Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK

FRENCH LANGUAGE

7 things you need to know about the Breton language

If you've been following this year's French Eurovision entry, you might be struggling to understand the lyrics. And that's because it's not in French, it's sung in the regional language of Breton. Here's what you need to know about it.

Published: 7 March 2022 16:15 CET
Updated: 12 May 2022 11:56 CEST
7 things you need to know about the Breton language
Photo: Loic Venance / AFP)

As one of Eurovision’s “Big Five,” or top financial contributors, France already already has its place secured in the final, set to take place this Saturday, May 14th. But viewers were finally able to get a real taste of what they will see on Saturday, after Eurovision released the official music video France’s performance.

With its bright green and orange lighting and exciting pyrotechnic effects, the video is striking…though not as striking as the fact that it is the distinct lack of French sounds in it. 

The entry to the 2022 contest, from Alvan and Ahvez, is sung entirely in Breton and as you will hear, this is no mere regional dialect of French, it’s a completely different language.

Here’s 5 things to know about the ancient Breton language. 

It is the only Celtic language still spoken on continental Europe

Breton was brought from Great Britain to Armorica – the ancient name for the coastal region that includes the Brittany peninsula – some time in the Early Middle Ages.

It is most closely related to the Cornish language, which is quite a coincidence as most of Cornwall and parts of Devon were formed millions of years ago when a section of France collided with Great Britain, according to a 2018 study. You could say that makes Cornwall French…

Breton was written down before French

The oldest known text written in the Breton language is a four-page work called the Book of Leiden, in Old Breton and Latin. It is a medical treatise dating from the end of the 8th century – and the language is known to date from the 5th century. The oldest known French text is the Oaths of Strasbourg, which were written midway through the ninth century, in 842.

In fact, the first French dictionary is also the first Breton dictionary. In 1464, the Catholicon was a trilingual Breton-French-Latin dictionary.

It’s spoken by over 200,000 speakers

According to a 2018 survey carried out by the regional council in Brittany the Breton language is spoken by around 213,000 people in Brittany – which equates to around 5.5 percent of the population.

As well as that 31 percent of the population of Brittany say they know several words and expressions in Breton.

Most Breton speakers are in the west of the region in the département of Finistere.

There is another regional language of Brittany known as “Gallo” which is more spoken in the east of the region roughly by around 200,000 people.

Breton is in demand among young people

According to that 2018 survey some 73 percent of those surveyed wanted more Breton taught in local schools and 55 percent wanted more TV shows in the regional language.

France tried to kill it off

Between 1880 and the 1950s, Breton – along with other regional languages – was banned from the French school system and children were punished for speaking it.

The situation changed when the 1951 Deixonne Law allowed the Breton language and culture to be taught for a maximum of three hours a week in the public school system on the proviso that a teacher was both able and prepared to do so.

Today, about 200,000 people speak Breton, down from 1 million in 1950.

What’s in a name?

But some parts of the French system still appear resistant to Breton.

In 2017, authorities refused a couple’s choice of baby name because it included a letter they do not consider to be French enough. The couple discovered exactly how stressful choosing your baby’s name can be in France when they tried to register their newborn “Fañch”, which is the Breton version of François.

Unfortunately, at the time, the the letter “n” with a tilde (ñ) – common enough in Spanish and also part of the Breton language – did not feature on the government’s list of acceptable letters.

A two-year legal battle only ended when Cour de Cassation dismissed the appeal lodged by the Attorney General due to a procedural error, and therefore definitively authorised the child to keep the tilde on his first name.

Asterix is a Breton hero – then, and now

The Asterix comic series has been translated into Breton. According to the comic, the Gaulish village where Asterix lives is in the Armorica peninsula, which is now Brittany.

Some other popular comics have also been translated into Breton, including The Adventures of Tintin, Hägar the Horrible, Peanuts and Yakari.

Member comments

  1. Cornish is a dialect of Welsh (or both are dialects of a common language). Many words are the same in Welsh, Cornish and Breton, e.g. black= du, blue =glas and others are slightly different but easily recognisable, e.g. fish = pysgod (W), pysk (C), pesked (B) and white = gwyn (W), gwynn (C), gwenn (B). Until not so long ago Breton onion sellers were familiar and much welcomed Autumn visitors with tresses of (Roscoff) onions draped over the handlebars of their bicycles. Those that worked Welsh speaking areas were able to communicate in Breton.

  2. Some factual inaccuracies here…Breton was not imported from Cornwall or the UK, though after the withdrawal of the Romans from the UK there was an influx of people into Brittany from the formerly Roman controlled parts of the UK.

    The culture and language was already present in the region and linguistically Breton forms part of the second migration of Celtic tribes into western Europe. Much the British Isles Celtic languages form part of the first migration. No doubt the influx of settlers from the UK would have influenced the languages spoken in Brittany (there are in fact four recognised dialects) but was not the source of it.

  3. “You could say that makes Cornwall French…”
    What it actually means is that Brittany is actually British and we’re just letting the French look after it for us.

  4. “You could say that makes Cornwall French…”
    What it actually means is that Brittany is British and we’re simply letting the French look after it for us………..

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

LEARNING FRENCH

Is the English language really just ‘badly pronounced French’?

A French linguist has been making waves with his boldly-titled book 'The English language does not exist - it's just badly pronounced French', but does the professor actually have a point?

