Ball Martin, M?ller Nicole. The Celtic Languages

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726 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

by them. Two other orthographies were created in subsequent decades, but, in spite of the

political history associated with the zedacheg spelling, the latter has persisted and become

over time the predominant orthography for representing the literary form of Breton, often

called Neo- Breton.

Neo- Breton

Beyond the orthographic reforms worked out by Hemon and others in 1941, the struc-

ture of the language had been modiﬁ ed and its lexicon greatly ampliﬁ ed to the point that

it could be described in part as a pan- dialectal koine with a bias (as had been true from

Le Gonidec’s time) towards léonais pronunciation, e.g., no palatalization of velar conso-

nants before front vowels, widespread in vannetais and in some areas of cornouaillais. The

structural and linguistic differentiation of Breton vis- à- vis French was emphasized by these

language reformers, with the goal of achieving a purer ‘Celticity’ in syntax and lexicon.

Ideologically speaking, the purpose of such corpus planning was to produce a language

based on logic and abstraction,

suitable for the creation of a secular literature catering

to the intellectual elite of Brittany, and, more pointedly, suitable as a national language.

Roparz Hemon was quite explicit about this in the manifesto with which he launched

Gwalarn in 1925, describing it as ‘a literary review destined for the elite of the Breton-

speaking public and whose ambition is nothing less than that of setting Breton literature

on the path for long followed by many a small nation’ (cited in Calvez 2000: 34). Later he

would write ‘From the dust of dialects a language was made . . . a literary language ﬁ rst,

from 1925 until 1941. From 1941, a language of State’ (cited in Le Dû 1997: 425).

The Gwalarn writers, especially Hemon himself, devoted themselves to the production

of this literature. Considering the relatively small number of participants in this effort, the

output of essays, plays, short stories, poems, reviews, translations of world literature, and

linguistic studies is truly impressive, surely more material quantitatively speaking of a

secular nature in two or three decades than had been written in the previous two or three

centuries.

Neo- Breton would later be the basis of a very popular method – Brezhoneg Buan hag

Aes (Breton Quickly and Easily) for learning Breton authored by Per Denez, of the Uni-

versity of Rennes 2, and ultimately it would be the variety taught in the Celtic Studies

section of that university, which over the years has become a major centre for the train-

ing of Breton language teachers, some of whom emerge as instructors in Diwan and the

bilingual streams of public and private education, and in adult courses. People learning

Neo- Breton are usually referred to as néo- bretonnants and, more recently, as britto-

phones; while native speakers are called bretonnants or occasionally, and sardonically,

paléo- bretonnants (Le Coadic 1998: 252).

Though Neo- Breton has become the prevailing literary standard, there are written vari-

eties of Breton that utilize one of the other existing orthographies and do not accept all of

the grammatical and lexical principles of Hemon’s Neo- Breton. For example, Skolveurig

(University orthography) was created in the 1950s by Breton linguist François Falc’hun

to bring Breton orthography closer to French (as opposed to the distancing principle of the

Peurunvan orthography). It does not use the <zh> digraph of Peurunvan, among other dif-

ferences. Writers choosing Skolveurig, like those using Peurunvan, tend to draw more on

the grammar and syntax of léonais than on the other dialects, but some adherents of this

orthography look to grammarians such as Pierre Trépos (1970), Sèité and Stéphan (1996)

or Visant Favé (2004) rather than Hemon (1970) or Denez (1972) in seeking models of

speciﬁ c morphosyntactic structures or idiomatic formulations. Skolveurig is the default

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN BRITTANY 727

orthography for the literary journal Brud Nevez and the publishing house associated with

it, Emgleo Breiz, in Brest.

Etrerannyezhel (Interdialectal orthography) is the most recent spelling system, created

in 1975 by linguist Fañch Morvannou and used by him in his teach- yourself- Breton book,

Le Breton sans peine (1978). The publishing house Skol Vreizh in Morlaix sometimes

uses this orthography in its Breton- language collection.

