Band translates Beatles into Cornish

A couple of Cornish musicians have decided to do their bit for the advancement of the local lingo by translating some of the Beatles' best-loved ditties into Cornish, the BBC reports.

Matthew Clarke and Dave Miller, who together form Skwardya, have already tackled She Loves You (Hi a'th kar) and Something (Neppyth) and are currently working on All My Loving.

Clarke told the Beeb: "We're just trying to expand the amount of stuff in Cornish that's out there. It's good to have some other things rather than just folk songs and the odd hymn."

Cornish, aka Kernewek, is reckoned to be spoken fluently by around 300 to 400 people, with another 5,000 having "some knowledge of the language", according to the Cornish Language Fellowship. It's a Celtic language closely related to Breton and Welsh, effectively entirely displaced by English by the end of the 19th century.

However, Cornish has in recent years enjoyed a revival, with the EU in 2002 rather kindly recognising it under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, in which it joined "Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Scots and Ulster Scots as protected and promoted languages". ®