 500 fluent speakers in 2018
• 563 spoke Cornish as their main language in the 2021 census
• 3000 people had minimal skills in Cornish
• 50 fluent speakers in 2019.
• 400 fluent speakers according to the Cornish Language Office in 2023.

One obvious problem is that some of these figures, e.g. the censuses, are self-assessed. Another problem is how one assesses fluency, which is perhaps responsible for the huge range between some of the figures quoted. It is difficult for Cornish to gain native speakers, and whilst a few children have been brought up with Cornish speaking parents, creating the conditions for successful acquisition of Cornish as a first language in childhood is extremely difficult when there is no opportunity for immersion in a Cornish-speaking community. In order to assess the language other methods must be found.

Languages predicate a number of skills, of which speaking is one. Possible ways of measuring other skills could be

• Listening – numbers attending Yeth an Werin (or Yeth an Werin Warlinen) meetings, the number of listeners to Radyo an Gernewegva
• Reading – sales of Cornish language books, numbers subscribing to Cornish language magazines such as An Gannas or An Gowsva
• Writing – an audit of published works (this has the advantage of being able to assess the amount written by orthography)
• Numbers of examination candidates / numbers attending classes

The problems involved with obtaining figures for some of these skills, and the validity of the statistics obtained, meant that this study concentrated on an audit of Cornish literature.

Rationale

The idea for this study followed a Pennseythen Kernewek (Cornish Weekend) event in 2024 when conversations between the author and several 4th grade students (the top grade in Kesva an Taves Kernewek examinations) revealed a widespread ignorance about the plural nature of the Standard Written Form, a general reluctance to read material commensurate with their supposed ability at that grade and relative ignorance as to what materials were available and where to get them, and some difficulty in coping with different spelling systems.

In 2020 Davies-Deacon noted that Cornish was now a pluricentric language, in other words, it had more than one codification or standard form. Cornish pluricentrism is a product of the history of the Revival, with different spelling systems being proffered as a response to the lack of standardisation in spelling in traditional Cornish and the preferred base for the revived language. This study enables an assessment of how pluricentric the language now is. It also enables a historical assessment of how much has been published in different orthographies at different times.

Diagram 1: The development of different orthographies in Cornish

Diagram 1 shows that traditional Cornish developed through the periods of Old, Middle, Tudor and Late Cornish, with each period containing its own literature, styles and grammatical and phonological idiosyncracies. When Henry Jenner, considered to be the father of the Revival, published ‘A Handbook of the Cornish Language’ in 1904, he based his spelling system on the period of traditional Cornish closest to him, i.e. Late Cornish. In particular he used the findings of Edward Lhuyd to guide him in devising a new standard orthography.

Very little literature was published in Jennerian, and in the late 1920s Robert Morton Nance, devised a new system, which he dubbed Unified Cornish (Kernewek Unys). Nance was a confirmed Mediaevalist and his system was based firmly on the Mediaeval miracle plays and saints’ lives of the 1300s to 1500s. Nance’s purism led him to reject many words and constructions from the language and to coin ‘purer’ words of Celtic derivation using Welsh and Breton cognates. Thus a debate about orthographies and the Cornish language also inevitably involves not just the orthography, but also grammatical and lexical issues. He quickly persuaded all others in the Revival movement to adopt his system. The one objector was Ralph St Vincent Allin-Collins (Hal Wyn), who saw no need to change from Jenner’s system. Hal Wyn was acknowledged as being the most fluent speaker of the Revival at that time, whereas others, such as Nance and ASD Smith (Caradar) were more comfortable writing in the language. His objections were brushed aside, however.

It was recognised as early as the 1950s that Unified Cornish was not very suitable for the spoken language. These grievances culminated in the mid 1980s when Richard Gendall started advocating a return to a Late Cornish base, and Ken George advocated a completely new orthography based on his phonemic analysis of the mediaeval texts. Again grammatical and lexical issues were a major part of the discussion. There were termed Kernuack Nouedzha (Modern Cornish) and Kernewek Kemmyn (Common Cornish) respectively. This led to a period of acrimony in the language community between supporters of Kemmyn (adopted by both Kesva an Tavas Kernewek and Cowethas an Yeth Kernewek), Modern Cornish and those who wanted to stay with Unified Cornish or to follow Nicholas Williams’ suggestions and amend it slightly to create Unified Cornish Revised. This period, known as the ‘Spelling Wars’ lasted until after 2000.

