Gwenno Saunders, Champion of the Cornish Tongue, On Sharing the Gift of Kernowek

Gwenno Saundres is a Welsh musician who released a Cornish Language album Le Kov (A Place of Memeory) in 2018. The impact was electrifying. The impact of the album on interest in the Cornish tongue has been widely acclaimed.  The Gorsedh Kernow went so far as to attribute the album’s release to the jump in the number of students sitting for the Cornish language certification exam, which in 2018 saw a record number of students certified in Cornish.

In an iterview posted to the Australina website "The Music", Saunders tells intererviewer Anthony Carew why she chose to relaease an album in a "minority lanaguage": 

“It’s quite a good conversation starter,” Saunders says, from her home in Cardiff. In turn, a Gwenno interview is, indeed, a conversation; her music the starting point for a conversation full of big ideas about the world.

Making an album sung in Cornish was, for Saunders, “always something [she’d] wanted to explore”. She was “given the gift” of her two ‘other’ languages, Cornish and Welsh, through her parents, linguists who met at Oxford, her father studying Celtic, her mother studying Welsh. “It was actually a really keen interest of theirs,” Saunders recalls. “It wasn’t: ‘Oh, we’re just like this and we always have been and we’ve always been from here.’ That’s not my background. My family’s from all over Britain and Ireland. [But] I only spoke Welsh and Cornish at home growing up, I never spoke English.”

“Naturally I’m anti-imperialist, because I come from cultures that have been oppressed. One of the Cornish revivalists, Robert Morton Nance, in comparing cultures with nature, said that a meadow needs to be varied to thrive. If you just had one type of tree or one type of flower across the earth, then the earth would die. Just as monoculture is a disaster environmentally, monocultural and monolingual is a disaster for humankind in the same sense. So much of the way that we treat the environment comes from living in a society that tries to homogenise everything – not just culture, or human beings, but the whole planet... We’ve got a strong connection with nature, [but] that connection is being severed. So much, within a late capitalist society, we define the value of language and culture as something that needs to be able to be monetised. I’m in complete disagreement with that, of that being any value marker.”

See The Full Interview Here: https://themusic.com.au/article/0NrIwsXEx8Y/gwenno-anthony-carew/