Four chapters in a volume on education in bilingual contexts, including a reprint of Erwan Le Pipec’s 2022 article ‘Pourquoi le breton n’est pas devenu une langue de scolarisation’ (see YWMLS 84), focus specifically on Breton, bringing different perspectives on how the spread of state education in France played its part in language shift from Breton to French in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Firstly, Fañch Broudic, ‘Le symbole et les autres dispositifs d’exclusion de la langue bretonne de l’école’, in L’école et les langues dans les espaces en situation de partage linguistique: Approche historique, ed. by Jean-Luc Le Cam and Erwan Le Pipec (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), 279–294, gives summary statistics regarding the evolution of speaker numbers throughout the twentieth century. Broudic notes that bilingual education was widespread in the nineteenth century, but successive acts of language policy encouraged a move towards education through French alone. Focusing on the use of the symbole as a means of identifying and punishing pupils who spoke Breton at school, he gives some examples of its enduring presence in the local collective memory and summarizes some studies where participants recounted their personal experiences. Similarly, Nelly Blanchard, ‘Souvenirs et témoignages sur les pratiques linguistiques à l’école en Basse Bretagne dans les années 1930–1950’, in L’école et les langues dans les espaces en situation de partage linguistique: Approche historique, ed. by Jean-Luc Le Cam and Erwan Le Pipec (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), 349–366, presents results of a survey of Breton speakers educated in western Brittany in the mid-twentieth century. Respondents noted that French was the expected language at school; many of them acquired French as a result of their attendance. Breton was nonetheless used in the playground and to some extent in religious instruction, and some schools had provided Breton lessons. Thirty-five per cent of respondents noted that Breton was explicitly banned in the school setting, and a quarter described punishments for using Breton, although some suggested this was more relevant for their parents’ generation. Respondents seemed not to regret the focus placed on acquiring French, but were happy to speak to researchers in Breton about their experiences, showing a complex attitude towards the language. Armelle Faby-Audic, ‘Scolarisation en français et abandon du breton dans la région vannetaise (fin XIX^e–XX^e siècle)’, in L’école et les langues dans les espaces en situation de partage linguistique: Approche historique, ed. by Jean-Luc Le Cam and Erwan Le Pipec (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), 331–348, discusses language shift and the role of education in Brittany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the commune of Arradon in the Vannetais dialect area and using extracts from primary sources to illustrate the changing sociolinguistic environment. Taken together, these contributions provide useful evidence and nuance regarding the role of education in language shift away from Breton, a subject that can risk being discussed in anecdotal and stereotypical terms.

In the same field, but focusing on the twenty-first century, Katell Chantreau, ‘La transmission familiale du breton: les stratégies de communication des parents’, La Bretagne linguistique, 25 (2024), 139–159, provides some results of a doctoral project examining the transmission of Breton, finding differences in whether parents enforce monolingual practices or employ the use of French in certain contexts, and further differences in the expectations parents have of their children in terms of their own use of Breton. These findings indicate a variety of beliefs about the relationship Breton and French should have in family life. By investigating the nuances of intergenerational transmission, the author sheds light on an aspect of contemporary Breton use that is often overlooked by accounts that tend to focus on the acquisition of the language in more formal settings. Erwan Le Pipec, Quel breton parle-t-on à l’école? Enquête dans une classe bilingue de cycle 3 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2024), nonetheless provides illuminating data relating to these formal contexts in the presentation of an in-depth study of a class of primary school children undergoing bilingual education in the Vannetais dialect area, describing multiple tests that measured participants’ production, comprehension, and perception. Results show that their Breton contained Vannetais forms, but tended not to include features of the local dialect of their specific area. Nonetheless, the fact that teachers are passing on dialectal forms casts some doubt on the popular claim that schools are a vector for transmission of the standard alone. Le Pipec’s findings indicate issues with the children’s competence in Breton to the point that they are often unable to produce fluent output, although, as the author points out, similar tests of their French would have been revealing and, corroborating with other sources (e.g., Holly Kennard, ‘Variation in Breton Word Stress: New Speakers and the Influence of French’, Phonology, 38 [2021] 363–399), it is likely that the children’s competence will increase as their exposure to Breton increases. Le Pipec emphasizes the difficulties of this method of immersion, where Breton is confined to specific school classes and pupils are reliant on a handful of teachers for input, resulting in parallel monolingualism and uncertainty about the utility of Breton in other contexts; he stresses the need to integrate the acquisition of Breton more fully into everyday life.