Following the recognition of Cornish by the UK Government under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2002, efforts were made to bring the community together and enable a Single Written Form.

Representatives from the Unified, Unified Revised and Modern camps met and agreed a compromise called by them Kernowak Standard (KS1). Meetings by them with the Common Cornish camp yielded little in the way of compromise, and in the end it was agreed that several variants of that was then called a Standard Written Form (SWF) would have to be allowed. Variants based on Middle and Late Cornish and for each, variants in spelling called Main and Traditional graphs meant that there were 4 main varieties of the SWF. Three of these have actually been used in literature, but the variant mainly used has been SWF (M) Mg. The concessions made to reach a SWF were too much for Nicholas Williams who went on to tweak KS1 into Kernowek Standard. Others in the Common, Modern and Unified camps persisted in using those orthographies anyway. In this study, the two varieties of SWF (L) have been included with Modern Cornish, mainly to avoid complicating the present division of systems. Diagram 2 shows where previous orthographies were most closely aligned to the SWF.

Diagram 1 thus shows 5 main systems of Cornish used today (the arrows pointing downwards).

SWF

Diagram 2: The relationship between the SWF and the systems previously used.

Methodology

To begin with, a thorough audit was made of everything that had been written in Cornish (both covering the Traditional and Revival periods). A large number of sources were consulted (the main ones being listed in Appendix 1). A list of publications was then drawn up, and has been published online at https://skrifakernewek.miraheze.org/wiki/Cornish_literature_by_year . The list is updated as and when needed. The list includes books, booklets, magazines and manuscripts.

A separate list was then made listing the word counts of most publications (Diagram 3). A number of decisions had to be made regarding the criteria for inclusion into the list.

Included in the word count were:

• Books, stories
• Magazines
• Both original works and translations
• Blogs
• Wikipedia
• Online stories
• Academic articles if written wholly in Cornish
• Newspaper articles wholly in Cornish
• Bible translations
• BBC news

Excluded from the word count were:

• Children’s books
• Transliterations from one orthography into another
• Social media
• Dictionaries/grammars/coursebooks
• The Korpus of the Akademi Kernewek
• Stories first published in a magazine
• Minutes + internal reports for organisations

Childrens’ books were regarded as not having a total word count approaching 1,000 words, so were not worth counting. Transliterations of one orthography into another, e.g. the Bible from Kemmyn to SWF (M) Mg just used the same words spellt in a different way. Separate translations, e.g. the Bible in Kemmyn and the Bible in Standard, were both allowed. Social media was considered impractical to count and also raises ethical concerns. Dictionaries and course books usually did not contain substantial bodies of text not published previously elsewhere. The ‘Korpus Kernewek’ available for perusal online at https://www.akademikernewek.org.uk/corpus/?locale=kw was not included because it uses texts which are not available for reading except as short excerpts. Much of the text uses translations which are also included in the word count elsewhere. Many short stories in Cornish, e.g. those by Jowann Richards, have been published both individually as a booklet and also serialised in An Gannas or elsewhere. It was decided to include these only if they had been published as a booklet first of all, as An Gannas was covered as a separate word count, and no attempt was made to separate out material published in An Gannas but published previously elsewhere. Minutes and internal reports were not included because of the difficulty in getting hold of them. It was thought that they would not greatly change the word count anyway.

Diagram 3. Part of the list of publications with word counts included. The list is colour-coded according to orthography

The list was then converted into a spreadsheet (see Diagram 4.)

