Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Minority languages and language revitalisation 93
out of a puddle, and attributed by Jones, R. (1983) to suburbanisation, second home
purchases, and retirement settlement.
If traditional ‘Welsh Wales’ has been losing speakers, a feature of the recent revival
has been an increase in the proportions, and numbers, of Welsh speakers in the urban
south. The 2001 census, for example, records a 7.7 per cent gain in the proportion
of Welsh speakers in Newport between 1991and 2001, and a 4.4 per cent gain in
Cardiff as against a 3 per cent fall in Gwynedd. As Aitchison and Carter (2000: 134)
remark, Welsh has been, for sometime, a predominantly urban language.
4.3.1.2 Breton
The dukedom of Brittany, an area originally colonised by Brythonic-speaking
peoples from southern Britain, was incorporated into the French state under the
Edict of Union of 1532. As a province, it held on to a measure of autonomy in
ecclesiastical, judicial and fiscal matters, but this status, along with the associated
privileges, was lost when, following the French Revolution of 1789, all provinces
were abolished and replaced by départements supervised directly from Paris. As
an administrative unit, Brittany only re-emerged in 1972, when it became one of
22 French régions, comprising the départements of Finistère, Morbihan, Côtes
d’Armor and Ille-et-Vilaine.
The geographical and administrative region does not, however, have a singular
linguistic-cultural identity, for, as is well known, it is divided into Haute Bretagne
(Upper Brittany), which has since the thirteenth century been Romance rather than
Breton-speaking, and Basse Bretagne, or Breizh-Izel (Lower Brittany), the traditional
Breton heartland lying to the west of a line running roughly from Saint-Brieuc in the
north to Vannes in the south, as indicated in Figure 4.3. This is not to say, however,
that any contemporary casual visitor would be aware of any such divide, since, as
Timm (1980), Humphreys (1993) and Price (2000) all observe, the last fifty years
have witnessed a radical collapse of the heartland, leaving extensive areas from which
Breton has largely disappeared. The towns of Lower Brittany, meanwhile, have been
predominantly French-speaking for centuries.
If the linguistic division of the Brittany region has impeded the development of a
pan-Breton sense of identity, an additional contributory factor is the fragmentation
of the Breton language into four main dialects (there are sub-dialects) known as the
Kerne, Leon, Treger and Gwened after the four ancient dioceses with which they are,
or have been, very roughly coextensive (see Figure 4.4). Jones (1998b: 131) claims
that these are only partly mutually intelligible, and, while this is disputed by some,
there is evidence that many native Bretons are very conscious of linguistic differentiation,
hence the common refrain – ‘Ils ne parlent pas le même breton’.
Kuter (1989: 84), meanwhile, emphasises the local parochial nature of the identity
of many Breton-speakers, suggesting that they identify most strongly with their
‘pays’, their ‘commune’ and its distinctive features of dialect, of costumes, and even of
the particular coiffes worn by the women. At regional, or subregional, level French
remains the unifying language, the instrument for communication with outsiders –