Language and Power in the Celtic World

Papers from theSeventh Australian Conference of Celtic Studies

The University of Sydney, September–October 2010 Edited by Anders Ahlqvist & Pamela O’Neill

AHLQVIST & O’NEILL LANGUAGE AND POW

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Published in Australia by THE CELTIC STUDIES FOUNDATION THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

in the

SYDNEY SERIES IN CELTIC STUDIES ISBN: 978-1-74210-234-4

© This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the authors. All conference papers published in this volume have been peer-reviewed. Cover photography by Murray-Luke Peard; design by Pamela O’Neill.

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Language Resilience and Self-Esteem

PIERRE NOYER The University of Sydney

HAVE recently returned from a campaign of audio recordings I was doing in Brittany. I was recording native speakers of my family’s

dialect in the Briec area eighteen kilometers north of Quimper. The situation of the Breton language in my family and in the families of my other informants exemplifies the history of the language’s decline. The speakers I was recording were born between 1923 and 1948. All spoke or still speak Breton with their spouses at home, yet, out of the sixteen children they had not a single one speaks the language of their parents, at least with any degree of fluency. Some have learned it in night classes, but soon gave up, in spite of the parental help they could receive. In the end, only a few locutions have survived, some vocabulary and ‘bretonisms’ in their everyday French language. In my generation (I was born in 1958), I am the only one to speak my family dialect.

Yet, the Bretons were and maybe still are for a few years, one of the biggest groups of speakers of a Celtic language in Europe.1 In spite of this, Breton is in danger of extinction.

1 In 1901, the population of the four départements that now constitute the current Région Bretagne amounted to 2,559,398. The population of historical Brittany was higher yet, as it included a fifth département, the Loire Inférieure (today’s Loire Atlantique), where there is a breton-speaking area in the west. In 1886, Sébillot (1886, 28) established a figure of 1,340,600 Breton speakers out of a total Breton population of 3,136,600 (43 %). This percentage would have been a lot higher in Lower Brittany, the traditional Breton-speaking domain of Brittany, where, in 1928, according to Hemon’s figures (1930, 46), the percentage of Breton-speakers was 82 %. The number of Breton speakers, Hemon gives for 1928 (1930, 46) is 1,158,000. In the absence of a linguistic census in Brittany in 1901, it can be inferred, assuming an even yearly decrease until WWI, that the number of Breton speakers in Brittany was roughly between 1,200,000 and 1,300,000 in that year. (I am grateful to Meriadeg Vallerie, President of Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg, Pôle Etude et développement, member of Observatoire des pratiques linguistiques, for supplying information on this topic through personal correspondence with me in 2010.) By comparison, 1901 UK Statistics give a number of Welsh speakers of 929,800, representing 50 % of the population of Wales at the time (Welsh Assembly Government 3). The current available figure given by the French National Institute of Statistics, INSEE, is 194,500 Breton

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The purpose of this paper is to discuss some of the reasons that underpin such a situation, and in particular the influence of self-esteem in the maintenance and acquisition of a minority language.

French culture has prestige and popularity, as reflected by the reaction non-French nationals have when confronted with my ten-year-old son’s equal command of French and English: ‘Oooh, aren’t you lucky to be able to speak French as well as English!’ I have experienced that, by contrast, if you announce that your son speaks Croatian and English, all you get is a blank look. If you announce that what you were just speaking with your son was actually not French, but Breton, you get the same blank look followed by the question: ‘How different from French is that?’ You say it is closer to Welsh, and the conversation ends there. Is it because, by that point, you have been identified as way too freakish and it is better not to ask any further? I cannot say for sure, but the reaction is virtually predictable and it looks as if people were embarrassed to have exposed something embarrassing about you. Between embarrassing and shameful, there is only a choice of words.

