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Viewing The Breton Language - A Languages of the World PrimerThe Breton Language - A Languages of the World Primer
By T J Leary While perceived in many quarters as a legacy of pre-Roman Gaul, Breton is in fact a much more recent arrival. Although a Celtic language, it descended instead from the Celtic languages on the British Isles and migrated from there to Brittany with settlers sometime in the late 3rd or early 4th Century AD. It established itself in Lower Brittany, and was the language of the elite until the early middle ages, when French began to make inroads. Over the following centuries, Breton fell afoul of a series of French state policies that began to marginalize it, initially banning it from use in public life. This process began with the 1539 Villers-Cotterets Ordinance, in which King Francis I made Parisian French the official State language. Later governments, including the revolutionary governments, actively sought to root out the language using the school system in an attempt to indoctrinate the masses. Due to these constraints and the absence of an educated Breton speaking class, there was very little in the way of a literary tradition until the early 20th Century. This changed in 1925 with the launch of a review entitled 'Gwalarn'. During its 20-year run, this publication not only brought to the fore a large amount of original material, but also stimulated the translation of major international works into Breton, thereby deepening the language's cultural base. Related Languages Breton is most closely related to Cornish and Welsh, and distantly related to Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic, but mutual intelligibility would generally be low. Current Status Breton is the only surviving Celtic language not to be officially recognized and protected. To its credit, the French government did make a belated recent attempt to fund bilingual schools in Brittany, but it fell afoul of the French Constitutional Council, which rightly noted that it would contravene Article 2 of the French Constitution, which states that French is the language of the Republic. The French State does not seem to have any intention to amend the Constitution out of a fear that it would lead to the country's eventual break-up. Despite centuries of oppression, Breton is still a living language with somewhere near half a million people using it on a daily basis, and over a million claiming knowledge of the language. That said, it has lost some of its vitality in recent decades, and language use in daily life is down over 50% from the 1930s. The launch of a regional TV station, TV Breizh, has given new impetus to Breton amidst growing regional demand for increased recognition of the language. About the Author: Stranslations offers professional language translation services in English, French, Spanish, German, and other major European languages. The original version of this article can found at www.stranslations.com. Article Source: A Language Guide - http://www.a-language-guide.com More free articles: 1st Rate Articles - 1stRateArticles.com |
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