Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

96 Language Planning and Education
into contact with a French-speaking world and further introducing bilingualism into
what had hitherto been a monoglot-predominant group.
Language demography
It might be supposed that the confluence of these various factors would have
suppressed the numbers of Breton speakers but, in fact, what statistics there are – and
there are few because French censuses have traditionally not sought information on
language – show that at the beginning of the twentieth century there were probably
around 1,400,000 Breton speakers (Humphreys 1993: 628). By the time of the most
recent reliable survey in 1997, however, conducted by the French daily newspaper
of Brest, Le Télégramme, there were only an estimated 240,000 fluent speakers with
a further 125,000 semi-speakers. Their age distribution, moreover, points unambiguously
to obsolescence, for, while 45 per cent of those over 75 could speak
Breton well, the corresponding figures for those aged 20–39 were 5 per cent and for
those under 20 years 1 per cent (Moal 2000: 119). The intergenerational transmission
of the language has practically ceased, as is confirmed by a 1998 INED
survey (National Institute of Demographic Studies) reporting an intergenerational
transmission rate of close to 0 per cent and a Euromosaic report ranking Breton 32nd
out of 48 communities for language reproduction).
It seems clear, then, that while the ground had long been prepared, the twentieth
century, and especially the middle period from roughly 1950 to 1970, saw the most
marked decrease in the number of speakers and in the vitality of the language. Again,
various factors have played their part. One might note here, for instance, that the
Catholic Church, along with its schools, a traditional bastion of the language, had
by the 1950s largely completed its gradual shift from Breton to French – even in such
auxiliary areas as catechism classes and private pastoral work.
Urbanisation and migration
More significant, however, are two broad socio-economic forces: urbanisation, which
in comparison with Britain came relatively late to France, and out-migration. The
former, fuelled partly by the mechanisation of agriculture from the 1950s, is linked
closely with significant rural depopulation, a trend firmly evidenced by McDonald’s
(1989: 4) finding that the proportion of the Brittany population employed in
agriculture declined from over 50 per cent in the 1950s to around 21 per cent in
1975. The effect, of course, was to weaken the rural basis of Breton. Out-migration,
too, sapped the strength of the heartland by drawing away young Bretons to work in
Paris and elsewhere: in the years 1954–62 alone, for example, an estimated 100,000
Bretons under the age of 30 emigrated out of the region (Oakey 2000: 644).
Adding the above to other aspects of modernisation – the growth of tourism, the
mobility brought by the motor car, the reluctance of young women to tie themselves
to a life of rurality and the ensuing rise of exogamy, and the decline of economic
incentives – takes us a considerable distance towards an explanation of the swift
collapse of intergenerational transmission.