When my grandfather went to school in 1903, he would be shamed for speaking Breton. If you were caught speaking it, Tid’ll Kozh (Old Tidell, the teacher), would pinch the hair on either side of your head and lift you up until your feet were no longer touching the ground. Alternatively, a wooden clog, the ultimate symbol of peasanthood, of subsistence farming, of poverty and lack of education would sometimes be hung around your neck as a punishment through humiliation. The clog was in fact called ‘le symbole’ or ‘la vache’ (the cow), an equivalent of the Welsh knot or Welsh note, used against children caught speaking Welsh.

The public education system of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw, in fact, the elimination of the Breton language, as one

speakers with a yearly decrease of 10,000 (INSEE Pratique de la langue bretonne en 2007), while the Breton-run Ofis ar Brezhoneg (2010, 1) gives a figure of 206,000 speakers for 2007. By comparison Bwrdd yr Iaith Gymraeg reports 582,000 Welsh speakers for 2001 with a modest yearly increase. Thus, after being some 30% more numerous than the Welsh speakers in 1901, the Breton speakers are now less than half their number. The gap between the two languages keeps growing, in favour of Welsh. A study by INSEE states that there were 257,000 Breton speakers in 1999 (Le Boëtté 2003, 18).

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of its main objectives, as exemplified by this pronouncement made in 1845 by the deputy Prefect of Montroulez (Morlaix), Finistère district of Brittany to the school teachers under his jurisdiction: ‘above all, Gentlemen, remember that you have been appointed to kill off the Breton language.’2 By 1881 regulations had been put in place under minister for Education Jules Ferry imposing French as the only language of education in schools. On 29 September 1902, the strongly anti-religious Président du Conseil and Minister for the Interior and Religious Affairs, Emile Combes issued a circular directly prohibiting the use of Breton in religious education (where it had, hitherto continued being used) under threat of suspension of the wages of contravening priests. 3

The fact that children in Brittany were shamed for using their own family’s language couldn’t but be a challenge to their self-esteem. To what extent did this contribute to their renunciation to such a big part of their culture and to its transmission to their own children from the 1950s onwards? After all, the Jews of Central Europe received even harsher treatment, yet, as a group, they not only maintained their traditions, dress and languages, but one of these languages, Hebrew, went through a revival and achieved national language status in the twentieth century.

Firstly, the question of whether self-esteem has any bearing whatsoever on any human behaviour deserves asking. In fact thousands of studies on the performance or behaviour of given subjects in relation to a measure of their self-esteem have been conducted (Rubio 2007, 1, 4). Predictable patterns have been observed and causal relationships have been identified between self-esteem and: memory, obesity, violence, the ability to carry out mathematical calculations, marital relationships, productivity, sex, managing fear of death to cite a few and of course language as well, with regard, for example, to language disorders, and also to the practice of minority languages. An example is a study carried out in Canada which showed

2 Here is the original text: ‘Surtout rappelez-vous, messieurs, que vous n’êtes établis que pour tuer la langue bretonne’ (Lebesque 1970, 97). The English translation is by me; this also applies to other quotations from the French originals reproduced in the following footnotes. 3 On this subject, see Broudic 1996, a book entirely devoted to this issue.

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a link between the use of an aboriginal language in the classroom and an increase in self-esteem of the pupils, regardless of their race (Wright and Taylor 1995, 241–252).

In the area of the learning of foreign languages, self-esteem is now understood to be a critical factor, as stated by Elaine K. Horwitz:

Self-Esteem. Self-Concept. Self-Image. Self-Confidence. Anxiety. Willingness to Communicate. Language-Ego. […] Identity. […] These are all terms that have been used in this volume and elsewhere to describe the relationship of learners to the endeavor of language learning and to the new language. We have truly come a long way from the early years of language aptitude research when […] success in language learning was conceived of primarily in cognitive terms. At this moment in language teaching history, the role of affective variables and the necessity of focusing on the emotional states of learners are readily acknowledged by the language teaching community. (Horwitz 2007, Foreword)

WHAT OF NATIVE LANGUAGE LEARNING?

As a native language normally starts being learnt from age zero and self-esteem is a social construct, one may be tempted to consider that self-esteem should not play a role in the acquisition of a native language at least by infant learners. Yet, research in infant psychology points to a perception by babies at increasingly early stages of very subtle features of their environment, including at gestation stage.

