Albums
Tresor
2022
Genre: Alternative
Release Date: 2022
By Peyton Thomas
Reviewed July 14, 2022
The singer and songwriter’s second album sung almost entirely in Cornish is a document of a revived linguistic heritage with a breezy, ethereal touch.
Gwenno Saunders’ new album Tresor is her second record sung almost entirely in Cornish, a Celtic language that bloomed around 600 C.E., and which the mothers of Cornwall passed down to their daughters for over a thousand years before the English more or less forced them to stop. Dolly Pentreath, purportedly the last fluent native speaker, died in 1777. But in 2010, the United Nations upgraded the status of Cornish from “extinct” to merely “critically endangered,” reflecting the work of the Cornish Language Partnership in standardizing written and spoken grammar for a community of about 300 speakers. The CLP also contributed to the opening of a Cornish-language nursery school, where, according to a news report, toddlers learn “to share their and play nicely in the .” , says Gwenno, is a record about her experience of becoming a mother, as well as a follow-up to her 2018 LP , lauded for bringing Cornish to wider attention. It’s as though, having turned to face the public and taught them all she knows of this new-old language, she is relishing the opportunity once denied to Dolly Pentreath: to pass her linguistic heritage to her child.