Istori Kewsys \ Oral Histories

Oral Histories

In 2008, the Cornish Language Partnership recorded a series of Cornish speakers talking about their experiences of using the language, as well as how they learnt it, and issues they felt were important. We intend to carry out similar interviews in 2019, with the intention of building up an oral history archive of speakers every 10 years to document observations on how the Cornish language community has changed. You can access both the recordings of these speakers, and PDFs of the relevant transcripts. 

Share your story

Ken
  • How did you learn Cornish?
    Firstly from Nance's 'Cornish for All', and Caradar's (A.S.Smith's) 'Cornish Simplified'. More recently with Hilary Shaw and her course books 'Kernewek Lowen'.
  • Why did you learn Cornish?
    Interest originally stimulated by teachers when I was a war evacuee in Cornwall 1940-44. (at Summercourt, and St. Ives.)​
William
  • My mother ... had Cornish language lessons at Trythall School in about 1918 from her teacher Mrs. Williams (wife of Joseph Harding Williams the head of the school) and kept a notebook (now sadly lost) of words, grammar, and expressions. [My mother] taught me as a child in turn the numbers as onen dew try padger pemp way say ay now deck.

We are still looking for more stories!

Social media

We have been sharing some of the archive documents on our Facebook and Twitter pages. You can download some of the discussions below as PDFs.