By Chloe Coupeau
THIRTY years after a group of die-hard purists set up a controversial system of bilingual French-Breton schools, the number of people speaking one of the country’s best-known regional languages is still falling.
Brittany’s Diwan schools – Diwan means “the shoot” in Breton – were created in 1977 to protect a language that many in the fiercely proud region said had been under attack from the centralised French state for centuries.
“Without us, bilingual teaching in state or private schools, books, or television programmes in Breton would not have been developed,” said Padrig Herve, president of the Diwan organisation.
“In total, if you add up the Breton classes in state and private Catholic schools there are about 11,000 to 12,000 children being taught bilingually today,” said Herve.
“But there should be 20,000 to 30,000 if the Breton language is to have a chance of surviving,” he added.
In 1900, some 1.3mn people regularly spoke the Celtic tongue similar to Welsh or Cornish. Today only 200,000 people speak it.
Yet the decline of the Breton language comes as other aspects of Breton culture, in particular its music and dance, seem to be thriving.
Breton music fiestas, known as festou-noz, are common at weekends across the region, and are well-attended. Brittany is also home to one of the world’s largest Celtic music festivals, the Interceltique, held on the first weekend of August every year in Lorient.
And in September 2007, Paris welcomed a huge celebration of Breton culture called Breizh Touch, which brought 300,000 people into the street to watch 3,000 Breton dancers and musicians parade down the legendary Champs Elysees.
“It’s a paradoxical situation,” says Bernard Gestin, president of the Breton Cultural Institute based in the southern Breton port of Vannes.
While pride in Breton culture has never been greater, there seems little doubt that “the number of Breton speakers is dying”, he added.
But Paris has always had mixed feelings about regional languages, with governments, particularly after the French Revolution, seeing them as a threat to a unified French state.
In the past, the language was often mocked as a dialect for the uneducated, and moves to stamp out Breton were common in state schools until the 1960s, with many older people still remembering being punished for speaking Breton at school.
The children would have to wear symbols of their “shame” around their neck. The objects, known simply as symbols in French – or “ar vuoc’h” after the Breton name for a cow – took a variety of forms.
They could be real cows’ tails, small coins with a hole in the centre or a wooden peasant’s clog. In one school, children caught speaking the regional tongue would have to wear a classroom slate bearing the words “I speak Breton”.
“It was an extremely vicious practice and it had consequences,” said Gestin.
“Right up until the 1940s we had about 1.2mn Breton speakers,” he said, adding that at that time Breton was the most widely spoken of the Celtic tongues, outstripping Ireland’s Gaelic or the Welsh language.
“One of the most unpleasant things about the “symbol” was that the only way to get rid of it was to pass it on to another Breton-speaking child by reporting them to a teacher,” he added. “The system meant hundreds of thousands of Bretons became ashamed of their identity and culture and refused to teach their language to their children.”
Today the situation has changed. There are bilingual French-Breton road signs posted across the western French region, and regional authorities subsidise Diwan schools to the tune of around 550,000 euros ($782,000) a year.
On average, one or two new Diwan schools open each year but each creation, says Herve, is an uphill struggle.
Critics of Diwan describe it as a partisan organisation that implicitly rejects the idea of a unified state with French as its common language.
“As Diwan is a school system that favours a certain community, there is no reason why it should receive state subsidies,” said Annette Le Port of the teachers’ trade union, SE-UNSA.
But Diwan supporters say the system fosters open-mindedness and the schools have a good academic record.
“We are constantly increasing the number of projects we teach that examine other cultures,” said Youenn Guillanton, headmaster of the Diwan school in the Breton capital Rennes, pointing to school exhibitions on India and the Kurds.
But like Herve, he fears the Breton language will not survive without greater national support.
“We will not last another 50 years unless regional languages are formally recognised in France,” he said, referring to the fact that France has not ratified a 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML), which protects and promotes such languages. – AFP |
