Performer says Cornish is her 'USP as a musician'

A Cornish musician is determined to bring "Cornish culture and language and history and folklore" into her work, she says. Martha Woods, who performs and writes songs in Cornish, said: "It's kind of my USP [unique selling point] as a musician, I suppose." It comes as people have been consulted about a 10-year Cornish Language Strategy to boost the number of speakers of Kernewek ("Cornish" in Cornish), which UNESCO has described as "critically endangered". Woods said she fell into performing in Cornish by accident after joining a Cornish dance troupe and learning about names. She was later asked to play in Cornish and said: "I really enjoyed it. It was a really great way to learn the language." When she started writing her own songs, she decided "to bring the Cornish language into my music". Woods has been writing songs in Cornish for the last 10 years, saying her "range of vocabulary is a bit weird" and she was "still learning the conversational stuff". She also said songs she wrote in English were different from those she wrote in Cornish. She is performing at various festivals in Cornwall during the summer, including Golowan in Penzance on Saturday 28 June, the Bodmin Riding and Heritage Day on Saturday 4 July and the Cornwall Folk Festival in Wadebridge on Friday 28 August. Cornwall Councillor Sarah Preece, who has promoted learning Cornish, said every child who left primary school in the county should be able to know the basics. There are also ambitions to have a bilingual school, which means "prioritising" teacher training as part of the language strategy. She told the BBC there were about 500 advanced speakers of Kernewek, adding: "People are very proud of the language. It's really important to keep it alive." Preece added: "Our culture and our heritage incorporates language and it's how we identify ourselves. It's how we link to the past. "If we don't link our young people to that incredible rich heritage through language, we are doing them a disservice."