Fabrice David, ‘Les sujets-textes d’examen en breton: présentation et analyse exploratoire d’un corpus textuel d’évaluation en langue bretonne’, La Bretagne linguistique, 25 (2024), 181–198, examines stimulus passages used for Breton examinations in the French school curriculum, discussing how they are selected and to which genres they tend to belong. Noting that a variety of subjects are covered, the author nonetheless argues that there are some gaps in the themes, authors, and publishers represented. Eve Rouxel, ‘La lecture jeunesse en breton, une clé de compréhension de la situation sociolinguistique de Bretagne, entre enjeux, représentations et pratiques’, La Bretagne linguistique, 25 (2024), 199–227, presents a study based on doctoral research, noting that over half of books published in Breton in the period 2007–2014 were aimed at children, and links this substantial presence to regional language policy. Describing the development of literacy in Breton over the twentieth century and noting that younger speakers are more likely to be literate in Breton, the author shows that children nonetheless read far less in Breton than in French, often due to a lower level of linguistic competence and the slighter offering in terms of reading material. She also notes that books in Breton are less visible for potential readers and that parents tend not to value reading in Breton in the same way that reading in general (i.e., generally in French) is encouraged, suggesting that parents seem not to realize the benefits of reading for developing their children’s linguistic abilities.

Mannaig Thomas, ‘Anjela Duval: un modèle de consécration littéraire?’, La Bretagne linguistique, 25 (2024), 229–259, discusses the cultural legacy of the poet Anjela Duval, showing how her work was supported by the Breton movement, and argues that her social background and political leanings were able to make her a central figure of Breton-language culture at a time when interest in Breton language and culture was increasing. The author notes that Duval’s work is nonetheless not widely read, as much of it has not been translated from Breton to French. Niall Ó Ciosáin, Print and the Celtic Languages: Publishing and Reading in Irish, Welsh, Gaelic and Breton, 1700–1900 (London: Routledge, 2024), compares Breton with Irish, Welsh, and Scottish Gaelic, considering the printed publications in these languages from 1700 to 1900. During this period the Church was the major instigator of publications in Breton, although differences among denominations had an effect on the volume and type of texts produced. Ó Ciosáin shows this ecclesiastical influence extended to shaping the linguistic form of written Breton, with Julien Maunoir’s brezhoneg beleg in the seventeenth century succeeded by Jean-François Le Gonidec’s New Testament translation in his new orthography in the nineteenth—while this orthography was received negatively, it formed a starting point for Le Gonidec’s influential dictionary and for some of the ideological features that would shape the néo-breton of the twentieth century. The author also discusses Welsh influence on Breton printing in this period, noting that Baptist and Methodist missions from Wales were common, but had little success in converting; however, the reaction of the Catholic Church was to print literature in support of their own ideas, which increased the communication of Catholic ideas to the masses in written form and enabled the spread of written Breton at a time before the emergence of a more explicit movement of linguistic and cultural revitalization.

