Breton Nationalism - Culture and Language

Culture and Language

Breton cultural movements are diverse and include many more active participants than the political parties with a Breton agenda. Since the late nineties, Breton culture has witnessed a large increased in popularity, not only within Brittany but throughout France.

In addition to French, which is spoken in Brittany since the late Middle Age, the Breton linguistic area traditionally comprises two major regional languages : the Gallo language, which is a romance language, and the Breton language, which is a Celtic language closely related to Welsh and even more to Cornish.

Breton language was traditionally spoken only in the western part of the region (Lower Brittany), as Gallo was spoken in the East (Upper Brittany).

While at the beginning of the 20th century, only a minority of these Bretons were even able to understand French, the Breton and the Gallo languages have been progressively uprooted by French. Currently, only a minority of Bretons are able to understand the regional languages of Brittany and this number is steadily decreasing. In order to invert this trend, an organization named Diwan was created in 1977. The goal of this association is to propose schooling in Breton through a system of total immersion. Unlike other schools in France, including private schools, the institutions belonging to Diwan operate almost totally without any support from the French government, a recent decision by the French constitutional council (2001) declaring teaching exclusively in Breton unconstitutional, French being the official language of the Republic. Since the 1970s however, an increasing number of schools have adopted a system of bilingualism.

In the 1980s and 1990s, but peaking in the early 2000s, there were some television programs translated into Breton. TV Breizh was a Breton-speaking TV channel offered programming fully in Breton, but the station went out of business by 2007.