Finch in Somerville
Finch Ward (2024) is a second year French and Linguistics student whose academic background and exceptional performance in Prelims just earned him a life-changing Michael Bishop Foundation Thatcher Scholarship.
I grew up near Land’s End, overlooking the seas said to bury the lost kingdom of Lyonesse. And yet the Cornwall where I grew up was not only a place of ancient stories and rugged beauty, but of rural marginalisation and chronic educational under-funding. Working hard at school and as a lifeguard every summer, I never had time to think about the old stories, or how the languages that brought them into my everyday reality.
All that started to change when I came across linguistics, initially through a school project led by a PhD student researching the death of the Cornish language. At the time, I didn’t know what linguistics was, and only felt intuitively that, somehow, this was important. My interest in languages bubbled under the surface until years later in French class, where I became fascinated by how cognates like castle and château had come to be pronounced so differently, despite their common origin. From there, I ended up down one internet rabbit hole after the next, leading me to historical linguistics and phonetics, and the realisation that linguistics was what I wanted to do.
As a Thatcher Scholar, I can pursue my curiousity to its end
Finch Ward
Now I’m able to study the subject properly at Somerville, historical linguistics and phonetics remain two of my favourite branches. Since coming here, I’ve met speakers of Welsh, Irish and other Celtic languages, and have also loved studying the idiosyncrasies of these languages in seminars and tutorials, from consonant mutations to the lack of a specific verb for ‘have’ across most Celtic languages. For example, the phrase ‘I have a cat’ is rendered yma kath dhymm in Cornish – literally ‘there is a cat to me’.
All this has made me reconnect with my Cornish roots. In Cornwall, the Celtic language can sometimes seem very far away. The last native speaker is said to be Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1777. Growing up, the only exposure I had to Cornish was the Kernow a’gas dynergh sign welcoming you back into the county. However, finding out more about the other Celtic languages fills me with hope that this does not have to be the universal fate for languages under threat. I’m even planning on learning Cornish itself, and am excited to see how much I’ll be able to converse with my Celtic-speaking friends.
Finch lifeguarding at Porthcurno Beach
As I learn more about linguistics, it becomes increasingly obvious how imperative it is that we protect the world’s endangered languages: of the roughly 7,159 languages in the world, around 3,193 are at risk. Indeed, in 1992, the linguist Michael Krauss warned that if we do not reassess our priorities, linguistics will go down in history as the only science that let 90% of its field disappear under its nose. My studies have already taught me so much about the value of all language varieties, and I now want to do everything I can to turn the tide on mass language extinction.
For goals like this, the Michael Bishop Margaret Thatcher Scholarship is life-changing; it will mean I can go on to further study debt-free and pursue my dream to be a linguist. In this career, I could work with local communities to preserve endangered languages, or study the effects of language policy on minority or marginalised languages, particularly in France, where the belief that every citizen should speak one homogenous language is unusually prevalent. This is to the detriment of the country’s minority and regional varieties, which until very recently were actively persecuted.
Breton is a fascinating example of this linguistic marginalisation. Today, Breton is the only Celtic language not officially recognised by a national government. And yet, Breton has a unique status as an Insular Celtic language, unrelated to the Celtic languages found across Europe before the Roman conquest. Instead, it shared a common ancestor with Cornish and Welsh which was spoken in parts of Britain until the fifth century CE, when the Bretons migrated to modern-day France. For as long as Cornish was a living language, fishermen from both regions could have happily conversed together.
This summer I hope to go to Brittany to hear from locals and understand the far-reaching effects of the French government’s policy towards their language. I’m particularly interested in the ‘gap in transmission’, whereby the new generation of Breton schoolchildren speak markedly differently from their native-speaker great grandparents, as the generations between had much less fluency. I hope to use what I learn about Breton in my future studies, and eventually work on protecting marginalised languages and dialects around the world.
Receiving the Michael Bishop Foundation Margaret Thatcher Scholarship has made globe-spanning plans like this possible, and I am extremely thankful to Lord Glendonbrook for his generosity. I will no longer have to work all summer, but can instead pursue my curiosity to its end.