Everything about Dolly Pentreath totally explained
Dolly Pentreath (died December
1777) is often considered to be the last
monoglot speaker of the
Cornish language (that is, the last person who spoke only Cornish and not English) - a legend which rose as a result of an account written by
Daines Barrington of an interview he'd conducted with Dolly. She has passed into legend for cursing at people with a long stream of fierce Cornish whenever she became angry. Her death essentially marked the death of Cornish as a community language. According to legend, her last words were "
Me ne vidn cewsel Sawznek!" ("I don't want to speak English!")
Pentreath lived in the parish of
Paul, next to
Mousehole, where she was also buried; a monument in her honour was established in the churchyard wall in
1860 by
Louis Lucien Bonaparte, a nephew of
Napoleon. There are many tales about her. She was said to often curse people, including calling them "
kronnekyn hager du", an "ugly black toad", and was even said to have been a witch. Numerous other stories have been attached to her, the accuracy unknown.
A year following the death of Dolly Pentreath, Barrington received a letter, written in Cornish and accompanied by an English translation, from a fisherman in
Mousehole named
William Bodinar stating that he knew of five people who could speak Cornish in that village alone. Barrington also speaks of a
John Nancarrow from
Marazion who was a native speaker and survived into the 1790s.
As with many other "last native speakers", there's a matter of controversy over her status. William Bodinar (died
1794) learned Cornish as a child and, in
1776, could remember it well enough to in it. Some claim that
John Davey, who died in
1890 should be considered the last "traditional" speaker; he was said to have kept it alive by speaking to his cat. However there's some confusion to the extent of his abilities, notably that some may be attributed to him rather than his father.
Mebyon Kernow erected a plaque to his name as the last person to have significant knowledge of the Cornish language. Subsequently the Cornish language continued to have some usage, by a few isolated learners, and words of Cornish origin persisted in the local dialect of English. Currently some children and young adults speak various forms of revived Cornish as native speakers. For example the dancer
Gwenno Saunders, has been a native speaker of Cornish and Welsh since a child.
John Mann was one of a group of
Zennor children who spoke
Cornish among themselves in the mid 1800s. In 1914, this native Cornish speaker from
Boswednack, was living in Chapel Street,
St Just in Penwith at the age of 80, ten years after
Henry Jenner's Handbook of the Cornish Language sparked the revival.
Pêr-Jakez Helias, the
Breton writer, has dedicated a poem to her.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Dolly Pentreath'.
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