Cornish meets Silesian: Comparing and contrasting the sustainability of two minority languages and cultures

Cornish meets Silesian

Katy Humberstone

Written by Katy Humberstone, PhD student in Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies at the University of Exeter. Email: kch207@exeter.ac.uk. With additional input from Adam Kubik, PhD student in the Faculty of Modern Languages at the University of Heidelberg and in Linguistics and Literary Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Email: adam.kubik@alumni.uni-heidelberg.de 

This blog post reflects and draws on material from a co-authored article which the present author co-wrote. The full reference for the original article is: Humberstone, K. C., & Kubik, A. (2023). ‘Celtic Meets Slavic’: The Social Sustainability of Cornish and Silesian Heritage in Europe and Overseas. Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 22(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.53779/LMZX3988 

At the time of writing, I am nearing the end of a two-month placement in Venice, Italy, as part of my PhD. As you might imagine, after living and working in Venice for a nearly a couple of months, you come to better appreciate the delicate nature of heritage in an area which sees a never-ending influx of tourists – in fact, there were an estimated 2.1 million visits to the Venice area in 2021.

You might wonder what connection this has to issues in Cornwall, but it can be said that many heritage cultures around the world – just like the Venice case – are under threat from the opening out of heritage to commodification (that is, how heritage and minority cultures are increasingly becoming ‘sold’ as products to be consumed). Cornwall, like Venice, is similar in this way. Indeed, increasing and important academic work within the field of minority languages, cultures and heritage (e.g., Duchêne and Heller 2012; Pietikaïnen et al. 2016; Jaffe 2019), is underscoring the fine balancing act between making minority languages and cultures known on the one hand, whilst also preserving their authenticity, on the other; and, of course, as mentioned in relation to my Venetian observations, this is a particularly hot topic at the moment for many heritage contexts across the globe.

This focus – on the sustainability of Cornish culture from broad perspectives – was the focus of a recently published article which I co-authored, fully integrating a comparative angle alongside the Silesian context, thanks to a collaboration with my colleague, Adam Kubik, from the University of Heidelberg.

Adam and I began working on the article in November 2021, having connected at a collaborative writing retreat as part of the SWWDTP Change Research Cluster. Adam works on Silesian literature, language and its diaspora in Texas, and I, Cornish heritage in the community of Hidalgo, Mexico (stemming from historical mining migration from Cornwall to Mexico a few centuries ago). After brainstorming to understand the connections between both of our research areas, we decided that an interesting focus would be a comparative exploration of the sustainability of Cornish and Silesian - in Cornwall and Hidalgo, and Silesia and Texas, respectively (the latter being two diaspora communities which we each had knowledge of).

Our article took the form of a review piece, uniting core academic pieces on the challenges and opportunities in terms of the sustainability of both cultures. The core areas which we discussed were: (old and new) media; commodification; and diaspora. Although, in-line with the literature on the topic (e.g., Pietikaïnen et al. 2016), we acknowledged that commodification is a running thread to a more or lesser extent throughout all of these areas. For the latter reason and to be brief, I will here below focus on some of our observations of commodification in both the Cornish and Silesian contexts.

An interesting observation which surfaced from the article was the fact that the extent of commodification of Cornish language and heritage in Cornwall appears more widespread than that of Silesian in Silesia; indeed, while the Cornish culture is seeking to pull away from commodification, there are apparent pushes to make Silesian better known, precisely through the sale of products associated with Silesian language and heritage.

In our discussion of highly commodified contexts (with the Cornish context in mind), we drew on some state-of-the-art literature (specifically from within the sociolinguistics of small languages), which signalled new creative paths through which heritage cultures around Europe are being preserved in a way which is more sympathetic to local (hi)stories of a given area. A core case study for us in this way was the insightful work of the late Alexandra Jaffe (2019), a linguistic anthropologist who undertook a great deal of work on the commodification of minority heritages, specifically within the context of Corsica (an island of France). Jaffe (2019) demonstrated the different ways in which communities were forging new avenues for a more sustainable tourism – through, for example, bringing together tourists and locals more closely to ensure that visitors have a more in-depth engagement with, and appreciation of, the heritage of a given area. In the article, we noted that such new paths for tourist-local interaction were equally emerging in the Hidalgo context, as observed through my small-scale Master’s thesis work on the topic (Humberstone 2021). We therefore noted this as a focus which warrants further attention in the future, both from academic and on-the-ground perspectives.

Of course, the transformation towards a more socially sustainable future for Silesian and Cornish cultures is not something which can happen overnight, and it is a fine balance to achieve. To maintain or revive a minority language, or indeed a wider cultural heritage can often mean opening it out to as many people as possible. But, particularly in nowadays highly touristic contexts such as Cornwall, this can problematic, when, in the words of Leitch (2017, p.33) [Cornwall] becomes ‘a place to be consumed, to occupy, and to entertain’. Nonetheless, the existing research reunited in our article demonstrates how ‘economy versus heritage’ need not always be a binary opposition (Jaffe 2019), and that local communities are best placed to find (and must be supported in), finding new avenues to achieve a balance.

We hope that our article will pave the way for future collaborations. I (Katy) am currently undertaking my data analysis phase for the fieldwork which I collected in Mexico, of which one core research question focused on the socioeconomic sustainability of Cornish heritage in the Hidalgo area; I hope, then, that the findings stemming from this slice of my thesis work will shed further light on communities’ responses to heritage tourism. Adam, on the other hand, is working on his PhD in Silesian literatures, while additionally establishing the first Silesian-online course in German to ever be available. While working on different contexts, we enjoy discussing minority cultures and their visibility within a world which is at once, global and local, and we contend that the key to preserving minority heritage (language and culture) is to learn from one another, from context to context: collaboration and connection is crucial.

Bibliography

Duchêne, A. & Heller, M. (2012). Pride and profit: Changing discourses of language, capital and nation-state. In A. Duchêne, and M. Heller (Eds.), Language in late capitalism: Pride and Profit (pp. 16-31). Routledge.

Jaffe, A. (2019). Poeticizing the economy: The Corsican language in a nexus of pride and profit. Multilingua. 38(1), 9-27. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2018-0005

Leitch, O. (2017). The Cornish Question: Conflicted Means and Uncertain Ends in Cornish Heritage Tourism and Indigenous Identity. Unpublished MPhil thesis, Trinity College Dublin.

Pietikäinen, S., Jaffe A., Kelly-Holmes, H. & Coupland, N. (2016). Sociolinguistics from the Periphery: Small Languages in New Circumstances. Cambridge University Press.