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Breton

Breizh

Breton (Breizh) is a Celtic language spoken in the Brittany region of France, with an estimated 500,000 speakers, though this large number is deceptive in that most native speakers are above 60.
Matyas Le Brun - poem 3 - Breton
Matyas Le Brun - poem 2 - Breton
Matyas Le Brun - poem 1 - Breton
Matyas Le Brun - short poem - Breton
Fabienne Geffroy - love poem - Breton
Fabienne Geofrrey - poem about love with the devil - Breton
Two Breton Poets
Erwan Le Bihan and Marie-Reine Jezequel - Breton
Interview with Rozenn Milin - Breton
Private video
Private video

Breton (Breizh) is a Celtic language spoken in the Brittany region of France. Although Celtic languages had been spoken widely within Western Europe before the expansion of Germanic and Romance speaking populations, Breton is presently the only Celtic language spoken on the European mainland, thanks to emigration from southwest Britain during the first millennium C.E. As a result, the language is most closely related to Cornish, followed by Welsh. The inhabitants of the coastal region of Brittany have long been closely connected to other Celtic people in the British Isles but Brittany was annexed to France in 1532 and included in the modern state with the French Revolution.

Within the Celtic subgroup of Indo-European languages, Breton is classified as a Brythonic language, together with Cornish and Welsh. The close connection to Cornish and Welsh can be observed from the simple lexical comparisons below (adapted from the Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg).

Breton Cornish Welsh Irish Scottish Gaelic Manx English
ti chy tŷ teach taigh thie house
dour dowr dŵr uisce uisge ushtey water
mab map mab mac mac mac son
penn pen pen ceann ceann kione head
ki ky ci cú cù coo dog
amann amanyn menyn im ìm eem butter
aval aval afal úll ubhal ooyl apple
amzer amser amser aimsir aimsir emshyr time
gwenn gwyn gwyn/gwen fionn fionn fynn white
skrivañ scryfa ysgrifennu scrí­obh sgrìobh screeu write

Endangerment

Breton became a severely endangered language due to decades of suppression at the hands of the French educational system. Today, there are an estimated 500,000 speakers, but this large number is deceptive in that most native speakers are above 60. Press (1986) estimated the number of active users at 50-100,000 over 25 years ago and this number has most likely diminished since.

Language suppression was extreme to the point that parents were not allowed to name their children with Breton names until 1993. The following quotes from various officials of the French state are representative of the language attitudes that led to the decline of Breton (see the International Committee for the Defense of the Breton Language for further context)

  • 1880s: Jules Ferry, the French Minister of Education, proclaims Breton to be “a barbarous relic of another age.”
  • 1845: teachers in the western department of Brittany are reminded by the sub-prefecture: “Above all gentlemen, remember that you have no higher purpose than to kill the Breton language.”
  • 1972: French President Pompidou states: “There is no place for regional languages in a France destined to mark Europe with its seal.”

Despite a precipitous downturn in language transmission, younger speakers, have now begun to emerge again from the Diwan bilingual schools which were established in the 1970s and are playing a key role in the revival of the language. There are interesting differences in the language of the older and younger generations, as most younger speakers learned the language in school later in life. While the phonology of the language among younger speakers shows a degree of convergence with French, the lexicon has also been purged of many French loan words that exist in the speech of older people.