Thus, far from being all but extinct, as various observers had predicted in the past

century, Breton has been making a comeback as a standardized literary language, Neo-

Breton, a variety of the language that is now learned mainly in schools or in language

courses. Unlike Traditional Breton, which was learned at home as a ﬁ rst language and

which for countless centuries had no public presence, Neo- Breton is now heard (and has

been for several decades) on the broadcast media, is available in secular and educational

print media and is visible on road signage,

maps, street, house and shop names, commer-

cial products, etc. In the meantime Traditional Breton continues to decline as its speakers

pass away, a paradox well captured by Mari Jones in the title of an article – ‘Death of a

language, birth of an identity’ (1998) – which also points to a crucial symbolic aspect of

the ascent of Neo- Breton, i.e., as the icon of the sociocultural movement (which embraces

an economic component) to valorize Breton culture and history and to afﬁ rm its unique

identity within France and Europe.

The Neo- Breton/Traditional Breton divide

One might well ask at this point what Traditional Breton speakers feel about this seem-

ing transformation of the societal role and new value attached to the language. In fact,

some attention has been paid this topic, with most observers pointing to a linguistic rift

between the two groups (Timm 2001b: 452), and an apparent difﬁ culty or lack of will

of the two groups of speakers to communicate with one another. In many situations of

language revitalization (see below), the elders are looked to for assistance in providing

models of language usage and for help in keeping learners from slipping back to their

ﬁ rst language habits, but this sort of intergenerational co-operation has not worked out

very well in Brittany for several reasons. First, Breton has for long been a language of

the family, neighborhood and religious practice. Traditional Breton speakers have been

accustomed to this sort of domain specialization, ﬁ nd it ‘normal’, and thus may express

bemusement at the Neo- Breton speakers’ emphasis on expanding the role of Breton in

society. As Mari Jones puts it:

Standardized Breton and the local dialects . . . represent different ways of life, out-

looks and mentalities and it is for this reason that the revivalists have never been able

to ensure the support of a signiﬁ cant percentage of the native speakers . . . A cross-

dialect Breton for communication beyond the immediate vicinity is redundant for

these people, for this role is already performed by French.

(1995: 436)

A second issue has been the undeveloped or under- developed literacy skills in Breton

among the traditional speakers, leading to a lack of conﬁ dence in their own competence in

Breton and a tendency to defer to the Neo- Breton taught in the schools as ‘correct’ Breton

inasmuch it is based on a literary standard to which they have had no exposure. They

therefore do not feel that they are able to add to the further development of Neo- Breton.

Third, traditional speakers may feel annoyed by Neo- Breton. I have heard this most

728 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

often expressed when they listen to Neo- Breton on the broadcast media; a typical reaction

is to switch off the radio or television, while grumbling about not understanding a word.

Of course, this sort of attitude is not conducive to engaging the traditional speakers in dia-

logue with the neo- speakers.

Finally, traditional speakers are very sensitive to the nuances of Breton; if a Neo-

Breton speaker or learner makes an effort to speak with them in Breton, the traditional

speaker quickly senses the ‘accent’ and may shift immediately to French. The learner may

be frustrated in seeking information from a traditional speaker on how to express an idea,

being told curtly that ‘that isn’t said in Breton’, which cuts off the conversation (Miossec

2000: 1–2). In short, considerable persistence is required if one is determined to attempt

learning a traditional form of the language.

REVITALIZATION EFFORTS: REVERSING LANGUAGE SHIFT

Transformation and revitalization

Much of the work by language activists on revitalizing Breton over the past century con-

sists of efforts to ‘transform’ the language in order to render it more suitable as a vehicle

for literature, pedagogy and wider social life (Timm 2001b); Neo- Breton has been the

fruit of these efforts. However, another vital component of revitalization is the process of

Reversing Language Shift (RLS), a term coined by Joshua Fishman and explicated by him

in a book of that title in 1991. Here Fishman provides a detailed analysis of how RLS can

be accomplished for languages threatened with decline and disappearance. He introduces

the notion of the Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS) which illustrates, in

eight stages, the actions that need to be taken to reverse an ongoing process of shift.

