Breton language

Breton is spoken in Lower Brittany (), roughly to the west of a line linking Plouha (west of Saint-Brieuc) and La Roche-Bernard (east of Vannes). It comes from a Brittonic language community that once extended from Great Britain to Armorica (present-day Brittany) and had even established a toehold in Galicia (in present-day Spain). Old Breton is attested from the 9th century. It was the language of the upper classes until the 12th century after which it became the language of commoners in Lower Brittany. The nobility, followed by the bourgeoisie, adopted French. The written language of the Duchy of Brittany was Latin until it switched to French in the 15th century. There is a limited tradition of Breton literature. Some philosophical and scientific terms in Modern Breton come from Old Breton. The recognized stages of the Breton language are Old Breton – to , Middle Breton – to , Modern Breton – to present. The French monarchy was not concerned with the minority languages of France, which were spoken by the lower classes, and required the use of French for government business as part of its policy of national unity. During the French Revolution, the government introduced policies favouring French over the regional languages, which it pejoratively referred to as . The revolutionaries assumed that reactionary and monarchist forces preferred regional languages to keep the peasant masses underinformed. In 1794, Bertrand Barère submitted his "report on the " to the Committee of Public Safety in which he said that "federalism and superstition speak Breton". In the early 21st century, the political centralization of France, the influence of the media and the increasing mobility of people have caused only about 200,000 people to be active speakers of Breton, a dramatic decline from more than 1 million in 1950. Most of today's speakers are more than 60 years old, and Breton is now classified as an endangered language. In 1993, parents were finally legally allowed to give their children Breton names. ==Revival efforts==

In 1925, Professor Roparz Hemon founded the Breton-language review . During its 19-year run, tried to raise the language to the level of a great international language. Its publication encouraged the creation of original literature in all genres, and proposed Breton translations of internationally recognized foreign works. In 1946, replaced . Other Breton-language periodicals have been published, which established a fairly large body of literature for a minority language. In 1977, Diwan schools were founded to teach Breton by immersion. Since their establishment, Diwan schools have provided fully-immersive primary school and partially-immersive secondary school instruction in Breton for thousands of students across Brittany. This has directly contributed to the growing numbers of school-age speakers of Breton. The Asterix comic series has been translated into Breton. According to the comic, the Gaulish village where Asterix lives is in the Armorica peninsula, which is now Brittany. Some other popular comics have also been translated into Breton, including The Adventures of Tintin, , Titeuf, Hägar the Horrible, Peanuts and Yakari. Some original media are created in Breton. The sitcom is in Breton. Radio Kerne, broadcasting from Finistère, has exclusively Breton programming. Some movies (Lancelot du Lac, Shakespeare in Love, Marion du Faouet, Sezneg) and TV series (Columbo, Perry Mason) have also been translated and broadcast in Breton. Poets, singers, linguists, and writers who have written in Breton, including Yann-Ber Kallocʼh, Roparz Hemon, Añjela Duval, Xavier de Langlais, Pêr-Jakez Helias, Youenn Gwernig, Glenmor, Vefa de Saint-Pierre and Alan Stivell are now known internationally. Today, Breton is the only living Celtic language that is not recognized by a national government as an official or regional language. The first Breton dictionary, the Catholicon, was also the first French dictionary. Edited by Jehan Lagadec in 1464, it was a trilingual work containing Breton, French and Latin. Today bilingual dictionaries have been published for Breton and languages including English, Dutch, German, Spanish and Welsh. A monolingual dictionary, was published in 1995. The first edition contained about 10,000 words, and the second edition of 2001 contains 20,000 words. In the early 21st century, the ("Public Office for the Breton language") began a campaign to encourage daily use of Breton in the region by both businesses and local communes. Efforts include installing bilingual signs and posters for regional events, as well as encouraging the use of the Spilhennig to let speakers identify each other. The office also started an Internationalization and localization policy asking Google, Firefox and SPIP to develop their interfaces in Breton. In 2004, the Breton Wikipedia started, which counts just over 90,000 articles as of December 2025. In March 2007, the signed a tripartite agreement with Regional Council of Brittany and Microsoft for the consideration of the Breton language in Microsoft products. In October 2014, Facebook added Breton as one of its 121 languages after three years of talks between the and Facebook. France has twice chosen to enter the Eurovision Song Contest with songs in Breton; once in 1996 in Oslo with "" by Dan Ar Braz and the fifty piece band Héritage des Celtes, and most recently in 2022 in Turin with "" by Alvan Morvan Rosius and vocal trio Ahez. These are two of five times France has chosen songs in one of its minority languages for the contest, the others being in 1992 (bilingual French and Antillean Creole), 1993 (bilingual French and Corsican), and 2011 (Corsican). ==Geographic distribution and dialects==

