Transmission ou transformation ?

Abstract

With the end of the practice of Breton within most families for a few decades, schools appear today as the main place for the transmission of this language. This leads some people to express doubts about the institutionalisation of an artificial language that is opaque to vernacular speakers, a criticism that echoes various studies in other contexts. In order to document the facts, I analysed the Breton spoken by pupils in a bilingual class in central Brittany. The aim was to ascertain the extent to which the Breton variety of this region was influenced, or even replaced, by a new standardised school variety. The initial results unsurprisingly show an influence of French. They also testify to the breakthrough of a form of Breton which is foreign to the region. But the resistance of some local peculiarities also appears, making the Breton of these new speakers a fundamentally composite phenomenon.

Keywords

• Breton (language)
• language variation
• bilingualism
• standardization