The

steps begin with Stage 8, representing a situation in which a language community has all

but lost its traditional language and indicates remedies to deal with it, ending at Stage 1

with a nearly restored language. The full scale is presented in Table 15.2 (note that ‘X’ is

the place holder for any given language threatened with loss, and ‘Y’ the place holder for

the dominant language).

Recently Fishman’s scale has been applied to the Breton situation by Marcel Texier

and Diarmuid Ó Néill (2005), who evaluate, stage by stage, the status of Breton with

regard to RLS; the following paragraphs provide a summary of these authors’ analysis,

along with some additional observations.

Stages 8 and 7

Traditional Breton speakers correspond, grosso modo, to the criteria depicted in these

stages inasmuch as the vast majority of these speakers are concentrated in interior Lower

Brittany, they are fairly socially integrated, but they are mainly well over 50 years old

and thus well beyond childbearing. As noted earlier, there can be difﬁ culties in getting

traditional speakers to work with younger generations – i.e. in ‘reassembling from their

mouths and memories’ the linguistic material that could be transmitted to ‘demograph-

ically unconcentrated adults’ elsewhere in Brittany. There have been efforts to provide

adult language instruction – correspondence courses, evening, weekend, or week- long

courses have been running for years. It is estimated by the Ofﬁ ce de la Langue Bretonne

(2006b) that several thousand adults each year – 3,060 in 2006 – take some training in

Breton but this is a very small number in light of the total population of Brittany and when

it is remembered that death claims each year thousands of the traditional speakers.

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN BRITTANY 729

Stage 6

The attainment of intergenerational ‘oracy’ is seen by Fishman (and others) as the most

crucial aspect of RLS, for unless there is daily face- to- face interaction in the context

of familial and communal intimacy, most activities undertaken at the other stages will

remain limited in scope and even largely symbolic. This interaction is, in general, not

taking place.

Stage 5

The attainment of literacy in home, school, and community was rarely if ever a goal

for traditional speakers for whom literacy in French was always taken as the priority in

nearly all contexts (except religion). However, now that Neo- Breton has gained accept-

ability and is being promoted in the region, organizations have been created to assist

adults in the acquisition of Breton literacy. The total number of adults possessing moder-

ate to advanced literacy in Breton is relatively small – some 40,000 are estimated (Texier

and Ó Néill 2005: 181). As a result the demand for Breton- medium literature is not high,

which, in cyclic fashion, limits the opportunities for writers and journalists to express

themselves in Breton.

Stage 4

Lower- level education through the medium of Breton is available to some extent in Brit-

tany; clearly there is much more now than before 1977, the founding year of the Diwan

network of schools. Both public and private (Catholic) schools in addition to Diwan now

State 8: Most vestigial users of X- ish are socially isolated old people, and X- ish needs

to be reassembled from their mouths and memories and taught to demographically

unconcentrated adults

Stage 7: Most users of X- ish are a socially and ethnolinguistically active population but

they are beyond child- bearing age.

Stage 6: The attainment of intergenerational informal oracy and its demographic

concentration and institutional reinforcement.

Stage 5: X- ish literacy in home, school and community, but without taking on

extracommunal reinforcement of such literacy.

Stage 4: X- ish in lower education . . . that meets the requirements of compulsory

education laws.

Stage 3: Use of X- ish in the lower work sphere (outside of the X- ish neighbourhood/

community) involving interaction between X- men and Y- men.

Stage 2: X- ish in the lower governmental services and mass media but not in the higher

spheres of either.

Stage 1: Some use of X- ish in higher- level educational, occupational, governmental and

media efforts (but without the additional safety provided by political independence).

