'PRAG NA?': The new project that aims to support and grow social opportunities for Cornish speaking

News from Kernow Matters To Us:

'PRAG NA?': The new project that aims to support and grow social opportunities for Cornish speaking.

My name is Brian Rogers and I've just started as Project Lead for this one-year Cornwall Council funded project managed and led by An Rosweyth, the network of Cornish language organisations, and wanted to ask for your help in spreading the word, so please feel free to share this with your friends!

'PRAG NA?', or 'Why not?', has two main aims, both of which are about getting more people engaged with Kernewek and speaking it.

Firstly, to support and enhance existing social opportunities for speakers to meet and talk Kernewek together. This, of course, includes, Yeth an Werins throughout Cornwall and, naturally, beyond with the diaspora. As such, I intend to visit as many as I can and learn from them what works, what people enjoy and get the most from. Generally, I want to generate some key principles of best practice to help those that already exist to grow as well as develop some guidance to new startups.

The second aim is to develop a network of social activities that can be run as sessions with Kernewek at its core. They might be aimed at people with lots of Kernewek, just a little or, perhaps as importantly, no Kernewek at all. They might be aimed at adults, children and young people or families. These might be anything from pasty making to skydiving and all points in between! Again, I aim to generate templates and packs of activities that can be picked off the shelf for anyone to use.

This is an amazing opportunity to grow the language in areas that are, perhaps, in areas that we might not have been able to venture into before and make relationships that can be of massive help to the language community in the future.

So let's cut to the chase- I need your help.

I need, in the first instance, to gather a small group of people who would be prepared, within their part of the world, to help bring activities together and support the delivery of activities. The degree of language skill is not the essential thing here- the main attributes you need are a passion and commitment to Kernewek and a pencil and notepad!

I'm also looking for people who would be interested, keen and prepared to deliver sessions on something that they're passionate about, have a skill or interest in. No topic or interest is too weird or wacky- there's always someone else out there who will be interested!

So here's what I hope you can do. Firstly, please share this information. I'll be creating a Facebook group shortly and enter the twittersphere to act as a focus for conversation and information and I'll be asking you to share and like that too!

However, most importantly, I hope that you'll get in touch (you can contact me at the email address below) and get involved. There's a bit of a time schedule I need to keep to and I'm putting a meeting or event together that will be held at the end of May / beginning of June to kick the project off. I hope that we can run this as centrally as possible, so if you have an idea for a free venue- we could link it with an existing event or activity, of course- and perhaps would like to host it. Please let me know. That's also the first time to get those people together who would be willing to get involved with the project.

I'm sorry for the length of this post and say a massive ‘keslowena’ to all of you who've got to the end! Please help spread the word and help get the project off to a great start!

CONTACT DETAILS: You can contact me on prag.na@btinternet.com.

Kernow bys Vyken!

Issued on behalf of Kernow Matters To Us.

John, Teresa, Craig, Tony, Matt, Mike, Clive, Ronan & Mark

Elected Members of the KMTU Steering Group