Our Irish language columnist Gearóid Ó Colmáin on the case of Breton - the traditional Celtic language that no longer has a place in modern France
IN SPITE OF its deep appreciation of culture and its international reputation in the field of ethnology and philosophy, France remains obstinately opposed to the preservation of some of its most fascinating cultural possessions – the Breton language – by refusing to grant it official status in the French Republic.
Breton is one of the six Celtic languages, and forms part of the Brythonic subgroup with Cornish and Welsh, with which it has close similarities. It was probably introduced to France by migrants from southern Britain from the third century onwards. And it is still spoken often in the northwestern region of France known as Armorica and further south in La Roche Bernand.
Although it was the language of the local nobility until the 12th century, Breton remained the lingua franca of the lower classes when the nobility abandoned it for French thereafter. With the establishment of L’Académic Francaise by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635 at the behest of Louis XIII, minority languages were sidelined and vehemently discouraged.
Even after the French revolution in 1789, with its universal precepts of liberté, egalité and fraternité, minority languages became anathema to the new staunchly Francophone French Republic. The reason for the French revolutionaries’ opposition to a multilingual state was their paranoid suspicion that regional languages could be used by the ousted monarchy to hoodwink the peasants, keeping them ignorant of the affairs of the world. Under the Third, Fourth and Fifth republics, extreme measures were adopted to annihilate the language. Sadly, little has changed since then.
The French government still refuses to fund Breton language immersion schools, as the constitution unequivocally states that French is the language of the republic. This is in spite of the fact that there are up to 200,000 speakers of Breton in France.
One of the Breton language’s most gifted yet deeply controversial exponents was Roparz Hemon, a professor who wrote books, dictionaries, grammars and short stories in Breton. He even translated Shakespeare’s The Tempest into the language.
But Hemon was a virulent supporter of the Nazi occupation of France. He broadcast in Breton for the Propagandastaffel, and his vitriolic, anti-semitic pronouncements were often extreme. He eventually escaped to Ireland after the war where, due either to the feckless incompetence of the Irish authorities or their fascist sympathies, he was allowed to remain.
Although, Hemon’s Breton is often fraught with grammatical and syntactical errors, he did more than any other in the 20th century to both promote and demote the language at the same time. His criminal brand of nationalism became associated by many with the desire for regional autonomy, and especially the Breton language. This is a terrible shame, as no language contains within itself a political viewpoint.
In 1977 the first Diwan schools appeared in Brittany to provide immersion education in Breton from primary to secondary level. Just as in Ireland in the case of Gaelscoileanna, these schools have been surprisingly successful, but they still lack government support. It is perhaps too late now for the French government to save this rare, endangered language, but for a country brimming with sociologists, philosophers and ethnologists, the price for their monolingual intransigence may be another point of perception, another world-view, receding rapidly before their unseeing eyes.