Gary Manchec-German, ‘Diglossie et standardisation dans l’Angleterre du XI^e au XV^e siècle: regard croisé avec la Bretagne’, La Bretagne linguistique, 25 (2024), 39–96, compares the development of Breton and English in the medieval period with respect to borrowing from French, providing an in-depth account of how differences in the social and political context had consequences for linguistic practices and language standardization. Noting that French borrowings tend to signal a higher linguistic register in English, but similar borrowings are often replaced with coinages in standard Breton, he includes a detailed discussion of the historical context, providing enlightening insights into the interplay between language and contextual factors over the centuries. Merryn Davies-Deacon, Breton in Contemporary Media: Speakers, Language, Community (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024), also focuses on lexis, but in the twenty-first century. Based on data from Breton-language media and interviews with professionals working in the field, Davies-Deacon investigates the extent to which speakers’ backgrounds and practices align with stereotypes about new speakers of Breton, as well as whether the lexis used by speakers matches stereotypes about the linguistic features of their variety, concluding that speakers manage their linguistic repertoires in order to communicate easily with others while still expressing their own local identity with the use of, for example, certain key dialect terms. Merryn Davies-Deacon, ‘Breton in the Online Context: A New Speaker Community?’, in Heritage Languages in the Digital Age: The Case of Autochthonous Minority Languages in Western Europe, ed. by Birte Arendt and Gertrud Reershemius (Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2024), 77–100, presents additional results from the same study, focusing on online contexts and discussing the use of non-standard Breton and orthographic variation, while Merryn Davies-Deacon, ‘Breton Dictionaries and Contemporary Corpus Planning: Vocabulary and Purism in the Minoritised Languages of France’, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, ed. by Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin, and Olivia Walsh (Oxford: oup, 2024), 322–343, compares a selection of Breton dictionaries with respect to the presence of borrowings and coinages, investigating the extent to which they conform to the same stereotypes around new speakers and their language.

Jean-Paul Chauveau, ‘Délocutifs français d’origine bretonne’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 140 (2024), 598–609, discusses Breton phrases that were fully or partially borrowed into French, showing how their meaning has shifted over time, and proposes new etymologies for two French words that he suggests derive from Breton. Milan Rezac, ‘The Earliest Forms of Endevout or Mihi Esse in Breton’, Études celtiques, 49 (2024), 155–188, investigates different forms of the verb ‘to have’, focusing on the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and on the emergence of the dative possessive construction. Identifying a wide variety of forms, he illustrates the significant impact of this verbal construction on the Breton grammatical system. Similarly, Milan Rezac, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Person-Case Constraint in Breton’, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 42 (2024), 1233–1306, describes the split-nominative object in Breton, including its development from early Insular Celtic and through the history of Breton. In the field of natural language processing, Annie Foret, Erwan Hupel, and Pêr Morvan, ‘Enhancing a Multi-Faceted Breton Verb-Centered Resource to Help a Language Learner’, in Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Computer Assisted Language Learning, ed. by Thomas Gaillat and others (Rennes: LiU Electronic Press, 2024), 59–66, discuss an example of leveraging annotated databases of Breton verbs to aid learners and suggest how future resource development could improve the availability of useful data. In historical linguistics, Anders Richardt Jørgensen, ‘Middle Welsh Dihynnyon “Fragments, Bits of Meat” and Breton Dienn, Cornish Dehen “Cream” ’, Studia Celtica Fennica, 20 (2024), 11–22, suggests that the Breton and Cornish words for ‘cream’ can be connected to the Middle Welsh word dihynnion, reconstructing their semantic and etymological development.

Jesse Harasta, ‘A Song for Cornwall (Kan Rag Kernow): A Study of Musicians and Translators Working on Cornish/Kernewek Lyrics for International Song Festivals’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 45 (2024), 72–83, notes a long-established tradition of bands working with translators to produce song lyrics in Cornish in order to be eligible for events such as the Pan Celtic Festival, where singing in the Celtic languages is compulsory. Rather than requiring full competence in Cornish for taking part, importance is placed on ethnolinguistic infusion, that is, encouraging affiliation with the group through the symbolic use of the language, reflecting the iconized status of Cornish within the contemporary cultural movement.