Breton is spoken mainly in Lower Brittany but also in a more dispersed way in Upper Brittany (where it is spoken alongside Gallo and French), and in areas around the world that have Breton emigrants. The four traditional dialects of Breton correspond to medieval bishoprics, rather than to linguistic divisions. They are (, of the county of Léon), (, of Trégor), (, of ), and (, of Vannes). (, of Guérande) was spoken up to the beginning of the 20th century in the region of Guérande and Batz-sur-Mer. There are no clear boundaries between the dialects because they form a dialect continuum and vary only slightly from one village to the next. , however, requires a little study to be intelligible with most of the other dialects. Due to this difficulty in intelligibility, the Glottolog project split the Gwenedeg dialects into a separate language entry from the KLT Breton dialects in v5.2 under the name Vannetais. ==Official status==

Nation French is the sole official language of France. Supporters of Breton and other minority languages continue to argue for their recognition and for their place in education, public schools, and public life. Constitution In July 2008, the legislature amended the French Constitution, adding article 75-1: (the regional languages belong to the heritage of France). The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which obliges signatory states to recognize minority and regional languages, was signed by France in 1999 but has not been ratified. On 27 October 2015, the Senate rejected a draft constitutional law ratifying the charter. /Vannes Region Regional and departmental authorities use Breton to a very limited extent. Some bilingual signage has also been installed such as street name signs in Breton towns. Under the Toubon Law, it is illegal for commercial signage to be in Breton alone. Signs must be bilingual or only in French. Since commercial signage usually has limited physical space, most businesses have signs only in French. , the Breton-language agency, was set up in 1999 by the Brittany region to promote and develop the daily use of Breton. It helped to create the campaign, to encourage enterprises, organisations and communes to promote the use of Breton, for example by installing bilingual signage or translating their websites into Breton. ==Education==

In the late 20th century, the French government considered incorporating the independent Breton-language immersion schools (called ) into the state education system. This action was blocked by the French Constitutional Council based on the 1994 amendment to the Constitution that establishes French as the language of the republic. Therefore, no other language may be used as a language of instruction in state schools. The Toubon Law implemented the amendment, asserting that French is the language of public education. The Diwan schools were founded in Brittany in 1977 to teach Breton by immersion. Since their establishment, Diwan schools have provided fully immersive primary school and partially immersive secondary school instruction in Breton for thousands of students across Brittany. This has directly contributed to the growing numbers of school-age speakers of Breton. The schools have also gained fame from their high level of results in school exams, including those on French language and literature. Breton-language schools do not receive funding from the national government, though the Brittany Region may fund them. Another teaching method is a bilingual approach by ("Two Languages") in the State schools, created in 1979. ("Awakening") was created in 1990 for bilingual education in the Catholic schools. Statistics In 2018, 18,337 In 2007, some 4,500 to 5,000 adults followed an evening or correspondence one Breton-language course. The transmission of Breton in 1999 was estimated to be 3 percent. Additionally, the University of Rennes 2 has a Breton-language department, which offers courses in the language, along with a master's degree in Breton and Celtic Studies. ==Phonology==

