Breton Language

Breton language, Breton Brezhoneg, one of the six extant Celtic languages (the others being Cornish, Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx). Breton is spoken in Brittany in northwestern France. It shares with Welsh and Cornish an identical basic vocabulary and with all other Celtic languages the grammatical use of initial consonantic variation, which is used mainly to denote gender. Breton benefited culturally and socially from a language-recovery movement that emerged in Brittany in the late 20th century.

Breton was introduced into Armorica (western Gaul; now Brittany) in the 5th and 6th centuries by migrants from southwestern Britain. It became firmly established in the western part of the Armorican peninsula, while in the eastern part a Romance language, Gallo-Romance, took hold. French later became the language of the region’s towns.

Old Breton, in use up to the 11th century, is known through glosses, words, and names recorded in documents. Middle Breton appears in the Catholicon, a Breton-Latin-French dictionary published in 1499 and attributed to Jean Lagadeuc. A number of texts that date from the 15th through 17th centuries use Late Middle Breton, mostly in the form of elaborate poetry that exhibits a prosody akin to that of medieval Welsh poetry. Late Middle Breton was also used in prayer books, catechisms, and various works for religious education.

The publication of Julien Maunoir’s dictionary in 1659 is accepted as marking, with its new spelling, the emergence of written Modern Breton. The dictionary had little significance for spoken Breton, however. Religious publications, which were nearer everyday speech, later flourished in the four Breton-speaking bishoprics of Brittany. The standards for written Breton developed separately in each, and the differences that subsequently emerged contributed to the theory that there existed four Breton dialects, each named for those bishoprics: Kerne, Leon, Treger, and Gwened (in French, Cornouaille, Léon, Tréguier, and Vannes, respectively). In fact, only Gwened differs significantly from the others, through a shift in stress accent and vowel aperture. Much energy was devoted during the 18th and 19th centuries to establishing a single written norm for Breton, especially after Jean-François Le Gonidec published a grammar (1807). He also published a Breton dictionary in 1821. But an unrelenting eradication policy implemented from the mid-19th century and into the 20th wrought havoc on Breton. No language census was ever taken. In 1928, after carrying out a survey, the scholar Roparz Hemon put at 1.2 million the number of people using Breton as their daily means of communication.

At the turn of the 21st century an estimated 500,000 people could understand and speak the language, and public opinion in Brittany strongly favoured the language. A Breton-language school system began to develop at that time, and bilingual education emerged in state-run and Roman Catholic primary schools. Adult education in Breton also expanded. Supporters of the language were optimistic that it was being built into a modern, up-to-date, urban language: a unified spelling system had been developed, and the language was used on private and state-funded radio and television networks as well as in films.