Dorothy Pentreath (16 May 1692 [baptised] – 26 December 1777) was a fishwife from Mousehole, Cornwall, England. She is the best-known of the last fluent speakers of the Cornish language. She is also often credited as the last known native speaker of Cornish, although sources support the existence of other younger speakers of the language who survived her. Biography Early life Pentreath was born in Mousehole, Cornwall. She was baptised on 16 May 1692, the second of six known 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." Later years, death, and legacy 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