The bagpipes in the Wadden Sea

The man with the bagpipes is not to be deterred. With stoic calm, he stands on the deck of the excursion steamer and plays melodies that seem quite exotic here in the North Frisian Wadden Sea, because these melodies are traditional Breton tunes. What is the man with the bagpipe doing so far away from his homeland on the rough Atlantic coast?

Jean-Pierre Levesque is the Secretary of the Cultural Institute of Brittany, which has been a member of the Federal Union of European Nationalities (FUEN) for a little over a year. He is playing his instrument—the Breton binioù kozh—during a trip as part of the FUEN Congress in Hüsem/Husum, where the participants want to get to know the North Frisians and their world.

The Bretons hope that FUEN will support their cause. And there is a lot to be done. UNESCO categorises the Breton language as being seriously endangered. In figures, this means: ‘Today, 200,000 of the five million inhabitants of Brittany speak Breton; in 1910, there were still one and a half million speakers,’ explains Levesque. The majority are over 60 years old, and the outlook for the next generation is rather bleak.

A lot is being done today to promote the only Celtic language on the European mainland after it was suppressed in France—like all non-French languages and regional dialects—for centuries. Only standard French was allowed in public and in education. French centralism repeatedly led to fierce protests, which a few decades ago also resulted in the systematic smearing of monolingual French place-name signs and violent actions, including bomb attacks by the Breton Liberation Front (FLB).

In the 1970s, there was a thaw. In 1977, the Breton Cultural Charter was signed, a Brittany Cultural Council was set up to advise politicians, and in 1981 the Cultural Institute of Brittany was founded. ‘The measures were not very specific, but they did mean recognition of the Breton identity,’ says Jean-Pierre Levesque. Only a very small portion of the money for these initiatives comes from the central government, which otherwise wants to regulate everything in France. The funds have to be raised by the region, the departments and the municipalities.

Nevertheless, Brittany flourished culturally again. An important pillar of this development is the development of Breton language teaching in schools. In 1977, the Diwan Association (Breton for germ or seed) was founded, which focuses on immersion in its private schools. The range of courses on offer was gradually expanded. Other private organisations followed suit with bilingual teaching, so that in the end the public school system was also forced to offer Breton in its schools. ‘It is now possible to complete school in Breton from the first grade to the baccalaureate; for some strange reason, however, mathematics may only be taught in French,’ says Jean-Pierre Levesque.

The promotion of Breton is widely accepted in Brittany; in fact, more teaching in Breton is desired. This also applies to non-Breton speakers: ‘It's not the French people who hate the Bretons; they love them,’ says Levesque: ‘It's the government and the elites who hate the Bretons.’

However, the Breton classes in schools have at best only halted the further decline in the transmission of the language. There is a huge gap, especially among the population between the ages of 20 and 50. And the provision of bilingual or immersion teaching is insufficient. It exists in just ten per cent of schools, benefiting 20,000 pupils. An agreement has recently been reached between the state and the region to increase this number to 30,000. However, major problems are standing in the way of this, such as insufficient funding and, above all, a severe shortage of teachers who are proficient in Breton.

Great efforts are being made to make Breton more visible in public life. An important role is played by the Public Office of the Breton Language (Breton: Ofis publik ar Brezhoneg), an institution founded in 1999 that works in the Breton language for the Breton language. It is present in each of the five departments of the historic Brittany. Its tasks include promoting bilingualism at all levels of education in schools, providing translation assistance and support of all kinds for the use of Breton, and working on Breton place-name toponymy (bilingual place names have been permitted since the 1980s). Three quarters of the funding for this work comes from the Brittany region, with the state contributing less than ten per cent.

What are the Bretons demanding from the government? ‘Above all, the reunification of historic Brittany into one region,’ says Jean-Pierre Levesque, because the tried and tested power-political motto ‘divide and rule’ was also followed by France decades ago, when it divided the five departments between two regions. Finistère (Breton: Penn-ar-Bed), Côtes d'Armor (Aodoù-an-Arvor), Morbihan (Mor-bihan) and Ille-et-Vilaine (Il-ha-Gwilen) belong of the present administrative region of Brittany. Loire-Atlantique (Liger-Atlantel), however, was separated from Brittany (Breizh) and now belongs to the Pays-de-la-Loire region. There have been several occasions when Brittany could have been reunited, but Paris is not even considering it. The integrity of the state must be protected, they argue. ‘The political elite also do not want to hold a referendum on the subject, which would be easily possible. They know why: they are afraid of the result,’ says Jean-Pierre Levesque.

So Rennes (Roazhon) remains the new capital of the Brittany region, while Nantes (Naoned), the historical capital of Brittany, is left out in the cold. However, Nantes has another name that is not French either: Naunnt in Gallo, the second language of Brittany, which has always been spoken in the east of the country. Like French, Gallo belongs to the Gallo-Romance languages, but in this case to the subgroup of the Oïl languages. Like Franco-Provençal, Occitan, Catalan and Rhaeto-Romanic, Gallo evolved from Vulgar Latin. It is the only langue d'oïl that is recognised as a regional language by the Ministry of Education, but it is still one of the least taught regional languages in France.

Some linguists dispute that Gallo is a language in its own right and describe it as a regional dialect (patois). But does that really matter if the speakers have a different opinion and want to promote Gallo? After all, many residents of the Loire-Atlantique department are in favour of it. They are experiencing solidarity from the rest of Brittany. The 1977 Breton Cultural Charter enables initiatives to develop education and culture in Gallo, and in 2004 Gallo was recognised by Brittany as a language of Brittany.

‘I am an optimist, even if we are in a difficult situation,’ says Jean-Pierre Levesque. He complains about a French media and political campaign against everything Breton. ‘But still, 70 per cent of the citizens of Loire-Atlantique want to go back to Brittany. That's wonderful,’ says the man with the bagpipe.

At the FUEN Congress, he raised an issue that highlights the problems faced by Brittany. The Cultural Institute of Brittany complains that the application of a state law passed two years ago is leading to debretonnisation. When street name directories are digitised, Breton names often disappear, while other streets that previously had no name at all are given purely French names. ‘For purely technical reasons, our language heritage is disappearing,’ complains the cultural institute in a resolution that the FUEN Congress unanimously adopted, and continues: ‘The tendency to erase regional peculiarities is a constant in the profound actions of the French central state, which is playing for time.’

But the man with the bagpipe is not giving up. ‘They can't stop us from dancing and making music. We do it all the time,’ says Jean-Pierre Levesque, and he proves it impressively with his binioù on the excursion steamer in the Wadden Sea.

Note: This article gives the views of the author and does not represent the position of the European Association of Daily Newspapers in Minority and Regional Languages (MIDAS) or Eurac Research.