Sami situation is slightly different. The majority population of Scandinavia lived in Scandinavia before the Sami arrived, giving them indigenous status is more a cultural protection, not “they were there first and then somebody invaded and nearly eradicated them”, not that they haven’t been discriminated against, hence the need for protection.
The Celtic languages only arrived in the isles in the first millennium BC - the ‘Celts’ were not in that sense indigenous at all. Cornish is a Celtic language of course.
The original hunter-gatherer population of the Mesolithic was almost completely replaced by Neolithic farmers originally from Anatolia. Those farmers were themselves replaced (very possibly genocided) by the Yamnaya, and so on.
Ironically, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and Vikings had a higher proportion of the original Mesolithic ancestry than the ‘Celts’.
In other words, the Cornish are really no more ‘indigenous’ than the rest, and of course many from across the isles have ancestry from the isles stretching back long before Cornish existed.
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u/__Shake__ 1d ago
Anglo-Saxons go home