Abstract
The paper opens with a brief overview of the reasons behind the decline of the Breton language in the mid-19th to
early 20th Centuries in order to contextualise on-going revitalisation ...efforts that began in earnest in the 1980s. The discussion
then turns to a theoretical review of the literature concerning the key role that translation has been shown to play within the
framework of language planning for minority languages within the complementary fields of Polysystems Theory and the Sociology of
Translation, arguing that the related yet considerably under-researched field of interpreting can also make a significant
contribution to language planning and revitalisation by heightening visibility and symbolic prestige. Finally, the paper presents
the results of a limited yet revelatory survey of the main interpreters active in the field in order to shed light on key aspects
of the current state of the emerging phenomenon of Breton language interpreting (including interpreter profiles, training,
directionality, modalities, voluntary vs. paid work, the clientele, etc.) and their implications with a view to gauging its
potential impact for language planning and possible directions for the future.
Aux XIX e et XX e siècles, tandis qu’il s’est inscrit de façon durable dans les représentations culturelles, le génie entre peu à peu en régime médiatique, où les valeurs d’excellence et ...d’originalité qui lui sont associées se mêlent à la notion de “photogénie” et en infléchissent le sens. Dès lors, le génie artistique s’évalue aussi en fonction de l’apparence écranique des artistes. Pour mettre en lumière cet usage médiatique du génie, cet article procédera à une analyse croisée de l’iconographie photographique de Salvator Dalí et d’André Breton au cours de l’entre-deux-guerres.
The question of authenticity in language has been approached from a number of theoretical standpoints. A significant type of feature which may bestow authenticity and legitimacy is the linguistic. ...Linguistic performance can be viewed in terms of either the unreflectingly fluent and competent use by the ideal native speaker or, in opposition, the inauthenticity of the non-native language learner. As pointed out by Martin Gill in his paper “Exclusive Boundaries, Contested Claims: Authenticity, Language and Ideology”, authentic speech is romanticised as “native, spoken, verbatim, unrehearsed, off-the-record, sincere, vernacular and non-standard”. Such a definition is easily understandable by the wider public outside of academia. However, it begs the question: who has the authority to make this distinction and who can validate these authenticity claims? Mary Bucholtz proposes instead the concept of authentication, or the outcome of constantly negotiated social and linguistic practices. Debates over what constitutes ‘authentic’ language in minority language settings are particularly noticeable, given the processes of revitalisation many of them are going through. This paper aims to move the discussion away from the purely linguistic when considering what authenticity means, and investigate the concept from a more speaker-centred perspective. The example of Breton in Brittany is taken as the case study here – what it means to speak Breton ‘authentically’, according to whom, and to which norms. In particular, attention is paid to the authentication process of negotiation and how different actors approach and manage this dynamic.
Previous work has used Greenberg's synthetism index to compare three of the Celtic languages - Irish, Welsh, and Breton - but not the other three languages, namely Scottish Gaelic, Manx, and Cornish. ...This paper extends this earlier work by comparing all six Celtic languages, including two periods of Irish (Early Modern and Present Day). The analysis is based on a random sample of 210 parallel psalm texts (30 for each language). However, Greenberg's synthetism index is problematic because there are no operational standards for counting morphemes within words. We therefore apply a newer typological indicator (B7), which is based solely on lexical rank-frequency statistics. We also explore whether type-token counts alone can provide similar information. The B7 indicator shows that both varieties of Irish, together with Welsh and Cornish, tend more towards synthetism, whereas Manx tends more towards analytism. Breton and Scottish Gaelic do not show a clear tendency in either direction. Rankings using type-token statistics vary considerably and do not tell the same story.
In this paper we present an extended description of two resources for natural language processing of Breton, a morphological analyser and constraint grammar-based disambiguator. The constraint ...grammar was developed using a novel methodology by a linguist and a language consultant creating rules to solve specific errors in disambiguation in a machine translation system. In addition we introduce a new morphologically-disambiguated corpus of Breton and evaluate both the morphological analyser and constraint grammar for coverage and accuracy. For comparison we use the same corpus to train several reference systems for part-of-speech tagging and lemmatisation and compare the performance. The experiments show that our system outperforms the reference systems by a wide margin when the reference systems are trained without an external full-form list, and performs comparably when they are trained with a full-form list generated from our morphological analyser.
This paper undertakes a comprehensive survey of the syntax of absolute forms of verbs in the corpus of early Welsh poetry known as hengerdd . Comparisons are made with the syntax of absolute forms in ...Old Irish, in Old Welsh and Old Breton, in Middle Welsh court poetry of the twelfth century onwards, and with those found in Middle Welsh prose texts.
This paper examines variation in Breton word order patterns in non‐negative utterances across speakers of different ages. Not only has there been some disagreement on how best to characterise ...unmarked word order in Breton, it has also been claimed that younger speakers of so‐called Neo‐Breton overuse subject‐initial word order under influence from French. Data from fieldwork provide a complex picture of word order variability. This seems to be driven by a number of factors, including the nature of the subject (lexical or pronominal), regional variation among older speakers, and a corresponding lack of regional features among younger speakers. Rather than overusing subject‐initial word order, the Neo‐Breton speakers tend to avoid this word order pattern when other word orders are available, such that the verb‐second pattern is being maintained.
This article studies some bilingual breton-french schoolbooks in their social contexts. Rather than considering the language policies as targeting languages themselves, we first show that the debates ...about languages are often a pretext in conflicts about clericalism. In analysing the schoolbook's paratext, we focus on the way in which both languages, french and breton, are handled in their cohabitation, and which social uses are given to them.
Breton (Brittany, France) and Lower Sorbian (Brandenburg, Germany) are two of the many endangered minority languages currently undergoing revitalization. In their cases, given that intergenerational ...transmission in a family setting has mostly ceased, language revitalization takes the form of educational initiatives, such as the immersion program Diwan in Brittany and the bilingual program Witaj in Brandenburg. The article argues that the differences in language ideologies and attitudes of language revitalizers, which form the often unexpressed and unaddressed ideological foundations of these programs, have led to divergences in results of revitalization of Breton and Lower Sorbian.
These divergences can have significant consequences for the new speakers of these languages produced through educational programs. Brittany's Diwan schools, which construes Breton as relevant to modern identities and capable of functioning outside the educational context, can be claimed to be producing new speakers in whose lives Breton will play a considerable role. By using foreign language teaching strategies and struggling to provide a vibrant life for Lower Sorbian after school, Witaj, in turn, does keep the minority language alive, but much more as a school subject than as a viable means of communication.
This article provides a first attempt of a syntactic characterization of the different Breton varieties spoken in the twenty-first century. Standard Breton is addressed as one of the modern dialects ...spoken in Brittany, and its syntax is compared with that of traditional varieties. I first establish a baseline and inventory the syntactic parameters that differentiate the traditional dialects from each other: Kerne, Leon, Goelo, Treger (KLT in the West) and Gwenedeg (South East). I show that a robust body of syntactic variation characterizes traditional dialects. I next compare these with the Standard variety that emerged during the twentieth century, and show that if Standard Breton has original features of its own, it varies less with respect to traditional varieties than do traditional varieties among themselves.
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