Table 15.2 The Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS). Source: Fishman

1991: 87–107

730 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

offer Breton classes for part of the curriculum where there is demand for this. It is im-

portant, however, for supporters of Breton (or any small language) not to place undue

emphasis on the schools to secure the future of the language, for without the support of

language use outside of the school walls, bilingual or immersion schooling in and of itself

will not ensure the indeﬁ nite continuation of the language.

Stage 3

Breton is weakly developed in the workplace beyond the local level of interaction since

French overwhelmingly dominates in all that has to do with commercial and professional

activities and negotiations beyond the local level. On the other hand, there has been some

effort to use Breton in labelling home- grown or manufactured products, an initiative pro-

moted by the business association Produit en Bretagne (Produced in Brittany): Breton

names are afﬁ xed to a wide range of products, from crêpes to clothing and on shop signs.

All of this draws attention to the language in a small way, offering a display of regional

identity but with virtually no inﬂ uence on the practice of the language. In only a few

extra- communal work domains – those speciﬁ cally devoted to the promotion of the lan-

guage such as the Ofﬁ ce de la Langue Bretonne, Breton or bilingual radio stations and

schools, theatrical troupes, etc. – is Breton likely to be used on a regular basis.

Stage 2

There is little meaningful presence of Breton in the lower governmental services. The

visual presence of the language has improved at the level of communal government – e.g.,

many communities have posted bilingual road and street signage – and Breton has been

recognized as a language permissible in court, though interpreters are hard to ﬁ nd and

few people ask for them (Texier and Ó Néill 2005: 190). The Regional Council of Brit-

tany espouses the importance of Breton, but does not use it on its website. The Council

lends ﬁ nancial support to the Diwan and public bilingual schools as well as to Breton-

oriented publishing houses. Yet the minutes of the Council’s monthly meetings are written

in French; and, according to the Euromosaic survey on Breton in public services, ‘Very

few people can read and write Breton, and they are simply not used to the idea of writing

ofﬁ cial business in Breton. Indeed the very ethos of ofﬁ cial administrative settings seems

to discourage the use of Breton’ (2006: 5).

Stage 1

With the exception of the use of Breton in the Breton or Celtic departments of the two

major universities in Brittany, in Rennes and in Brest, the extension of Breton into higher

level educational, government and media domains has not happened and is not likely to

so long as Brittany remains part of a France preoccupied with the notion of French as the

one and only ofﬁ cial language of the Republic (see Rogers 1996), but surveys and voting

patterns demonstrate that the vast majority of Bretons have no desire to become politi-

cally independent from France, while nonetheless feeling themselves to be, and being

identiﬁ ed by outsiders, as a region with a particularly strong identity (Dargent 2001;

Tabouret- Keller 1999). As Texier and Ó Néill observe, ‘Not only has Breton no ofﬁ -

cial status in Brittany, it has no status in France or at a European level (for example

in dealings with bodies representing the European Community, such as its parliament

or various agencies’ (2005: 193). Some in Brittany hope to secure an ofﬁ cial status for

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN BRITTANY 731

Breton, and there is talk of establishing a Breton- medium university in Carhaix in central

Lower Brittany (ibid.), which already has a functioning Breton- medium lycée. Further,

the Regional Council voted in December 2004 to adopt and promote a new politique lin-

guistique (linguistic politics) in Brittany with the goal of expanding student enrolments

in Diwan and bilingual schools to 20,000 by 2010. All of this is evidence of the regional

government’s support and good will for Breton, but it is still a long way from the sort of

solid entrenchment of a language within society at this stage of the RLS process envis-

aged by Fishman.

Among Texier and Ó Néill’s closing remarks on the RLS situation in Brittany is this

challenging commentary:

There is no dodging the main question. Unless Bretons focus squarely on demographic

concentration of Breton speakers at the home–family–neighbourhood–community

level . . . the erosion of Breton as a community language will continue unabated,

probably at the same disastrous rate as during the ﬁ ve post- war decades. Uncom-

prehending Breton language activists will be left scratching their heads (again, like

the Irish before them) wondering aloud, ‘what went wrong? The schools are full of

Breton, but nobody speaks it!’

