Nations Blog

Lisa Simpson, the spiky-haired U.S. cartoon character, may just be the spark that revives an ancient language and fuels a tiny political movement at the tip of the southwest English coast.
The sister of bad-boy Bart and daughter of bumbling Homer will appear in a special episode of “The Simpsons” shouting out support for the independence of Cornwall in the nearly dead language of ancient Cornish as an alternative broadcast to the Queen’s traditional Christmas address.
Matthew Clarke, Lisa Simpson’s translator and a member of the Cornish Language Fellowship, told Reuters that news of the Christmas special has ignited more than the usual mocking interest in a language which some say was the lingua franca of such British legends as King Arthur and Boadicea.
“Before you got a lot of people writing on the Cornish language as a bit of a joke,” he said.
Clarke said the way much of the media viewed Cornish changed almost overnight when the press discovered it would feature in a cartoon series that is famed for lampooning American life and gained international currency poking fun at other stereotypes in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, and elsewhere.
Clarke said the number of people using the Web site he runs, www.cornish-language.org, doubled after news got out on The Simpsons’ Christmas special.

(Read more: Cornwall24)

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