Diagram 4. Part of the spreadsheet listing the wordcount for each orthography according to IP – in print, OP – out of print and LT – lyver termyn (magazine)

Word counts were made by:

• Copying and pasting into Microsoft Word and utilising the ‘word count’ feature. This was only possible when material was available online or digitally.
• For translations a web search could be made to find the number of words in the English (or other original language version) and rounding up slightly. My own translation of the children’s book ‘Swallows and Amazons’ ran to 103,000 words instead of the original’s 98,000, so this was thought to be appropriate.
• Otherwise, a typical page or number of typical pages (i.e. without significant losses due to illustrations etc.) were chosen and a word count made of them. This was then multiplied by the number of pages in the book. In the case of magazines, a further multiplication could be made for the number of issues. Sometimes (e.g. ‘Hwedhlow A-Dhiworth an Orsedh’) the book has to be divided because different parts had been written in different orthographies.

The author is aware that this can lead to some inaccuracies, but was of the opinion that these inaccuracies would cancel each other out over the whole of the study considering the volume of words included.

Results of the word count investigation

Diagram 5 shows the increase in amount of material written during the Revival over time. For context, about 180,000 words were written in Cornish before the Revival, divided fairly equally between Middle Cornish on the one hand and Tudor and Late Cornish on the other, according to Gendall and Toorians’s division (although Chaudhri and George disagree as to how the corpus of texts should be split) . In any case, this amounts to 1.5% of the entire output of Cornish by now.

Diagram 5. Measuring the cumulative increase in size of the corpus of Cornish literature of the Revival

The graph shows clearly the acceleration in output, especially from 1980 onwards, and again from 2010. It took 60 years for the first million words to be published, but subsequent million words took fewer and fewer years to complete (Diagram 6). The output varies widely from year to year because the publication of a large item such as the Bible can skew the results, as Diagram 7 shows. However it is also obvious that the base amount written per year has increased in the years since 2010. It is unclear as to whether this is the result of the ease of publishing text online or a clear sign that the size of the community is growing.

Diagram 6. The number of years taken for the corpus of Cornish literature to add a million words

Diagram 7. Output of words per year of Cornish literature.

The totals of everything published by spelling system (Diagram 8) shows indeed that Cornish is a pluricentric language. But these figures represent 120 years of literature and much of this content is now out of print. The graph for works in print (Diagram 9) is somewhat different, as magazines such as An Lef Kernewek (1952-82) and An Gannas for the period 1976-2009 are not available, and virtually all of the publications in Kernewek Kemmyn before 2009 are out of print.

The losers in this are the older orthographies of Unified and Kemmyn, whilst more has been published more recently in Standard, Modern Cornish and the more recent ‘official’ orthography of SWF (M) Mg. The figures also enable us to analyse in more detail the changing spectrum of orthographic change in Cornish.

Diagram 10. The comparative success of orthographic change in Cornish

It can be seen from Diagram 10 that the change to Unified Cornish was almost completely accepted. Hal Wyn continued to publish a few items in Jennerian for a year or two post 1929, and a few experimental items were written in Kemmyn before the adoption of the orthography by Kesva an Taves Kernewek and Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek in 1988. This was despite the limitations of Unified Cornish being known from the 1950s onwards.

The adoption of Kemmyn by KATK and KAYK prompted a period of acrimony and competing orthographies. Despite this, the relative dominance of Kemmyn stands out on the graph. However novels, short stories and magazines were still being written in Unified Cornish and Unified Cornish Revised (included together for the purposes of this study). The relative lack of content published in Modern Cornish might indicate a prioritisation of speaking over writing, although written material in this orthography has proved difficult to source.

It is the period following the Treyarnon Agreement in 2008 and the establishment of the Standard Written Form(s) that shows clearly the way that the language is split at present. People have continued to use Unified Cornish, Kemmyn and Modern Cornish at the same time as SWF (M) Mg and Standard have also been adopted. The SWF is not even the most used form according to word count. Indeed, if we look at output per year for each orthography, we can see that the ‘official’ orthography used by Kesva an Taves Kernewek during each period has changed little in its output per year over the three periods and that Standard has outproduced SWF (M) Mg by 35% since 2009. (Diagram 11)

However it is the language as a whole that is the winner, as readers now have much more of a choice of literature available. Fifty novels have been published in the 16 years since the Treyarnon Agreement as opposed to fifteen in the period of 18 years before it.

