Rhys Sandow: ‘The Anglo-Cornish dialect is ‘a performance, a deliberate performance’: Ideological orientation and patterns of lexical variation in a peripheral dialect’, English Today 143.36 (2020), 77-84
‘Attention, identity and linguistic capital: inverted style-shifting in Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis’, English Language and Linguistics 26.4 (2022), 677-95
‘Maid in Cornwall: social, stylistic and cognitive factors in lexical levelling, English Worldwide 442 (2023), 157-83
You’ve probably heard the hoary old tale of the English visitor who enters a pub in Wales and complains that all the locals immediately switched from English to Welsh on their entry. Apocryphal it may be but something like that deliberate linguistic shift appears to be occurring in Cornwall, at least according to Rhys Sandow in these three articles.
Rhys has been researching styles of speech and Cornish dialect words in the context of dialect levelling or the declining use of dialect terms. It’s long been a commonplace among sociolinguists that people drop vernacular words and modify their accent in more careful speech. But Rhys argues that in Cornwall, specifically in Camborne-Redruth, we can find the reverse pattern, an inverted style, as some people switch to using dialect terms in careful speech whereas in casual speech they don’t.
The initial approach involved 21 self-identified Cornish people and the word lunch-box. Whereas only two used the dialect alternatives of crib or crowst in casual speech, the number rose to six in careful speech. This inverted style was linked to local identity as all six scored higher on a measure of Cornish affiliation.
The second article above expands on this to involve 80 Cornish folk and dialect possibilities for woman (maid), walk (stank) and tourist (emmet). Using an ingenious method to elicit relatively casual and relatively careful speech, it was found that Anglo-Cornish1 variants were 12 times more likely to be used in careful than casual speech. Again, this was correlated with the strength of Cornish identity and in addition age (with over 40s more likely to employ the dialect terms). Meanwhile, there was no significant correlation with gender or class.
Rhys Sandow quotes one of his interviewees stating that dialect words are becoming ‘less authentic as they become a badge of a Cornishman’. He concludes that the use of dialect in careful styles functions as a rejection of powerlessness in the more general linguistic arena where English cultural norms hold sway and Anglo-Cornish dialect is frowned upon. To express their identity, Cornish patriots make use of Anglo-Cornish dialect as a symbol even as the material markers of cultural Cornishness drown in a sea of globalisation.
The final article in the series provides a more theoretical context for dialect levelling. The erasure of regional dialects has been the focus of a lot of study but this has mainly focused on phonetics and the sounds of the dialect with lexical levelling (the use of dialect words) less researched. In this article Rhys remedies this by focusing on a study of the word ‘maid’ and its use in Anglo-Cornish dialect. He finds the expected attrition with younger speakers only rarely using maid to mean woman. But at the same time the dialect use is recognised even by the younger cohort. Moreover, it can appear in new contexts and ‘maid in Cornwall’ tattooed on the arm of one of his interviewees serves as an example.
It would be fascinating to see this type of research replicated in other districts and with a larger number. However, the chosen dialect words seem a little archaic. The Anglo-Cornish maid for example has possible sexist overtones these days. This implication is something that a younger generation might be more attuned to and therefore reluctant to use the word. This was recognised in the article but may serve to skew the results somewhat. What about other words that are less traditional, such as ‘ansum? Or words that don’t have a direct English equivalent such as dreckly? Are these also uniformly in decline and does the careful/casual distinction still hold? Can we still identify a Cornish person by the greeting of ‘right?’ and the ritual response ‘right’, in some parts replaced by ‘you’ or ‘ess’?
Lots of other potential research questions around the levelling of the dialect come to mind. Is there still a difference between west and east Cornish dialects and are both experiencing levelling at the same rate? How does the linguistic symbolism found here relate to the broader sociology of Cornishness? It seems that as material markers of Cornishness disappear the use of symbolic Cornishness increases (see also Kennedy, 2016). But is this the case generally and what are its implications? The three articles reviewed here are very specialised works of sociolinguistics. They could be complemented and contextualised by some broader sociological research – a perfect subject for a doctoral thesis perhaps.
This research also implies that the Anglo-Cornish dialect may be converging in function with the revived Cornish language. Both are now important more as symbols of Cornishness than as practical modes of communication. Not that this is particularly new. The popularity of dialect tales and dialect performers (usually impeccably middle class) in the mid-1800s may indicate the beginnings of this process. Nonetheless, am I alone in not being able to shake the feeling that the death of Alan Kent last year did not just mark the too early passing of Cornwall’s best dialect writer but perhaps also effectively the demise of the Anglo-Cornish dialect as anything more than a ritual and relict performance?
Matter do ‘et?
- Anglo-Cornish is sometimes called Cornu-English ↩︎
Cornish studies resources 