Vowels Vowels in Breton may be short or long. All unstressed vowels are short; stressed vowels can be short or long. (Vowel length is not noted in usual orthographies, as it is implicit in the phonology of particular dialects, and not all dialects pronounce stressed vowels as long. An emergence of a schwa sound occurs as a result of vowel neutralization in post-tonic position in different dialects. All vowels can also be nasalized, which is noted by appending an letter after the base vowel, by adding a combining tilde above the vowel (most commonly and easily done for a and o because they are used in Portuguese orthography) or most commonly by non-ambiguously appending an letter after the base vowel (this depends on the orthographic variant). Diphthongs are . Consonants • The pronunciation of the letter now varies: is used in the French-influenced standard language and, generally speaking, in the central parts of Lower Brittany (including the south of Trégor, the west of Vannetais and virtually all parts of Cornouaille), whereas is the common realisation in Léon and often in the Haut-Vannetais dialect of central Morbihan (in and around the city of Vannes and the Pays de Pontivy), but in rapid speech, mostly a tapped occurs. In the other regions of Trégor, or even may be found. • The voiced dental fricative () is a conservative realisation of the lenition (or the "spirant mutation" in cases that the phenomenon originates from the mutation of , respectively) of the consonants and which is to be found in certain varieties of Haut-Vannetais. Most of the Breton dialects do not inherit the sound and so it is mostly not orthographically fixed. The Peurunvan, for instance, uses for both mutations, which are regularly and more prominently pronounced in Léonais, Cornouaillais, Trégorrois and Bas-Vannetais. In traditional literature written in the Vannetais dialect, two different graphemes are used to represent the dental fricative depending on the scripture's historical period. There was a time that was used for the sound, but it is today mostly replaced by the regular , a practice that can be traced back to at least the late 17th century. The area this phenomenon has been found to be evident in encompasses the towns of Pontivy and Baud and surrounding smaller villages like Cléguérec, Noyal-Pontivy, Pluméliau, St. Allouestre, St. Barthélemy, Pluvigner and parts of Belle-Île. The only known place to have the mutation occur outside the Vannes country is the Île de Sein, an island located off Finistère's coast. Some scholars also used as the symbol for the sound to indicate that it was rather an "infra-dental" consonant, than a clear interdental, which is the sound the symbol usually describes. Other linguists, however, did not draw that distinction, either because they identified the sound to actually be an interdental fricative (such as Roparz Hemon in his phonetic transcription of the dialect used in Pluméliau or Joseph Loth in his material about the dialect of Sauzon in Belle-Île) or because that they attached no importance to it and ascertained that their descriptions did not need a further clarification of the sound's phonetic realisation, as it was a clearly-distinguishable phoneme. • The digraph represents a variable sound that may exhibit as , , or , and descends from a now-extinct sound , which is still extant in Welsh as . • Finally, C (as a single letter), Q and X occurs mainly in loanwords. ==Grammar==

Nouns Breton nouns are marked for gender and number. While Breton has a fairly typical gender system for Western Europe, Breton has number markers that demonstrate rarer behaviors. Gender Breton has two genders: masculine () and feminine (). It has largely lost its historic neuter (), as has also occurred in the other Celtic languages and in the Romance languages. Certain suffixes (-ach/-aj, The suffix -eg'' can be masculine or feminine. However, gender assignment to certain words often varies between dialects. However, the system is full of complexities In fact, starting a sentence with a finite verb is generally ungrammatical in Breton. Noun phrases, adverbial phrases, verbal nouns and the negative particle ne may stand in sentence-initial position to satisfy the V2 requirement. That makes it perfectly possible to put the subject or the object at the beginning of the sentence, largely depending on the focus of the speaker. The following options are possible (all with a little difference in meaning): • the first places the verbal infinitive in initial position (as in (1)), followed by the auxiliary . • the second places the auxiliary verb in initial position (as in (2)), followed by the subject and the construction + infinitive. At the end comes the object. This construction is an exception to verb-second. • the third places the construction + infinitive in the initial position (as in (3)), followed by the auxiliary verb , the subject and the object. • the fourth option places the object in initial position (as in (4)), followed by an inflected verb and then by the subject. • the fifth, and originally least common, places the subject in initial position (as in (5)), followed by an inflected verb, followed by the object, just like in English (SVO). ==Vocabulary==

