Posted on 09/30/2005 6:10:46 PM PDT by blam
Bretons speak up to save their dying language
By Colin Randall in Brest
(Filed: 01/10/2005)
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.
A pupil in Relecq Kerhuon reads Tintin in Breton
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.
A sign inside the school toilet reminding pupils to speak Breton
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' ."
I need to find some canned Haggis. :D
The Breton language is a dialect of Gaelic.
Ireland is trying to preserve Gaelic but the mass of the populace still speaks English as the language of commerce.
Gaelic will remain a second language in all those places just as French is in Louisiana.
I thought Haggis came with it's own can?
By definition, it is already packaged in the skin that surrounds it. Once it is prepared it can be frozen and all that is then needed is to unfreeze it and steam it.
And, of course, get a piper to pipe it to the table on St Andrew's night and Burns' night.
Yes, today Breton; tomorrow French.
"The decline of the Breton language dates from the 1914-18 war"
The decline of the French language dates from the Arabic invasion of France in the late 20th century.
The language itself was DOOMED when the First Continental Congress was conducted in English!
I am Breton.
The Breton are as French as Parisians.
So, you drink a lot of wine. The Irish drink a lot of whiskey and that doesn't make them Scottish!
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I don’t agree with letting a language die out — especially a rich one. English as the first language (or French in the Bretons’ case) but keep the second lagnauge alive as well. humanity is naturally multi-lingual.
well, technically there are nearly half a million Latin speakers — Latin evolved into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian etc. :)
you mean Sumerian or Akkadian?
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