Dolly Pentreath

Dolly Pentreath
Pentreath in an engraved portrait of 1781
Born	Dorothy Pentreath baptised 16 May 1692 Cornwall, England
Died	26 December 1777 Cornwall, England
Nationality	Cornish
Other names	Dolly Jeffrey
Occupation	saleswoman; fortune teller
Known for	last fluent speaker of the Cornish language

Dorothy Pentreath (16 May 1692 [baptised] – 26 December 1777), known as Dolly, was a speaker of the Cornish language. She is the most well-known of the last fluent, native speakers of the Cornish language, prior to its revival in 1904.

Baptised on 16 May 1692, Pentreath was probably the second of the six children of fisherman Nicholas Pentreath and his second wife Jone Pentreath. She later claimed that she could not speak a word of English until the age of 20. Whether or not this is correct, Cornish was her first language. In old age, she remembered that as a child she had sold fish at Penzance in the Cornish language, which most local inhabitants (even the gentry) then understood. She lived in the parish of Paul, next to Mousehole.

Perhaps due to poverty, Pentreath never married, but in 1729 she gave birth to a son, John Pentreath, who lived until 1778.

Pentreath is described as having been "the old matriarch of the Cornish language [...] Dolly was a Cornish fishwife who tramped her fishy wares around Penwith and Penzance. At the latter place she gained the reputation of being the last native Cornish speaker, though she may not have been. Opinion is also divided about how much Cornish she could actually speak - though everyone agreed she could swear in Cornish [...]

In 1768, Daines Barrington searched Cornwall for speakers of the language and at Mousehole found Pentreath, then a fish seller said to be aged about 82, who "could speak Cornish very fluently." In 1775 he published an account of her in the Society of Antiquaries' journal Archaeologia in an article called "On the Expiration of the Cornish Language." Barrington noted that the "hut in which she lived was in a narrow lane," and that in two rather better cottages just opposite it he had found two other women, some ten or twelve years younger than Pentreath, who could not speak Cornish readily, but who understood it. Five years later, Pentreath was said to be 87 years old and at the time her hut was "poor and maintained mostly by the parish, and partly by fortune telling and gabbling Cornish."

In the last years of her life, Pentreath became a local celebrity for her knowledge of Cornish. Around 1777, she was painted by John Opie (1761–1807), and in 1781 an engraving of her after Robert Scaddan was published.