Bretons Speak Up To Save Their Dying Language

They have their own schools, bilingual road signs, vibrant festivals and dubbed Perry Mason repeats on television.

But even the most passionate champions of the Breton language admit that its survival is in question.

Native speakers are ageing, their numbers falling by 15,000 a year. And among those remaining, there is anger that the French government does more for Brittany's large influx of British settlers than for those campaigning to save Breton from extinction.

Along the pink granite coast of northern Brittany, where nationalists demonstrated in February against British "colonisation", Paris-appointed administrators are lambasted for banning dealings in Breton while sending staff on English courses to cope with the newcomers' queries.

"Bretons are always being told France is one nation with one language," said Yann Rivallain, 33, who ran a EU-funded organisation for minority languages in Dublin before returning to Brittany with his Huddersfield-born wife, Sarah, to edit a magazine, ArMen. "So they are enraged when the préfecture does something for English speakers that is denied to them. They say if the British can go in and sort out licensing problems in English, why can't they do it in Breton?"

He insists that anti-Englishness, while hardly unknown in French society generally, is largely confined in Brittany to a minority of nationalists and Left-wingers who identify Britain with the supposed evils of global capitalism.

But the language grievances add to the bitterness aroused, especially in the northern département, Côtes d'Armor, by the far greater spending power of the invading British in the property market.

The decline of the Breton language dates from the 1914-18 war when soldiers from Brittany found they had to use French to communicate with comrades-in-arms.

Now, out of a population of four million, up to 300,000 still speak it and a further 200,000 have some knowledge of the tongue. But amid the pressures of Francophone society the number of families using it routinely at home is small and dwindling.

Only about 9,000 Breton children use Breton daily in class, in schools run by the pro-Breton-education Diwan movement or in bilingual state and Roman Catholic schools. But the French authorities are accused of giving only token support. Patrick Le Lay, the Breton head of TF1, France's biggest television channel, recently accused the state of waging "cultural genocide" against Brittany. Despite being mocked by the Parisian press for "staying out in the sun too long", he is said to have no regrets about his emotive words.

Mr Le Lay is a top TV mogul but after launching TV Breizh five years ago, even he was powerless to overcome commercial and government obstacles to development. Breton-language output is now restricted to a weekly football programme and those Perry Mason dramas.

Organisers of the Diwan network of schools claim that they are starved of resources despite academic results that match or better the state's.

A visit to Relecq Kerhuon on the Atlantic coast near Brest illustrates both the fervour of the language campaign and its limitations. This was the first Diwan secondary school, launched with eight pupils in a flat in 1988, 11 years after the birth of the movement.

Now, 200 children attend but they are taught in drab accommodation long ago abandoned by a state school. The atmosphere is friendly but the facilities outdated.

The English teacher, Morwenna Jenkin, 47, is Cornish, the daughter of two grand bards of Cornwall and fluent in Welsh, Breton and French. She speaks Breton to her husband and English to their three children, who talk to each other mostly in French.

Wall paintings and signs, designed by pupils, urge the use of the language even when teachers are not listening. But two girls revising in the library admitted they spoke more French than Breton outside school.

"We do as much as we can, but teachers cannot be there all the time," Ms Jenkin said.

She said she completely understood Bretons' demands for the same right to use their own language with civil servants as the thousands of Britons who struggle with French.

"People say we are dreamers," said Anna-Vari Chapalain, 50, the director of Diwan. "But my dream is modest. I want all our staff funded by the state and all parents to have the chance to send their children to Breton schools."

She denied that the movement was inextricably linked to separatism, even though some parents had nationalist sympathies.

Alex Richards, 36, a teacher from Hampshire who now lives near Bourbriac, scene of the anti-British protest, said he could understand "up to a point" the Breton demands for fairer treatment of their language.

"But the fact is that every Breton who speaks it also speaks French," he said. "The local tobacconist, a proud Breton who speaks the language, said to me the other day that the problem was simple. 'It's a dead language because young people don't use it in the street' ."

But the difference is OBVIOUS!

The Breton are French, and have been French for centuries. The British are guests, visitors. They are not French. It is always pleasant when an Anglophone can speak French, but nobody EXPECTS the British to speak French. They are British, after all. They're expected to speak English, and in areas that thrive on tourism, as Bretagne does, it is only to be expected that people will accomodate the tourists and visitors to the greatest extent feasible. The British speak English, and this is simply a fact. It is not a threat to the territorial integrity of France as a nation that English people, or Americans for that matter, come to France and continue to speak French. Why would anyone expect otherwise? And likewise, it is not a threat to the territorial integrity of France to accomodate these anglophones, whose visits and money are most welcome.

But with Breton, c'est une autre histoire. These people are French. They speak French. They are in the country of France. Most French people do not speak Breton. France is one country. If the Breton insist on regional particularism, such that the government itself should deal with them not in the French of France, but in an ancient provincial dialect, they will develop a national identity and nationalism that will draw them away from unity with France. If the Breton demand, and succeed, then the Flamands of Picardie will demand that the government deal with them in Flemish. And the Alsatians will demand to be dealt with in Alsatian. The Savoyards will insist on Italian, as will many of the people of Nice and the Cote d'Azur. The Corsicans will insist upon doing business in Corsican, the Provencals in provencale, Guineens in Indian languages, Tahitians in polynesian, and New Caledonians in the native tongue.
The country will balkanize and shatter into a dozen RACES, since "French" is not a race but a nationality held together by certain conventions. The Saxons and the Bavarians speak different dialects, but they are the same ethnic races. But the Bretons, Normands, Alsatiens, Provencales and Angevins are all of different ethnic races in origin. The concept of France and the abolition of the ancient provinces has weakened these ancient allegiances to the point that they provide color, but no FORCE.

But the Breton desire to have the state conduct business with them in Breton: this is a desire to give FORCE, political force, to a separatist concept, that being Breton is a separate and distinct identity from being French.

France as a nation is composed of many ancient tribes. It cannot retain its unity if these ancient tribes reassert their tribal identities. The Bretons, of course, may retain and celebrate their culture, and do, and half of Paris turns out for Les Printemps Celtes. But that is not the same thing as achieving special political rights. If the Breton get them, then everyone else will demand them, and France will become as Belgium, and the unity of 1000 years will be torn apart by petty provincialism and nationalism.

It makes sense to deal with the British in English. But it is dangerous to set the precedent of dealing with the French of Brittany in Breton. A Breton is French. Some of them may assert otherwise, but this is a romantic notion, and it certainly is not to be encouraged by going along with it.

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