Re: History of the Breton Language

On 21 Oct 2005 02:39:19 -0700, "fred" <f5r4e3d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

>How many native speakers of Breton do you think there are, Michel=EDn?
>One site I came across suggests there are 240 000 'native speakers'.
>I suspect this would be an optimistic figure (though I really don't
>know!)

The problem is that the French government refuses to gather
statistics, but I have seen figures of up to a half million speakers
given in re****ts about local people funding Breton-speaking evening
cl*****, including native speakers and younger people who have learned
the language as a protest against government efforts to bury Breton.

It's an old story, if you want to encourage a language, try to kill it
it off. Sadly in the Highlands, most of the native speakers left for
other parts of Britain or overseas.

This persecution is not unique to Breton. The same pressure has been
exerted in the Midi against the descendants of Occitan, Savoyard and
Norman-French, while in Spain, Catalan was subjected to the same
official pressure. 

The reasons were the same as the reasons for trying to obliterate
Scots and Irish Gaelic and Welsh - to make the people of each country
speak the government -approved language and unite rather than splinter
into linguistic and therefore political and nationalistic groups.

Unfortunately, thanks to social, business and other pressures, the
Scots language in Scotland is rapidly dying in the cities. Gaelic is
already teetering, but there is a local backlash and more and more
non-Gaelic Scots are learning it and sending their children to Gaelic
language schools, particularly those non-Gaels who have settled in the
Highlands and have to decided to have their children educated in
Gaelic - a startling but extremely welcome development. 
>
>If that was the case, and these were genuine 'mother tongue speakers'
>(albeit non-monoglot, obviously), that would put Breton far ahead of
>Irish in terms of the mother-tongue speakers (as opposed to those who
>have learned it as a second language.)

That is the case as far as I am aware.
>
>If I remember right, according to Reg Hindley's book, the number of
>people who have learned Irish as non-mothertongue speakers outnumbers
>people who learned it from birth as their first language by 10 to 1,
>with only about 30 000 actual mothertongue Irish speakers as opposed to
>something like 300 000 who have reasonable Irish learned through the
>various educational structures for second language acquisition.)

The Irish experiment has been interesting, in that it sems to have
been mostly resented by Irish children exposed to compulsory Irish
learning. However, the fact that people are learning any native
language means that there is a depth of hidden sup****t inherent in
ordinary people; a desire to preseve and be able to use what for some
should have been their mother tongue until governments decided to
interfere and dictate which language they should speak.



Murchadh