Which Linguistic Model for Brittany?

In attempting to safeguard a severely threatened language such as Breton (which really means safeguarding the threatened language communities and the local economies which sustain them), are we to promote the traditionally transmitted language varieties spoken naturally by the quasi totality of the population, or do we promote the new standardized, unified language now supported and spoken by much of the media, the majority of schoolteachers and young learners of the language? The debate could perhaps be summarized as follows: Which linguistic model is best suited to encouraging the preservation of the Breton language: a “bottom-up” approach (advocating the renewed support for the dialectal but sociolinguistically stigmatized varieties of language spoken by over 200,000 traditional speakers) or a “top-down” approach (endorsing a standard language conceived and elaborated by an intellectual elite which offers the advantage of uniformity and thus enhanced mutual comprehension among learners, but which is often frowned upon and viewed as unnatural by traditional speakers)? These questions are certainly not new. Taking into consideration the sociolinguistic and socioeconomic motivations of older speakers who have for the most part rejected their native dialects in favour of French, the impetus is clearly on the side of those who are adopting the new Breton norm, even though these speakers are almost exclusively learners with French as their native language. The debate over what constitutes acceptable Breton is still raging today in Brittany and is so intense and passionate at times that a balanced discussion among specialists can be difficult. Having said this, the case of Breton is not an isolated one and the lessons gleaned here could benefit other threatened-language communities worldwide. The options of language revivalists and language planners must thus take into account all the possible parameters and it may be that no single solution is preferable. In this paper, I argue that the production of reference tools in the form of six or seven dialect dictionaries and corresponding dialect grammars covering all of Western Brittany would go a long way to fulfilling the needs of a vast, neglected segment of the Breton-speaking population.