Breton
is a Celtic language, with Indo-European roots. Modern Celtic languages
are:
Gaelic branch:
Irish Gaelic (Ireland)
Scottish Gaelic (Scotland)
Manx Gaelic (Isle of Man)
Breton branch:
Breton (Brittany)
Cornish (Cornwall)
Welsh (Wales)
Language
and History
Breton
is derived from Indo-European languages
Like the Germans, Latins,
Greeks, Slavs, Persians and the inhabitants of northern India, the Celts
spoke a language derived from an older common language called
Indo-European, named so because of the extent of its geographical spread.
Sanskrit represents perhaps the language being the closest to it.
This language, spoken
4000 years ago, and which has no written text, had spread over the
centuries into almost every area of Europe and to the border regions of
India imposing itself gradually, through random wars, invasions and
commerce on a wide variety of peoples and populations.
Breton
is a Celtic language
One Indo-European population,
probably established in the territory between the Rhine, Danube and
Main, distinguished itself some 3000 years ago by its economic activity
and its art. These people were called Keltae by the Greeks and Galli by
the Romans. They then sprad to occupy all of northern Europe, and began
to mix with the local populations. It is from this mixture that emerged
those that we know of today as the Celtic peoples (Celts). They brought
their culture and their language, which we call "Old Celtic",
to a large part of Europe, stretching from Ireland to the tip of the
Iberian peninsula and the Black Sea.
This Celtic world was to
decline and be absorbed under pressure from the Germans in the north and
the Latins in the south. The celtic language of continental Europe
continued to decline and eventually died out in the valleys of Helvetia
around the year 1000 A.D. However, it remained alive in the British
Isles, home to two Celtic peoples, the Britons and the Gaels, who spoke
two different forms of the celtic language. The language of the Gaels
developed into Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx (the Isle of Man)
and from that of the Britons (Brythonic) came Breton, Cornish and Welsh.
From fifth to seventh
century, Britons of the island of Britain, were driven by the invading
Anglo-Saxons to migrate in large numbers to the Armorican peninsula.
In general
terms, the history of the Breton language can be divided into three
stages :
The Breton
of the kings
Before the year 1000, the era of Old
Breton emerged, Nominoe Breton emerged after a gradual
development of the language from the merging of Briton emigrants and
Armoricain Celts on the peninsula.
In the ninth century, Nominoe's
reign marks the apex of the Breton nation
and the furthest advances in the language. Breton spread to the east,
becoming dominant in the Rennes and Nantes areas. Around 1050, it
reached its phase of maximum expansion, being spoken as far as Mont Saint
Michael bay and the Saint-Nazaire region.
At this
time the language was still close that spoken
in parts of Britain, especially Cornish but also Welsh, a language almost
purely Celtic apart from some old borrowings from Latin, a vestige of the Roman occupation
of Britain, now perfectly assimilated. It was a symbol of the Breton nation, an independent kingdom and purely Celtic,
although still retaining within its borders regions where non-celtic peoples still
spoke dying romance dialects derived from Latin.
Breton was the language of the majority of the population and of the ruling
classes, the language and culture and of law, as was the Welsh of Hywell Dda,
the language of the active members of the nation.
This was when place names and
peoples surnames were established in Breton.
The Breton of the dukes
This is when Middle
Breton emerged, from 1000 A.D. to the seventeenth century. This period
dates from the
great Norman invasion which changed the face of the land.
The norman invasions had an negative
effect on the unity of Brittany. The Breton language was abandoned as
the official
language by the Duchy of Brittany at the height of the Middle Ages in
favour of French. Breton retreated gradually towards the west.
The ruling classes,
nobles and monks who had to flee the country returned after thirty years
exile influenced seriously by the French language.
Brittany remained a
sovereign state, separate from both France and England but its official
language, that of the Court and the Administration, became French,
followed gradually by the language of the bourgeoisie.
However, Breton continued
to be the usual language spoken by the ordinary people and nobility of rural
areas and small towns
and remained a literary language, but it was to undergo an evolution similar
to the one English underwent during the same period.
Eventhough its syntax
remained very Celtic, it was to come under a strong influence from French, especially in
its vocabulary and the way it was written.
If Breton had become the
official language of the Duchy at that time, it is likely that it would
have kept this hybrid Celto-romance from in the way that English became a
Germanic-romance language rather than purely Germanic. This form of Breton
corresponds to the ducale period but continued after the loss of independence and
the disappearance of our state. Parts of the state structure remained during the period of autonomy which
ended with the French Revolution, however, the ruling classes continued to abandon their language
to switch to French. It should be noted that Middle Breton is a
literary and unified language, not the language of the people.
Dialects existed, of course, but not in the written form.
The
modern Breton
It is in the mid seventeenth
century, in 1659 to be precise, that a revolution took place with the adoption by
Father Maunoir of a way of writing that was much closer a to the spoken language, and, which
records for
the first time the mutation of consonants, and, at the same time, breaks
with the ancient literary
tradition, most notably with the system of prosodic Celtic alliteration and
internal rhyming similar to those to be found in Welsh and Irish Gaelic,
and whose
roots go back to the distant past, before the division of the former
Brythonic into distinct different languages. Breton was to become
primarily a language of the people.
The consequence of
adopting this system was to be the break-down of the unity of the
language and henceforth people tended to write the language in the way
that it was spoken in their region. This led to the development of the
different literary dialects of expression giving rise to the modern-day
dialects of Leonad, Tregorois, Cornouaillais, and Vannetais.
However, this return to
the living spoken language as a basis, which was often more Celtic in
its structure and also in its vocabulary than the written Middle Breton,
served as a rejuvenation.
The grammarians and
writers of the nineteenth century (The Gonidec), and then of the twentieth
century (Ernault, Vallée, Mordiern) would try and regain this lost unity
by, on the one hand, basing Breton on the form spoken mainly in the Leon
region (Leonard), and on the other hand, by building on the efforts already undertaken in the eighteenth
century by Dom Le Pelletier, in trying to eliminate from the language the excessive borrowings of
French that had occured in the previous centuries and by replacing these
and expanding the language by drawing on ancient Breton, the dialects and
Welsh to provide new words having Breton roots.
They would go on to gradually
build a new literary from of the language which is clearly Celtic in
style. This is Modern Breton, albeit with a
significant number of words of French or Latin Origin, but as a language
relatively "pure" and not an hybrid such as Middle Breton or
French.
The Breton
language, systematically persecuted since the time of the French Revolution,
has managed however to survive. Today, although the use of Breton is declining in the
countryside, it is becoming a language of culture,
adapted to the urban civilization of the twenty-first century.
The language has been
revitalized by the teaching of Breton in universities, in the Diwan schools where Breton is
medium for teaching, in the bilingual Divyezh state schools, and in the
private sector Dihun schools, and also by the willingness of brittophones to speak their language
on a daily basis. Some radio and TV stations do offer programmes in Breton but to
date there is, despite strong demand, no public Breton radio or television in
Brittany. However, there are newspapers, magazines and
publishing houses as well as theatre groups. The Office of the Breton Language,
created in 1999, implements actions for the promotion and development of
the language in social and public life. It is worth noting that France has
still not ratified the European Charter for Minority Languages in 2008.
The number
of brittophones is now estimated to be 350 000. |