(2005: 196)

THE EVOLUTION OF ATTITUDES TO BRETON

Although it appears at present unlikely that Brittany will experience Stage 1 in RLS, there

has been a considerable positive, and perhaps lasting, shift in Bretons’ attitudes to their

traditional language. Without this, the progress that has been made in some of the other

stages of RLS would probably not have happened. This section will sketch in the broad

trends in both Bretons’ and outsiders’ perceptions of and attitudes toward Breton language

and culture.

Following the brief period of Breton independence during the ninth–tenth centuries

AD, Brittany became a society dominated by a landed aristocracy and a well- entrenched

clergy who controlled a large working population consisting of peasants, ﬁ sherfolk and

artisans who were, with rare exceptions, monolingual Breton speakers, The aristocracy,

clergy and urban bougeoisie functioned in French most of the time, though many of the

rural, estate- owning nobility would have known and used Breton as well.

Because the bulk of the Breton population was of the labouring classes, poor and

uneducated, it is scarcely surprising that the language they spoke soon became associ-

ated with backwardness, even primitiveness – an association that lasted for centuries. For

example Stephane Strowski (1952) tried to demonstrate that Breton was an ‘archaic’ lan-

guage because one could not make generalizations in it (accoring to him) and it had an

inadequate lexicon. Linguist D. W. F. Hardie describes Breton as ‘primitive’ for its lack of

lexical distinction between the colors blue and green (1948: 58).

As Brittany began moving into modernity in the late nineteenth century, the stigma

attached to Breton became even more pronounced: the language was denounced by vari-

ous authorities as an obstacle to progress, an impediment to clear and lucid thinking, and

the handmaiden of reactionary religious, and monarchist, thinking, vividly depicted in

this opinion, published in 1919 in the Revue de l’enseignement primaire, about the idea

of teaching in Breton: ‘Teaching in Breton, while throughout Breton- speaking Brittany

the regional dialect is the vehicle of reactionary ideas, the intermediary for a propaganda

732 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

that not only works against the Republic, but goes as far as espousing separatism’ (Chanet

1996: 211, n. 14).

Once in circulation, such notions are hard to dislodge, and it is clear in reviewing some

recent literature on the perceptions of Breton speakers who were born between the late

1800s and early 1900s that they had internalized a good deal of this negativity. Much

of this commenced in the schools where, as discussed earlier, Breton- speaking young-

sters were humiliated with the ‘symbol’ if they lapsed into Breton while on the school

premises. Others may have found themselves discomﬁ ted for not knowing French when

they travelled to cities, when they were recruited into military service, or when needing to

deal with the justice system.

In the mid- nineteenth century Bretons were particularly singled out for caricature by

Parisian newspapers and journals presenting Bretons as clumsy, uttering inarticulate peas-

ant oaths, the butt of jokes. For example, Le Journal Illustré (in 1896) and L’Indiscret (in

1902) depicted Breton ‘men drinking from troughs with animals . . . and ignorant impreg-

nated women’ (Moch 2004: 7). This was followed in 1905 with the ﬁ rst appearance of

what would be the remarkably successful cartoon character Bécassine, ultimately featured

in album- length children’s literature that continued until the 1940s. The Parisian creators

of this incompetent Breton servant traded on stereotyped Breton characteristics of naiveté

and blind loyalty to one’s employers (Forsdick 2005: 26). In another popular work, aimed

at adults in the 1920s, a family saga by Roger Martin du Gard, a stereotypically naive

Bretonne comes to Paris, where she is seduced and abandoned and trained out of her

‘Breton accent [that] you could cut with a knife’ (cited in Moch 2004: 8).

