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How do I let people around me know they can speak to me in Cornish?

The Badge Problem

Speakers of Cornish, along with speakers of many other minority languages I suspect, face a particular problem. You’ve just taken five or six years or more, and put in a lot of hard work to learn this language, but you’re probably the only one in your street who has. You’d like to use it now but you’ve no idea who else outside your immediate learning-group can speak it. Most Cornish speakers use English unless they know they’re in a Cornish-speaking group, so you could meet an unfamiliar Cornish speaker in the street and never know it - a missed opportunity.

The solution to this is fairly obvious; a visual indication of Cornish-speaking ability. Some sort of badge makes a lot of sense and certainly the Welsh and Scots Gaelic communities think so.   

So why isn’t there something similar for Cornish speakers?  The answer is that there have been many attempts at something along those lines and there are a couple of good designs around, but most of them are produced very cheaply to keep prices down and don’t make for a very wearable badge.  The test I always apply for this is; ‘Could you wear it to a funeral?’

Unfortunately, most of the badges which have been produced so far, although the designs are good, are not of high enough quality or are too big to be discrete, and don’t pass the wearability test.  

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The notable exception so far has been the ‘Kroenek’ (Kroenek Hager Du - Ugly Black Toad).  It’s been around a long time and outlasted other attempts at the same thing mainly, I think, because it’s been produced to a higher quality than most and is small enough to be discrete.  At approximately 2cm x 1cm it’s big enough to see the design but small enough not to be conspicuous.

The design is very culturally appropriate  - ‘ugly black toad’ is reputedly one of the insults aimed at Daines Barrington by Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole when he questioned the authenticity of her Cornish Language.   

The Kroenek does have an obvious disadvantage in that there’s no explicit reference to the Language on the badge itself, which, along with a lack of publicity about its use, means that most people don’t know what it is - apart from people who speak Cornish - who are the only people who need to know really!     

There is another aspect of the Kroenek which could make learners in the early stages a little hesitant to wear it, and that’s the fact that it has no indication of the speaker’s ability.  It’s a daunting thought to encourage people to speak to you in Cornish when you don’t know an awful lot beyond ‘dydh da’ and ‘duw genes’!

My suggested solution to this is very easy and very cheap.  Drawing-pins and map-pins are available in many different colours these days and paired with a ‘butterfly clutch’ to hold it in place on your clothing make a discrete, inexpensive pin-badge which is easily replaced if lost.  Use one of these in conjunction with a Kroenek and you have a way of visually signalling to others that you speak Cornish and what level of Cornish you’re comfortable with using.

I’d suggest using them in rainbow-order; white, red, yellow, green, blue to give a rough indication of your confidence with the spoken language. Just use the badge on its own when you’re confident of your fluency.

Kroeneks are available online from ‘Spyrys a Gernow’ […here…](£2.20 at the time of writing).

Butterfly clutches are easily and cheaply available online and coloured drawing-pins and map-pins at most stationary shops.

If more people used some sort of visual representation of their Cornish-speaking ability, people around them would start to realise that the Language is being used by ordinary people in the street, and maybe start thinking they ought to learn to use it themselves. It wouldn’t just be helping you, it would be helping the Language as well.

So if you’ve put in the time and effort to learn to speak Cornish, let everyone know about it…..you might find you have more people to speak to than you thought you did!