Diagram 11. Output per year per orthography

A closer look at the literature published in the period since the Treyarnon Agreement shows the following patterns. (Diagrams 12 and 13)

Diagram 12. Output 2009-2024 Diagram 13. The present divisions in Cornish 2009-2024 output

The biggest surprise is that SWF (M) Mg, despite being the version used by Kowethas an Yeth, Kesva an Taves and Cornwall Council, is only responsible for 26% of the output of the last 16 years, although some in Kowethas and Kesva still prefer to use Kemmyn. The divisions in the language caused by the orthographic revisions of 1929 and the 1980s are only too clear. The split between Middle and Late Cornish output in 2009-2024 material, (introduced by Morton Nance’s Unified Cornish in 1929), is almost 50/50. Even more surprising is that more is now written in Traditional graphs, i.e. Unified and Unified Revised, Standard, Modern and SWF (L) Tg (55%) than in Main graphs, i.e. SWF (M) Mg, SWF (L) Mg and Kemmyn (45%). Of course plurality is not so important if the language community is inclusive and everyone is supportive and accepting of each other. However as we shall see later on this paper, inter-connectivity is poor and the existence of other systems is more often ignored by many parts of the community.

So despite the fault lines present in the Cornish language revival, the growth of Cornish literature, especially during the most recent period since 2008, seems heartening. However the situation is not quite so simple for each orthography.

Table 1, Number of authors with word counts of 50,000 words + during the period 2009-2024

• Unified - 1,
• Kemmyn – 2,
• Standard – 2,
• Modern – 3,
• SWF (M) Mg - 5

Unfortunately, Table 1, which suggests there are a dozen or more very active authors in Cornish, spread over various spelling systems, doesn’t tell the whole story. Several of these authors are now over 80 years old and are no longer actively writing or translating. Others are not in the best of health. One (Eddie Climo of Unified) has sadly passed away.

It seems then that the impetus of the period 2009-2024 has been lost. For Unified or Unified Revised, no new books longer than simple children’s books have been produced for several years and the editor of An Gowsva has been finding it difficult to publish the magazine regularly. For Kemmyn, the Bible project has now been completed and the two authors still actively writing are Peter Trevorah, translating his English language novels to Cornish (and he has only one left) and Jerry Jefferies, who has been translating ‘Lord of the Rings’ since 2017. Apart from Nicholas Williams and Ian Jackson, no-one else is writing in Kernowek Standard. Both Rod Lyon and Jan Lobb, writing in Modern Cornish, are in their 80s. Only SWF (M) Mg has younger writers but, up to now, their output has not been so prolific as those writing for the other systems.

To conclude this assessment of a literature word count, we can say that the amount of written Cornish accelerated after 2008 with an increase in number of spelling systems. The amount written in the ‘de facto’ official orthography of the Kesva and Kowethas stayed at relatively the same level. Much of the increase came from Nicholas Williams’ translations of English classics in Standard, from various authors writing articles for wikipedia and for some long-running blogs and podcasts.

But can we find other figures to elaborate on this assessment?

Other figures illustrating the state of the Revival

Diagram 14. Number of Cornish classes

According to Speak Cornish, there were 46 Cornish classes in 2025, including both those held face-to-face and those online. Assuming an average of 6 per class, about 250 are receiving lessons. No data was available regarding previous years. So how does this compare with the numbers taking examinations?

Diagram 15. Number of examination candidates per grade per year according to Kesva an Tavas Kernewek

Although figures were not obtained for every year, a clear pattern can be seen in Diagram 15. The number of examination candidates peaked in the early 1980s and didn’t attain anything close to those numbers again until the Covid Pandemic, when many people around the world were learning languages online and all of the face to face classes had been re-organised to become online classes. The diagram also shows a large drop off rate between first grade and second/third/fourth grades. This graph also shows well that most of the learners do not take part in the examinations system, presumably especially those learning with orthographies not associated with Kesva and Kowethas. Approximately 220 people have passed the top grade of Kesva exams during the last 35 years. This figure alone puts into doubt the figures for fluent speakers discussed at the beginning of this paper. Not all who pass 4th grade can be said to be fluent in the language, and there are few people who are fluent who have not been through the examination route.