The aftermath of the Second World War brought on more negatively charged freight

for Breton due to the association of the language with the small collaborationist move-

ment of that period mentioned above. For a while Breton was tainted in the eyes of many

with treason and fascism, and it may have accelerated the shift to French (Quéré 2000:

41–2). The association of Breton with nationalism and separatism has continued to be a

leitmotiv, surfacing frequently during the turbulent years of the 1970s with clandestine

autonomist groups bombing some carefully targeted public sites, and more recently in

organizations (albeit tiny) at both ends of the political spectrum that advocate autonomy

or independence, such as Emgann and Strollad Breizh (left- leaning) and Adsav (right-

leaning).

Despite the lingering association of Breton with political agendas clearly not appre-

ciated by the majority of the Breton population, it is clear that overall popular attitudes

towards both Breton identity and the Breton have been softening, though occasionally

tinged with ambivalence, as will be evident in some of the following discussion.

In 1998 sociologist Ronan Le Coadic published an important empirical study,

L’Identité bretonne, based on ﬁ ndings from in- depth interviews he conducted with what

he calls ‘ordinary’ Breton men and women, aged 20 to 65, from across Brittany. The

interviewees’ knowledge of Breton ranged from none (the majority) to full ﬂ uency (a

minority). He found that a solid majority (25/46) responded to the question ‘What does

the fact of being Breton represent in your personal life?’ in ways that indicated it was

very meaningful: ‘It’s pride in my roots!’, ‘My way of living, my reason to live’. Not

all were so emotive, but no one found being Breton at all negative (as might well have

been the case in early decades of the century). Indeed, some of his respondents appear to

have resorted to what sociologists call ‘symbolic inversion’, assimilating long- standing

outsider stereotypes of the Bretons and attributing positive value to them as present- day

markers of Bretonnitude: ‘stubborn’, ‘primitive’, ‘rough’, ‘emotional’, ‘heavy drinkers’,

close to nature’, and so on (1998: ch. 5, passim).

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN BRITTANY 733

Le Coadic’s research also demonstrated clearly that a sense of belonging to Brittany,

as territory, as region, as landscape, is more ‘primordial’ for many Bretons than are ties

of kinship or a knowledge of the Breton language. One interviewee commented, ‘There

is nonetheless this sentiment of belonging to something . . . the Breton is very attached

to his/her region.’ Another explained that ‘Everyone is different, but one is on a soil that

is called Brittany and everyone is conscious of that’ (Le Coadic 1998: 321–2). Francis

Favereau, likewise, argues that for Bretons identity is above all an attachment to a pay-

sage – a place and its landscape, encapsulated in the French phrase patrimoine paysager

(1993: 47–9). An interviewee in Le Coadic’s study depicts this sentiment more speciﬁ -

cally: ‘One is from this pays, from this territory . . . And the reality of the paysages, of the

sites and the characteristics of the Lower- Breton paysage, I think that that’s the basis of

[our] identity’ (1998: 65). As to the importance of language for Breton identity among Le

Coadic’s interviewees, while it was often cited as a marker of Bretonnitude, there was no

agreement as to its centrality for identity; more respondents from Upper Brittany (non-

Breton speakers) stressed the importance of the language for identity than did respondents

from Lower Brittany (which included those respondents with knowledge of the language

[ibid.: 215]).

In spite of disagreement about the importance of the Breton language for Breton iden-

tity, there is general agreement that the language should be maintained. Recent public

opinion surveys in Brittany show a high level of support, whether one spoke the language

or not, for preserving it – 88 per cent in a survey conducted by TMO Ouest in 1997 (Ker-

goat 1999: 420); this was a notable increase from the 76 per cent who had so responded in

a TMO survey of 1990 (Nicolas 2001: 144). Eighty per cent in the 1997 survey signalled

their approval of having Breton taught optionally in the schools (Quéré 2000: 79). Brou-

dic points out that the bretonnants are the least interested in such instruction but that when

they are in favour of it, they are more likely to say it should be required (1995: 245).

