Revived Cornish and Academia

Revived Cornish and Academia

Dr Merryn Davies-Deacon

I’m a lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast, and while I work in a French department and teach French language and linguistics to our students, most of my research so far has focused on either Cornish or Breton, its closest linguistic relative.

My field is sociolinguistics – how language is used in society, and how speakers harness it to frame identity and community membership. Among other topics, I’m particularly interested in the use of non-standard language varieties in minoritised language contexts. This, along with my interest in language and linguistics in general, probably stems from my upbringing: I grew up in a bilingual household, with both English and Cornish, specifically Revived Late Cornish, a variety that tends to be less publicly visible. That experience made me particularly alert to contexts where a sort of “double minoritisation” exists: where speakers of a minoritised language may be further marginalised within their own community by their use of varieties that could be perceived as non-standard or less reflective of the movement’s overall aims.

This interest fed into my PhD on Breton, which I completed in 2020: in it, I investigated the stereotypical notion that Breton speakers can be divided into two distinct groups according to their beliefs and language use. In the past, some research has suggested that new speakers of Breton (typically those who learn the language through education or other formal means) tend to employ certain linguistic practices such as avoiding borrowing vocabulary from French, but my research has shown that the situation is more nuanced than this, and that unexpected, innovative uses of language can be found on the internet in particular. My main project at the moment is reshaping this work into a book, due to be published by De Gruyter.
Alongside this, I’m also thinking ahead to other research projects, and I hope to continue working on Cornish alongside my research in francophone contexts. I’ve published a couple of articles on sociolinguistic aspects of revived Cornish so far, and have a chapter in press that takes a broader view of the same topic, which is due to be included in a book on the Celtic languages published by Palgrave Macmillan. I’m pleased to be contributing to this volume and hence, I hope, to be spreading awareness among Celtic studies scholars of the fascinatingly complex situation of revived Cornish: one of the things that frustrates me about some academic work on Cornish is that it can fail to grasp the nuances of the position we are in as speakers of a revived language in all its diverse forms. I’m also frustrated by the institutional structures of academia that typically require researchers to be part of a unit that concentrates on a mainstream, traditional subject of study; while I’m delighted to have a job in a French department and work alongside colleagues and students who are passionate about languages, it disappoints me that university careers tend to force us into larger, more established areas, and that early-career scholars working on minoritised languages may lose out on jobs and funding opportunities as a result.

I don’t get many opportunities to use Cornish here in Belfast, although I did teach an evening class at the university for a semester, and I’ve given a couple of taster sessions for a local Celtic studies group. I’m also contributing editor for the Breton and Cornish section in the annual publication The year’s work in modern language studies, which involves compiling a list of recent publications in the area and writing a report including a brief summary of each one, which is an excellent way of making sure I keep up with the scholarship being produced. As a sociolinguist from a Cornish-speaking background, I hope to be able to represent our language in academia in a way that acknowledges its unique status and emphasises the indefatigable work that those on the ground in Cornwall are doing to encourage the use of Cornish in the community.

Biography

Merryn Davies-Deacon grew up in Redruth and has been lecturer in French linguistics at Queen’s University Belfast since 2020. Merryn’s research interests include language standardisation, language attitudes, identity, language revitalisation and new speakers, language in (new) media, lexicon and lexicography, and orthography.