Diagram 16. Membership of Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek

As can be seen in Diagram 16 the pattern of membership of KAYK has seen a slow decline from a peak in 2007.

Diagram 17. Publication on traditional texts in Cornish

Kesva an Taves Kernewek’s history can be divided into three main periods, 1967-1988 (Unified), 1989-2008 (Kemmyn) and 2009-2025 (SWF (M) Mg). Most of the traditional texts were published in Unified by KATK (Column 1) during this first period, with some extra editions post-dating the move to Kemmyn being published by Agan Tavas. Most of the works were published in Kemmyn in the second period (Column 2) except for those of the Late Cornish period, and virtually all of these are now out of print. However the period since 2009 has seen only four publications in SWF (M) Mg (Column 3). Only one member of Kesva is actively editing the traditional texts. In contrast most of the traditional texts are available in Corpus Textuum Cornicorum in Kernowek Standard (Column 4), edited either by Nicholas Williams or Ian Jackson. What is not generally known within the SWF (M) Mg community is that many of the original texts are available on wikisource (Column 5), and SWF (M) Mg translations are available on another wiki, kernowlingo (Column 6). The website ModernCornish offers English translations with the original texts. The series ‘1,000 Years of Cornish’ is composed of academic studies of the texts in English (Column 7).

Both Kesva an Taves Kernewek and Kowethas an Yeth seem to be experiencing problems in maintaining the output of previous years.

Factors restricting the growth of the language community

There are a number of factors which act as a brake on the expansion of the literature of the Revival.

The first is that there has been considerable duplication in translating novels. Those in Diagram 18 are colour coded according to the spelling system used (Unified – purple, Kemmyn – red, Standard – green, SWF (M) MG – orange). Several examples of duplicated effort have occurred with a gap of only a year or two, and even in the same orthography! Another example of duplication is that examinations are now being held in Kernowek Standard as well as those held by Kesva in SWF (M) Mg or in Kemmyn. Kesva examinations are not available in other than those two orthographies. Whilst not restricting growth this diverts effort away from other activities.

Diagram 18. Duplication in Cornish translations.

Another consistent factor working against the growth of the language community has been hostility and toxicity within parts of the community, especially seen on social media. Several very active people dropped out of the community during the ‘Spelling Wars’ of the 1990s/2000s, harming its growth then . The author has seen several enthusiastic beginners hounded out of social media platforms for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Little is done to regulate abusive statements within e-mail and social media exchanges within Cornish language groups. This only serves to encourage to alienate people from the community causing people to turn their backs on it. This indicates there is a need to encourage interaction in person rather than relying on social media for maintaining the community.

Even when inter-personal exchanges are cordial, the fact that there are several spelling systems disillusions some. There is also a waste of resources within the language community. Much of the output of the Revival is hard to access. Some of it is only available in archive offices or libraries in other parts of Britain, whilst large proportions of the output of some orthographies are now out of print. Prominent examples of this are the works of Richard Gendall which are rarely available second-hand and also almost all of the catalogue of novels and short stories published in Kernewek Kemmyn between 1988 and 2008. No catalogues have yet been made of the archives of Henry Jenner nor the Gorsedh. Every year a volume is collated and sold of all of the submissions for the literary competitions for the National Eisteddfod of Wales. Yet it is believed that most, if not all, of the submissions to Gorsedh literary competitions over the years since the first competitions in 1940 have simply been thrown away.

Resources which perhaps ought to have been prioritised by the community have been produced or partially produced, but are unknown or ignored within the community either because they are in a different spelling system or because their format is not suitable for the nature of the community today. The only set of easy or graded readers commonly available are based on books written over 100 years ago. So far there are not many books + audio material combinations, although more are planned. The largest collection of text and audio files available is the 500+ podcasts by Nicholas Williams for An Radyo (formerly Radyo an Gernewegva).

