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Cornish has three main dialects, based on three different periods. The Cornish Language Council continues the work of those who attempted to save the language in its last days in the 1700s, re-forging the links with the historic language. However, other Cornish users persist with an older medieval revived dialect. The two main forms are Unified Cornish Revived, whose users base their spelling and pronunciation on the Cornish of 1550, and Common Cornish, which claims to replicate the pronunciation of 1500. Common Cornish also rejects historical spellings of Cornish in favour of a radically new system devised in the early 1980s. Unfortunately, this destroys our links to the historic language.
Over the past 30 years our knowledge of the more modern phase of Cornish has grown by leaps and bounds, helped by the fact that this is the only period of Cornish that possesses a record of how it was pronounced. This encouraged some Cornish speakers to revisit the aims of the early revivalists who wished to adopt the sensible strategy of picking up the language where it had left off. The Cornish Language Council (CLC) believes this to be a more logical approach to the revival of Cornish, building on the historic forms of Cornish in the period when Cornwall was beginning to industrialise and a modern Cornwall was being born. The CLC encourages research into the Cornish of all periods but supports the teaching and dissemination of Modern rather than medieval Cornish.
The Cornish Language Board (CLB) and the Cowethas an Yeth Kernewek are in the position of actively asserting that it speaks for all the language community, while vigorously promoting only one section of the language community.
