Last updated by kprzemek on 2019-03-29. Originally submitted by karolka on 2019-03-27.
The Centre for Celtic Studies cordially invite everyone interested to the next meeting of the Celtic Research Group will take place on Thursday March 28th at 18.30 in room K (Coll. Martineum). Our speaker will be mgr Piotr Szczepankiewicz, who will give a talk entitled The many authenticities of Cornish.
Time: 28 March 2019, 18.30
Place: Room K, Collegium Martineum
ABSTRACT
Cornish is a revived P-Celtic language brought back by Henry Jenner in the 20th century (Jenner 1904). It is known for its troubled language community divided by severalorthographies: Unified Cornish (Nance 1929), Kernewek Kemmyn (George 1986),Late Cornish (Gendall 1988) and Unified Cornish Revised (Williams 1995). A Standard Written Form was created in 2008 but it was considered disappointing (Davies-Deacon 2016: 38-39) and attracted approximately 40% of the revival movement(Szczepankiewicz, Brown 2018). The reasons for the continued split in the movement may be sought in the perceptions of what constitutes an authentic revived Cornish language among different groups within the revival. The aim of my Ph.D. thesis is research and discover what are the grounds for these concepts of authenticity within the Cornish language revival movement. This will involve answering four research questions:
1. Who speaks Cornish and what does “fluency” mean?
2. How does spoken Cornish compare to prescriptive norms?
3. What has happened in the last 40 years of the revival?
4. How are the varieties discussed?
The presentation will provide background information on the Cornish language, detail Nicholas Coupland’s framework of language authenticity (2003) upon which this research will be based, and propose ways in which I plan to answer the four research questions.