Isolating parts of the community

As was explained in the Rationale, learners are generally ignorant about where to obtain Cornish language literature. Teachers of one orthography do not tend to advertise other orthographies (either because they do not wish to confuse learners, perhaps because they are generally unaware of them themselves or, more cynically, because they don’t want learners to become aware of a competitor and to learn that their own variety is not necessarily the only “correct” one).

Diagram 19 Co-operation amongst booksellers

Diagram 19 illustrates well that most Cornish language books are not sold via Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek, yet few learners at KAYK’s Pennseythen Kernewek had bought books from Spyrys a Gernow etc.. In an informal survey at a Yeth an Werin Warlinen in May 2025, learners who used SWF (M) Mg tended to buy most of their books through Kowethas (Kesva do not sell books themselves, but use Kowethas as a conduit for selling their publications). Those who were learning through Standard, Unified or Modern Cornish tended to go firstly to Spyrys a Gernow.

Moreover more and more materials are being published online. A good example of this is the LovingLivingCornish website which offers novels, short stories, reissued versions of classic pieces of literature of the Revival, the traditional texts as well as over 500 podcasts with text broadcast each week by the radio programme An Radyo. Another example is the blog of Sam Brown, again offering translated novels, short stories and poetry. Yet how many Cornish speakers know of these resources and visit them?

Diagram 20 Interconnectivity between Cornish language institutions (pre 2022)

The way that Cornish language institutions link to each other online is illustrated in Diagram 20. An Rosweyth connect organisations who run classes for learners and Yeth an Werin conversation groups. The one link between the Main graphs community and the Traditional graphs community is the reference to Agan Tavas on the Kowethas an Yeth website’s resources section. Agan Tavas do not return the compliment. Kowethas do not mention Spyrys a Gernow, perhaps because they are a competitor in selling Cornish books, though one would hardly think they are competing for market share.

Diagram 21 Interconnectivity between Cornish language institutions (from 2022 onwards)

Inter-connectivity was improved following the introduction of an online resources website at https://www.celtic-languages.org/Cornish/Resources (Diagram 21). How much use is made of it by class tutors is not known, however.

Summary

• More is published now than ever before in Cornish, in print and online, but in a far greater range of orthographies than before.
• The quasi-official orthography SWF (M) Mg is effectively no more used in writing as the previous ones, Unified and Common Cornish.
• A slow decline can be seen in the number of examination candidates and membership of Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek.
• Cornish speakers, even fluent ones, are generally ignorant about where to obtain literature in Cornish, and how much is available.
• By and large, language organisations do not link to each other, especially across the orthographic divide
• The present Cornish examination curriculum doesn’t equip learners with the skills to exploit this range of literature.

Appendix 1. Main sources for a list of Cornish literature

• Online shops for Spyrys a Gernow, Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek, Kesva an Taves Kernewek, Evertype, Lulu.com
• Agan Tavas - Cornish Library list
• ISBN list - Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek
• Kowethas an Yeth Kernewek - archive catalogue
• Kesva an Taves - rol lyvrow 2015 / 2017
• http://www.royalcornwallmuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Book-Catalogue.xlsx
• Merryn Davies Deacon - Draft bibliography
• Kist Kov catalogue
• Kresen Kernow catalogue
• Elio Smith Y Diaz-Andreu, University of Exeter
• kw.wikipedia,org/wiki/Studhyansow_Kernowek
• kw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lien_Kernowek
• https://pure.aber.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/9830627/1_introduction.pdf
• Levrow scrifys gena ma - Rod Lyon
• Hand-list of works published in Cornish since 1900 - Institute of Cornish Studies
• Cornwall Council Library Catalogue
• LovingLivingCornish - https://www.skeulantavas.com/
• List of fiction and essays from old MAGA website https://www.magakernow.org.uk/default_page-331.html