Breton uses much more borrowed vocabulary than its relatives further north; by some estimates a full 40% of its core vocabulary consists of loanwords from French. ==Orthography==

The first extant Breton texts, contained in the Leyden manuscript, were written at the end of the 8th century, 50 years prior to the Strasbourg Oaths, which are considered to be the earliest example of French. Like many medieval orthographies, Old and Middle Breton had an orthography that was at first not standardised, and the spelling of a particular word varied at the author's discretion. In 1499, however, the Catholicon, was published; as the first dictionary written for both French and Breton, it became a point of reference on how to transcribe the language. The orthography presented in the Catholicon was largely similar to that of French, in particular with respect to the representation of vowels, as well as the use of both the Latinate digraph , which was a remnant of the sound change > in Latin, and the Brittonic or to represent before front vowels. As phonetic and phonological differences between the dialects began to magnify, many regions, particularly the Vannes country, began to devise their own orthographies. Many of those orthographies were more closely related to the French model albeit with some modifications. Examples of modifications include the replacement of Old Breton - with - to denote word-final (an evolution of Old Breton in the Vannes dialect) and the use of - to denote the initial mutation of (today, this mutation is written ). In the 1830s, Jean-François Le Gonidec created a modern phonetic system for the language. During the early 20th century, a group of writers known as elaborated and reformed Le Gonidec's system. They made it more suitable as a super-dialectal representation of the dialects of Cornouaille, Leon and Trégor (known as from , and in Breton). This KLT orthography was established in 1911. At the same time, writers of the more divergent Vannetais dialect developed a phonetic system, which was also based on that of Le Gonidec. Following proposals that had been made during the 1920s, the KLT and Vannetais orthographies were merged in 1941 to create an orthographic system to represent all four dialects. This ("wholly unified") orthography was significant for the inclusion of the digraph , which represents a in Vannetais and corresponds to a in the KLT dialects. In 1955, François Falcʼhun and the group proposed a new orthography, which was designed to use a set of graphemes closer to the conventions of French. This ("University Orthography", known in Breton as ) was given official recognition by the French authorities as the "official orthography of Breton in French education". It was opposed in the region and was only by the magazine and the publishing house Emgleo Breiz, which disappeared in 2015. In the 1970s, a new standard orthography was devised: the or . This system is based on the derivation of the words. Today, most writers continue to use the Peurunvan orthography, and it is the version taught in most Breton-language schools. Alphabet Breton is written in the Latin script. Peurunvan, the most commonly used orthography, consists of the following letters: : a, b, ch, cʼh, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, r, s, t, u, v, w, y, z The circumflex, grave accent, trema and tilde appear on some letters. The diacritics are used in the following way: : â, ê, î, ô, û, ù, ü, ñ Differences between and Both orthographies use the above alphabet although is used only in . Differences between the two systems are particularly noticeable in word endings. In Peurunvan, final obstruents, which are devoiced in absolute final position and voiced in sandhi before voiced sounds, are represented by a grapheme that indicates a voiceless sound. In OU they are written as voiced but represented as voiceless before suffixes: "big", "bigger". In addition, Peurunvan maintains the KLT convention, which distinguishes noun/adjective pairs by nouns written with a final voiced consonant and adjectives with a voiceless one. No distinction is made in pronunciation. , vs. . Pronunciation of the Breton alphabet C (as a single letter), Q and X appear mainly in loanwords. ⟨ks⟩ or ⟨gz⟩ may be used to represent /ks/ or /ɡz/. Notes: • Vocative particle: "O Brittany". • Word-initially. • Word-finally. • Unwritten lenition of and spirantization of > . • Unstressed represent in Leoneg but in the other dialects. The realisations appear mainly before (also less often before ), semivowels , consonant clusters beginning with or . Stressed long represent . • In Gwenedeg velars are palatalized before and , i.e. , , , , , , represent . In the case of word-final and palatalization to also occurs after . • Before a vowel other than the digraph is written instead of , e.g. "to drive", radical , 1PS preterite , 3PS preterite . • Silent in words such as , , , , , and . Always silent in Gwenedeg and Leoneg. • is realized as when it precedes or follows a vowel (or when between vowels), but in words such as , , it represents (in orthography may be used: , , ). • represents when it follows a vowel, after a consonant it represents . But before a vowel other than , is written instead of , e.g. "to follow", radical , 1PS preterite , 3PS preterite . In some regions may be heard instead of . • Word-finally after a cluster of unvoiced consonants. • In front of . • The digraph is realized like when preceded or followed by a vowel (or when between vowels), but in words such as , , it represents . • The digraph represents plural endings. Its pronunciation varies by dialect: rating geographically from Northwest Leon to Southeast Gwened. • usually represents , but word-finally (except in word-final ) it represents in KLT, in Gwenedeg and in Goëlo. The pronunciation is retained word-finally in verbs. In words , , , , , it represents in KLT, in Gwenedeg and in Goëlo. Word-finally following it represents . • But silent in words such as , , , , , , , , , , ', , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . is generally silent in Kerneweg, Tregerieg and Gwenedeg, but in Leoneg is always pronounced. • Used to distinguish words such as "river", "heir", "town" (also written ) from "sense", "bold", "dear". • Used to distinguish "circuit/tour" from "foot". • In northern dialects (mainly in Leoneg), there is a tendency to voice between vowels. also appears as the lenition of and mixed mutation of . • The lenition of and the spirantization of are both represented by is mainly pronounced although in certain regions (especially for the spirantization of in Cornouaille) and (in some Haut-Vannetais varieties) also occur. • The pronunciation of varies by dialect, nowadays uvular (or ) is standard; occurs in Leoneg, or in Tregerieg, and in Gwenedeg. • In Gwenedeg an unstressed often represents . • Lenited varieties of may appear word-initially in case of soft mutation. • In Leoneg in front of a nasal. • In Leoneg represents before . • In Leoneg represents or before . • In Leoneg represents . • Before a vowel. • Forms of the indefinite article. • A conservative realisation of the initial mutation of and , used in certain parts of the Vannes country. ==Sample texts==

Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Lord's Prayer : Hon Tad, : cʼhwi hag a zo en Neñv, : ra vo santelaet hocʼh anv. : Ra zeuio ho Rouantelezh. : Ra vo graet ho youl war an douar evel en neñv. : Roit dimp hiziv bara hor bevañs. : Distaolit dimp hon dleoù : ''evel m'hor bo ivez distaolet d'hon dleourion.'' : ''Ha n'hon lezit ket da vont gant an temptadur,'' : met hon dieubit eus an Droug. Words and phrases in Breton . Note the use of the word ti in the Breton for police station and tourist office, plus for all directions. Visitors to Brittany may encounter words and phrases (especially on signs and posters) such as the following: ==Language comparison==

==Borrowing from Breton by other languages==

The English words and have been borrowed from French, which took them from Breton. However, this is uncertain: for instance, is or ("long stone"), ("straight stone") (two words: noun + adjective) in Breton. Dolmen is a misconstructed word (it should be ). Some studies state that these words were borrowed from Cornish. can be directly translated from Welsh as "long stone" (which is exactly what a or is). The Cornish surnames Mennear, Minear and Manhire all derive from the Cornish ("long stone"), as does "settlement by the long stone". The French word ("to jabber in a foreign language or an unintelligible manner") is derived from Breton ("bread") and ("wine"). The French word ("large seagull") is derived from Breton , which shares the same root as English "gull" (Welsh , Cornish ). ==.bzh==

.bzh is an approved Internet generic top-level domains intended for Brittany and the Breton culture and languages. In 2023, the Breton internet extension .bzh had more than 12,000 registrations. Alongside the promotion of the .bzh internet extension, the www.bzh association promotes other services to develop Brittany's image on the web: campaign for a Breton flag emoji (), and email service. ==See also==