Learn Cornish Online

Join the revolution with a self-paced, online course in the Cornish Language

Kernowek: the Cornish Language

Kernowek is the indigenous language of Kernow (a.k.a Cornwall), a Celtic nation in the South Western corner of the island of Britain.

Some form of it has been spoken here continuously for thousands of years, though in the 19th Century it ceased to be used as a community language. Thankfully, it remained in the hands of individuals until it began to grow again during the Revival at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Are you ready to start your Cornish language journey?

Explore the breathtaking coastal view of Cornwall, England featuring lush greenery and stunning ocean scenery.

Cornish is not just a language

Learning Cornish isn’t just about learning words and rules.

It’s about belonging. Belonging to a place, belonging to a culture.

Rather than wasting your time being sat at a computer learning words you will never use, this course focuses on the essentials – everything you need to know, but without the excess fat – so you can get back out there to use the language in the real world, with the people and land you care about.

Based on 15 years of research and testing
Currently only £5 per month with 1 week free trial!

About the Course

Frequently Asked Questions

This course focuses primarily on how you put sentences together, with a minimal amount of vocabulary learned to facilitate this.

The rationale for this is simple. You can look words up in a dictionary (or nowadays, an app), and you likely will continue doing for a while (I still am after 20 years). But if you don’t know how they go together, those words are useless.

Rather than the unnecessary stress of overwhelming learners with vocabulary while they are still grappling with how you put them together, we’ll focus on grammar first, and then give you tools we’ve developed in-house to increase your vocabulary towards the end of the course.

You need no knowledge of Cornish to begin this course.
You will need to speak English.
It is helpful if you know Cornish placenames, but this isn’t a dealbreaker.

You will learn Cornish using the spelling of the Standard Written Form. However, some important spelling variants will be presented (this isn’t news to anyone, e.g. Color vs. Colour)

The Cornish presented here will draw on both of the major “dialects” of Cornish – Middle Cornish and Late Cornish – firstly to make use of some of easier structures early on, and to help learners have a familiarity with both.

This course aims to equip you with the minimum amount of knowledge you need to express yourself in Cornish, in as little time, with as little stress as possible.

This has been based on over 15 years of research into the Cornish language, experimentation and testing, and inspired by famous language teacher Michel Thomas.

There is no wasted effort on learning complicated and rarely used grammar or vocabulary, and instead, we go far beyond teaching you just a few phrases, giving you a real proficiency in the language.

This course aims to teach you all the structures you would require to express yourself in the language. Later planned advanced courses will teach you structures that help you have flexibility and nuance, and those that you might come across but might not use. You might also treat this as a “Primer” course, and follow this up with in-person classes, self-study textbooks or other methods.

This course is for people who want to learn Cornish and are able to self-study.

Lessons are kept short and introduce a minimum of material, and these are followed by Quizzes where you will be given a sentence in English, and asked to translate it to Cornish.

Currently, the cost is £5 per month following a 1 week free-trial as the latter stages of the courses are still under construction – this will rise once the course is completed.