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North Cornwall is the largest of the six local government districts of Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. Its council is based in Wadebridge. Other places include Bude, Bodmin, Launceston, Padstow, and Camelford. The district was formed on 1 April 1974 by a merger of the boroughs of Bodmin and Launceston, along with Bude-Stratton urban district and Camelford Rural District, Launceston Rural District, Stratton Rural District and Wadebridge and Padstow Rural District.

North Cornwall is an area of outstanding natural beauty that is of important geological and scientific interest. It is the only part of Cornwall that is made of carboniferous sandstone. A similar area is covered by the North Cornwall parliamentary constituency.

The district will be abolished as part of the 2009 structural changes to local government in England.

The Cornish people are regarded as an ethnic group of the United Kingdom originating in Cornwall. They are often described as a Celtic people.

The number of people living in Cornwall who consider themselves to be more Cornish than British or English is unknown. One survey found that 35.1% of respondents identified as Cornish, with 48.4% of respondents identifying as English, a further 11% thought of themselves as British. A Morgan Stanley survey in 2004 indicated that 44% of people in Cornwall identify as Cornish rather than English or British, and there have been recent calls for more accuracy in the recording of the number who identify as Cornish in the 2011 Census.

As with other ethnic groups in the British Isles, the question of identity is not straightforward. Ethnic identity has been based as much – if not more – on cultural identity than on descent. Many descendants of people who came and settled in Cornwall have adopted this identity.

The subject of Cornish identity has been extensively studied in the Cornish studies series of books published by Exeter university press. Cornishness is examined with methodological tools varying from feminist theory to deconstructionism.

In the 2001 UK Census, the population of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly was estimated to be 501,267.

For the first time in a UK Census, those wishing to describe their ethnicity as Cornish were given their own code number (06) on the 2001 UK Census form, alongside those for people wishing to describe themselves as English, Welsh, Irish or Scottish. About 34,000 people in Cornwall and 3,500 people in the rest of the UK wrote on their census forms in 2001 that they considered their ethnic group to be Cornish. This represented nearly 7% of the population of Cornwall and is therefore a significant phenomenon. Although happy with this development, campaigners expressed reservations about the lack of publicity surrounding the issue, the lack of a clear tick-box for the Cornish option on the census and the need to deny being British in order to write "Cornish" in the field provided. The UK government has agreed recently that English and Welsh will have an ethnicity tick box on the Census 2011 but there will be no Cornish option tick box. Various Cornish organisations are campaigning for the inclusion of the Cornish tick box on the next 2011 Census.