This favourable trend was particularly noteworthy among young people: 96 per cent of

those under 20, compared with 75 per cent of those over 75, were in favour of the survival

of the language (Nicolas 2001: 144), from which Nicolas concludes that ‘this situation is

therefore of the sort to inspire a reasonable conﬁ dence’ (ibid.). Yet the expression of sup-

port does not necessarily translate into a desire to take steps to ensure the preservation

of the language, for example, by sending one’s child(ren) to an immersion or bilingual

school. One of Le Coadic’s interviewees, when asked if he would consider sending his

children to a Diwan school, replied ‘That leaves me cold, that absolutely does not moti-

vate me’ (1998: 203). Another person opined that in offering Breton ‘it isn’t necessary to

spend an hour learning it, but a short half- hour or even ﬁ ve minutes would sufﬁ ce to learn

a thing or two in Breton’ (ibid.). A 60- year- old man interviewed by Quéré considered that

Breton language schooling is ‘apostolate . . . and it’s a very courageous struggle that they

have undertaken, but . . . let’s say that I’m not very optimistic as to the ﬁ nal results’ (2000:

80).

This sort of ambivalent feeling about teaching/learning Breton also comes up in Rachel

Hoare’s study (2000) of young people’s (aged 8–18) attitudes towards Breton (and French)

language and identity. Using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies,

Hoare

analysed reported levels of competence in speaking and reading Breton, reported practices

of language use and understanding of Breton at both the spoken and written levels, per-

ceptions of Breton identity, and the relationship between the comprehension of Breton and

Breton identity; she also examined her data for evidence of gender and/or regional (Upper

vs. Lower Brittany) patterns of perception and use. Her main ﬁ ndings may be summarized

as follows:

734 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF THE CELTIC LANGUAGES

Nearly ¾ (74 per cent) of respondents agreed that Breton should be preserved.•

• Nearly ⅔ (62 per cent) feel it should not be obligatory in the schools, and more than

⅔ (68 per cent) think that English, German or another ‘living language’ would be

more useful.

• Males showed a stronger sense of Breton identity, with 48 per cent saying they felt

more Breton than French vs. 37 per cent for the females, and more females (43 per

cent) than males (30 per cent) feel they are more French than Breton.

(Hoare 2000: 337–41)

Slightly at odds with what was reported earlier concerning the greater interest expressed

by adult Bretons from Upper Brittany in having Breton taught, it was the young people

in Lower Brittany in Hoare’s study who showed a higher level of support for this (ibid.:

341). This appears to complement another of her ﬁ ndings, that ‘just over twice the pro-

portion of Lower Brittany informants (30 per cent) as Upper Brittany informants (14 per

cent) have a powerful sense of Breton identity and that the inverse relationship is true for

French identity’ (ibid.: 337).

Overall this study paints a picture of a young generation of Bretons who have been

rallied symbolically to the cause of preserving the traditional language – much of this ral-

lying mediated by the considerable public attention given to the Diwan immersion schools

over the past three decades – are sympathetic towards efforts to promote its teaching and

broader use in society, but are nonetheless not sufﬁ ciently motivated, as Hoare puts it, ‘to

participate directly (only 16 per cent would be very interested in improving their com-

prehension skills’ [ibid.: 343]). The author concludes with a statement by a 15- year- old

male interviewee that captures the rather paradoxical positioning of many from this gen-

eration of Bretons: ‘If the language dies out a whole culture is lost and I don’t think that’s

a good idea, I think that it should deﬁ nitely continue. But it’s not up to me to do it – there

are always others who will’ (ibid.: 344).

Unlike this young man, others may attach value to learning and using the language.

Children and adolescents receiving their entire education (nursery school to lycée) in the

Diwan system are very likely to be invested in the language and at least some of these

will form, or have formed, families in which their own children will be/are taught Breton

within the household. There are other reasons, too, for promoting and/or speaking Breton.

For example, one woman told researcher Anna Quéré that she wants to see Breton revalor-

ized because she knows that her parents and her sisters suffered from contempt for having

spoken Breton, so she would like to avenge them in a sense by assertively speaking the

language today (1999: 83).

