Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Minority languages and language revitalisation 107
recent cross-dialectal hybrid, a creation of experts and committees long divided
among themselves (see Jones 1998b). Standardised thus ‘from above’ it has not had
time to evolve or to win the acceptance of a reluctant speech community, a situation
which is clearly inimical to engagement in revival work.
A final factor distinguishing Welsh and Breton is one of timing. Welsh revitalisation,
dating from the early twentieth century, got underway when family
transmission of the language was still not uncommon and when there was a
reasonably large constituency of younger native speakers, willing and able to mobilise
on behalf of the language. Breton revitalisation, on the other hand, coming later, was
confronted with a situation where family transmission had already all but collapsed,
and thus it has had to cope not only with a divided speech community but with the
absence of a solid base of younger native speakers.
For all these reasons, then, the fortunes of the two languages have diverged very
considerably over recent decades, and it is perhaps true to say that in terms of vitality
Breton now has more in common with Irish than it does with Welsh. Of all the
Celtic languages, Welsh is the best placed socio-politically, demographically and
institutionally to survive through the twenty-first century. One cannot express the
same degree of optimism for Breton, however.
4.4. CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS OF THE
WELSH/BRETON CASE STUDY
The forces affecting Welsh and Breton enter into distinct and individual
configurations, but this does not mean these forces are in themselves unique. In
many other situations of language decline and revitalisation in Europe one tends to
encounter similar agents: the nation state whose resources are mainly channelled
towards the favoured official language; a dominant standard language spoken by the
more powerful members of society, which as a result comes to be associated over time
with social mobility; minority language speakers with strong attachments to the
ancestral language and who are on that account willing to mobilise in its support;
other minority speakers whose sense of identity is less strongly bound to the ancestral
language and who, therefore, are more predisposed to shift to what is perceived to
be a more advantageous language; an educational system that may in one period
be exploited to disseminate the official state language but in another used to teach
and transmit the minority language; and, more nebulously, modernising forces
(e.g. industrialisation, urbanisation), which tend to undermine the social networks
sustaining minority language communities.
From this enumeration it is plain that it is primarily socio-political and economic
factors that influence the fate of languages. But our previous discussion makes it
equally clear that the interplay between them is complex and variable in different
situations, and in such complex processes no one single variable is predictive of
successful revitalisation or failure. Nationalist mobilisation, for example, appears to
have been helpful to Welsh but much less so to Irish.
Slightly firmer conclusions are possible, however, with respect to the roles of