Disambiguation: you may be looking for general contemporary forms of the Cornish language

Cornish language

Cornish is a Brythonic Celtic language and a recognised minority language of the United Kingdom. Along with Welsh and Breton, it is directly descended from the ancient British language spoken throughout much of Britain before the English language came to dominate...

.

Modern Cornish (Kernuack Nowedga) is a variety of the revived Cornish language

Cornish language

Cornish is a Brythonic Celtic language and a recognised minority language of the United Kingdom. Along with Welsh and Breton, it is directly descended from the ancient British language spoken throughout much of Britain before the English language came to dominate...

. It is sometimes called Revived Late Cornish (RLC) or Kernuack Dewethas, to distinguish it from other forms of contemporary revived Cornish.

When Unified Cornish

Unified Cornish

Unified Cornish is a variety of revived Cornish. Developed gradually by Morton Nance during and before the 1930s, it derived its name from its standardisation of the variant spellings of traditional Cornish MSS...

 came under heavy fire in the early 1980s, various attempts were made to rectify its problems. While some supporters stuck with original or modified UC, two main schisms arose, that of Kernewek Kemmyn

Kernewek Kemmyn

Kernewek Kemmyn is a variety of the revived Cornish language.Kernewek Kemmyn was developed, mainly by Ken George, from Unified Cornish in 1986. It takes much of its inspiration from medieval sources, particularly Cornish passion plays, as well as Breton and to a lesser extent Welsh...

 led by Ken George

Ken George

Kenneth J. George, writing as Ken George, is an oceanographer, poet, and linguist noted as being the originator of Kernewek Kemmyn, an orthography for the Cornish language supporters claimed to be more faithful to Middle Cornish phonology than its precursor . Kernewek Kemmyn was introduced in 1987...

, and that of Modern Cornish, led by Richard Gendall

Richard Gendall

Richard Gendall is a British expert on the Cornish language, born in 1924. He is the founder of "Modern Cornish"/Curnoack Nowedga, which split off during the 1980s. Whereas Ken George mainly went to Medieval Cornish as the inspiration for his revival, Gendall went to the last surviving records of...

. Unlike Kernewek Kemmyn

Kernewek Kemmyn

Kernewek Kemmyn is a variety of the revived Cornish language.Kernewek Kemmyn was developed, mainly by Ken George, from Unified Cornish in 1986. It takes much of its inspiration from medieval sources, particularly Cornish passion plays, as well as Breton and to a lesser extent Welsh...

 which tended to go to medieval Cornish for inspiration, Modern Cornish uses the latest known forms of Cornish from the 17th and 18th centuries from writers such as Nicholas Boson

Nicholas Boson

Nicholas Boson was a writer in, and preserver of, the Cornish language. He was born in Newlyn to a landowning and merchant family involved in the pilchard fisheries....

 and John Boson

John Boson (writer)

John Boson was a writer in the Cornish language. The son of Nicholas Boson, he was born in Paul, Cornwall. He taught Cornish to William Gwavas. His works in Cornish include an epitaph for the language scholar John Keigwin, and the "Pilchard Curing Rhyme". He also translated parts of the Bible, the...

, William Rowe, Thomas Tonkin and others, and Anglo-Cornish

Anglo-Cornish

Anglo-Cornish is a dialect of English spoken in Cornwall by Cornish people. Dialectal English spoken in Cornwall is to some extent influenced by Cornish grammar, and often includes words derived from the Cornish language...

 dialect words of Brythonic origin. Critics claim that the later forms of Cornish are corrupt and anglicised, but supporters of Modern Cornish counter this by saying that they are continuing the natural evolution of the tongue where it left off.

The orthography

Orthography

The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...

 of Modern Cornish is a standardisation of the English-influenced orthographies of Cornish writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, and its grammar is more periphrastic than that of Middle Cornish-based varieties. It retains a number of English borrowings discarded by Kemmyn and Unified, e.g. wolcum instead of dynargh for 'welcome'. It makes sparing use of accents and diacritical marks. For instance, the word for 'good' typically spelt dâ, could also be written daa, and the word for 'month' could be spelt mîz or meez.

Cussel an Tavas Kernuak

Cussel an Tavas Kernuak

Cussel an Tavas Kernuak is an organisation promoting the revival of the Cornish language, and is represented on the Cornish Language Partnership. The CLC encourages research into the Cornish of all periods but supports the teaching and dissemination of modern rather than medieval Cornish...

 is the governing body of Modern Cornish. The need for standard spelling when learning a language has led Cussel an Tavas Kernuak to adopt the Modern Cornish spelling standardised by Gendall and Neil Kennedy.

Modern Cornish provided a source of input into the creation of the Standard Written Form

Standard Written Form

The Standard Written Form or SWF of the Cornish language is an orthography standard that is designed to "provide public bodies and the educational system with a universally acceptable, inclusive, and neutral orthography"...

 of Cornish in 2008.

Example text

The following is a letter by William Bodinar, written in 1776, transliterated into Modern Cornish.

Bluth vee ewe try egence a pemp.

Theara vee dean bodjack an poscas.

Me rig deskey Cornoack termen me vee mawe.

Me vee demore gen seara vee a pemp dean moy en cock.

Me rig scantlower clowes eden ger Sowsnack cowes en cock rag sythen ware Bar.

Na rig a vee biscath gwellas lever Cornoack.

Me deskey Cornoack moas da maor gen tees coath.

Na ges moye vel pager po pemp en dreav nye ell clapia Cornoack leben,

poble coath pager egence blouth.

Cornoack ewe oll neceaves gen poble younk.

I'm sixty-five years old.

I'm a humble fisherman.

I learnt Cornish when I was a boy.

I was at sea with my father and five more men in a fishing boat.

I heard scant a single word of English in the boat for in seven days.

I did not ever see a Cornish book.

I learnt Cornish going to sea with the old men.

There are no more than four or five in our village who can talk Cornish now,

old people, eighty years old.

Cornish is all forgotten by the young people.