Illustrating yet another motivation for choosing Breton, Le Coadic mentions the case

of a man, born in 1975, who pushed his bretonnant family to teach him the language to

give him an advantage with girls by showing that he was different from the other lads, a

tactic that seems to have brought some results. Moreover, he says, ‘I really love to show

that I know how to speak Breton. I’m proud of this, yes!’ (2002: 143). This suggests the

emergence of a very different perspective on the attractiveness of Breton as a form of

gender display in comparison with that reported for earlier decades.

The foregoing examples have focused on Neo- Breton speakers, but it is important

to point out that native bretonnants, too, ﬁ nd positive reasons for using Breton, at least

within their daily local lives. This has been documented in the work of Eva Vetter whose

case study of the social networks of such speakers in a small rural community near Brest

in northern Finistère shows afﬁ rmative uses of Breton by many of these older- generation

speakers, though such use belies an underlying situation of ‘language conﬂ ict’, as she

LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN BRITTANY 735

sees it, pointing to the sometimes contradictory linguistic practices around the choice of

Breton or French by these speakers. She gives the example of selling a calf, a negotiation

deemed better executed by seller and buyer in Breton, given the historical value accorded

that language for this type of activity, but both buyer and seller are most likely to speak

French with their children or grandchildren, as, in those interactions, French is accorded a

higher value (1999: 218).

Vetter is quite explicit that this and other examples of language conﬂ ict she presents

are not illustrative of diglossia but rather of ‘an extremely conﬂ icted and unstable socio-

linguistic situation’ (ibid.: 221). Although Breton is being used regularly by older speakers

in the community in four speciﬁ c networks – family, neighbourhood, (local) workplace

and local leisure activities – which are helping preserve the language, there is no intergen-

erational transmission of Breton.

To sum up, the relationship between language and identity among Bretons is complex and

has evolved in several directions through the generations. From a close ﬁ t between the two

for the vast majority of the Breton population for nearly a millennium and a half, the opening

of Brittany to the forces of modernization and then post- modernity wrought an increasing

incidence of language shift. Ordinary people of the peninsula were brought into the national

educational system, the armed forces and international warfare, they emigrated to ﬁ nd

jobs elsewhere, and tourists descended on the peninsula in ever increasing numbers in the

twentieth century, all of which inevitably altered the traditional languacultural

identity of

Bretons – not for everyone all at once, but steadily, inexorably French advanced into nearly

all domains of social interaction, leaving Breton as the language of family life, religion, and

rural or maritime workplaces. Intergenerational transmission of the language was ruptured

during or just following the Second World War, with the result that today only a very small

proportion (about 16 per cent) of Bretons of Lower Brittany speak Breton on some sort of

regular basis, and they are almost exclusively older people (Broudic 1999: 114).

INSTITUTIONAL AND EXTERNAL SUPPORT FOR BRETON

In recent decades a number of institutions, agencies, organizations, or initiatives have

been developed that lend support to the Breton language in a variety of ways. Four of

these will be described here.

Ofﬁ ce de la Langue Breton (Oﬁ s ar Brezhoneg)

The Ofﬁ ce de la Langue Bretonne (OLB) was created in May 1999, supported by the

Breton Region and by the Department of Loîre- Atlantique. It has three locations: Carhaix

in Lower Brittany, Rennes in Upper Brittany, and Nantes in Loîre- Atlantique. Legally the

OLB is a private cultural association, but its services are on behalf of the Breton public.

Its main activity is language planning and development, though it has no powers of impo-

sition or enforcement of any initiatives it might create. Services include:

• L’Observatoire de la langue bretonne (Observatory of the Breton Language) gathers

and analyses sociolinguistic data on number of speakers, practice of the language in

daily life, use in schools, etc.

• Normalization of Breton toponyms. As of 2005 this service had produced a 62- page

list of bilingual names for communes throughout historic Brittany and has provided

bilingual signage for communes, roadways and public sites.