Published: 23 April 2024 14:35 CEST
Is the English language really just 'badly pronounced French'?

The French linguist Bernard Cerquiglini is clear that the title of his book should be taken with humour and a pinch of salt, beginning his work by explaining that it is a ‘bad faith proposition’.

Clearly, the English language does exist and equally clearly the French are a little uneasy about it – with numerous laws, national bodies and local initiatives attempting to fight back against the anglicisms that now litter everyday speech, from ‘c’est cool’ to ‘un job’. 

But Cerquiglini argues that the supposed ‘influx’ of English words that are now used in France, especially tech-related terms, is nothing compared to what happened when French literally invaded English in the Middle Ages.

And the close similarity that the two languages enjoy today – around 30 percent of English words are of French origin – speaks to this entwined history.

“You can also see my book as an homage to the English language, which has been able to adopt so many words… Viking, Danish, French, it’s astonishing,” he told AFP.

The history

The key date in the blending of English and French is the Norman conquest of 1066, when Duke William of Normandy invaded England with a small group of Norman knights and made himself the English king William the Conqueror.

What happened next was a radical re-ordering of society in which English nobles were displaced and William’s knights were installed as a new French-speaking (or at least Norman-speaking) ruling class. 

The use of French by the ruling classes continued into the 13th and 14th centuries, by which time French was the official language of the royal courts, diplomacy, the law, administration and trade – meaning that ambitious English people had no choice but to learn French in order to take part in official or legal processes. 

Cerquiglini says that half of all English’s borrowings from French took place between 1260-1400, with a heavy slant towards words related to nobility, trade, administration or the law.

But a large group of non-native speakers meant that the French spoken in England was already starting to evolve, and the French words ended up with different pronunciations or even a different meaning. 

As early as 1175, the records show a Frenchman in England snootily remarking that: “My language is good, because I was born in France”. 

English and French started to part ways from the mid-1400s, by which time the two countries no longer shared royalty (the last English possession in France, the port of Calais, was lost to the French in 1558) and gradually systems such as the law courts and trade began to be conducted in English.

French remained widely spoken as a second language by the nobility and the elite right up until the early 20th century and French is still the most widely-taught language in UK schools.

The similarities

It’s not always easy to distinguish between English words that have a French root and those that have a Latin root, but linguists estimate that around 29 percent of English words come from French, another 29 percent from Latin, 26 percent from German and the rest from other languages.

But many of the English words that do have a clear French root are related to nobility, administration, politics and the law.

For example the French words gouvernement, parlement, autorité and peuple are clearly recognisable to English speakers. Likewise budget, revenus, enterprise and taxe, plus avocat, cour, juge, magistrat and evidence.

Amusingly, the French and the English obviously found time to share many insults, including bâtard [bastard], crétin, imbecile, brute and stupide.

Adaptation

But most of the people in England who were speaking French did not have it as their mother tongue, so the language began to adapt. For example the French à cause de literally translates into English as ‘by cause of’ which over time became the English word ‘because’.

There are also words that started out the same but changed their meaning over time – for example the English word ‘clock’ comes from the French ‘cloche’ (bell), because in the Middle Ages church bells were the most common method of keeping track of the time for most people.

When the mechanical clock began to appear from the 14th century onwards, the French used a new term – une horloge – but the English stuck with the original.

The differences

One of the big differences between English and French is that English simply has more words – there are roughly 170,000 words in the English language, compared to about 135,000 in French.

And at least part of this comes from English being a ‘blended’ language – that English people hung on to their original words and simply added the French ones, which is why you often get several different English words that have the same translation in French eg clever and intelligent both translate into French as ‘intelligent’.

Another difference represents the class divide that the Norman invasion imposed between the French nobles and the English labourers.

For example the words pig and cow both have Anglo-Saxon roots, while pork and beef come from French (porc and boeuf) – so when the animal is in the field being looked after by English peasants it has an Anglo-Saxon name, but by the time it is on the plate being eaten by posh people, it becomes French.

There’s also a tendency in English for the more everyday words to have Anglo-Saxon origins while the fancier words have French origins – eg to build (English) versus to construct (French). In French construire is used for both. Or to feed (English) versus to nourish (French) – in French both are nourrir.

Faux amis

One consequence of English and French being so closely linked in the bane of every language-learner’s life – les faux amis (false friends).

These are words that look and sound very similar, but have a completely different meaning. If you don’t know the French word for something you can have a stab at saying the English word with a French pronunciation – and often you will be right.

But sometimes you will be wrong, and sometimes it will be embarrassing.

READ ALSO The 18 most embarrassing French ‘false friends’

Often, faux amis are words that have changed their meaning in one language but not the other – for example the French word sensible means sensitive, not sensible – which is why you can buy products for peau sensible (sensitive skin).

But it once meant sensitive in English too – for example in the title of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility – over time the meaning of the English word adapted but the French one stayed the same.

The title

And a word on that title – La langue anglaise n’existe pas, C’est du français mal prononcé (the English language does not exist, it’s just badly pronounced French) is actually a quote from former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau.

He did apparently speak English, but doesn’t appear to have been very fond of England itself – his other well-known quote on the topic is: “L’angleterre n’est qu’une colonie français qui a mal tourné” – England is just a French colony gone wrong.  

SHOW COMMENTS