As with emotional development, both internal and external variables can affect young children’s self-concept. If there are psycho-logical features attached to the use of a language spoken in a baby’s environment, say, a stigma, for example, there is a strong possibility it will be picked up by the child and influence their acquisition of that language. As long-term memory develops, children also gain the Remembered Self which incorporates memories, including information recounted by adults about personal events that become part of the child’s own autobiographical memory. So, cultural identity is a highly important part of a child’s self-identity. While ideas about ancestry and how their family’s culture fits into the larger society are too abstract for most young people to understand, they are at least able to pick up broad social inferences whether positive or negative. In

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addition, young children develop an Inner Self, private thoughts, feelings, and desires that are unknown to others unless they choose to share this information. (Oswalt 2010, 14) If the stigma is connected to a self-esteem issue in the children’s parents, it has a potential to indirectly influence them until it is fully passed on to the children as they grow up and enters the fabric of their very own sense of self.

Let us now look at definitions of self-esteem: As inventor of the term, psychologist William James (1890, 311) defined it as a ratio: Self-esteem = Success/Pretensions. To this achievement-based defini-tion, a more holistic one is now preferred, defining Self-esteem as the overall evaluation by a person of this person’s own worth.

Rubio (2007, 4) summarises the makeup of self-esteem, as being comprised of the following six major components:

—Competence and worthiness. —Cognition and affect. —Stability and openness.

Rubio hastens to say ‘However, because self-esteem is a complex construct, a short definition cannot possibly grasp the whole concept and phenomenological process’ (Rubio 2007, 5). Indeed, judging by the lengthy dissertations aiming at defining self-esteem in his and other works, it is clear that defining the construct is a work in progress. Interestingly, a controversy has even erupted over the consideration given to self-esteem in certain government programs in U.S. schools, largely because of a confusion between self-esteem and narcissism (Rubio 2007, 5). There is, nevertheless, a growing trend to view self-esteem as of paramount importance in the understanding and management of human behaviour, especially with regard to achievement in language learning.

Elaine Horwitz sees a potentially far-reaching effect of low self-esteem that can span two generations: the ‘lack of self-esteem in learners can in short order become a lack of confidence in language teachers. When advanced language learners become language teachers, low self-esteem can limit the experiences they offer to their students’ (Horwitz 1996, 366).

I see this remark as very pertinent to transmission of minority languages from grandparents (generation 1) with exhaustive command of the language to grandchildren (generation 3) through parents

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(generation 2) whose command of the language is not exhaustive. In this case, generation 2 parents, who no longer fully master the language of their parents (generally because they have mastered and use in their daily life a dominant language different from their parents’) are in a weak position to transmit their parents’ language, both because of the pressure exerted by the dominant language against their parents’ and because of their own feeling of inadequacy in the command of their parents’ language. This fits entirely the linguistic state of things in my family, where members of my parents’ generation, although fluent in Breton, do not have exhaustive command of the language. This manifests in particular in their lack of knowledge of the orthography of the language, their inability to accurately describe and explain its features and the many gaps in their lexicon.

It also happens that they do not think highly of themselves as speakers of Breton, describing what they speak as not being ar gwir brezhoneg or ‘the real Breton’. This real Breton is in their eyes the language spoken to the north, in the Leon region and found in the Breton literature of mostly religious nature that they came across at Sunday school.4

A similar perception of the existence of a ‘real’ form of a language as opposed to one’s own can be observed in Italian migrants who came to Australia or the US from Southern Italy in the middle of last century who readily rate their own language as only ‘dialetto’ as opposed to ‘real’ Italian. In doing so, they fail to realise that official Italian is only an extension of another dialect, the Florentine dialect and that in today’s Italy, speaking a dialect is no longer a low status symbol, but is a positive adjunct to one’s identity (Berruto 2006, 8).

Self-esteem is inherently social in nature and therefore rests on comparison with others. There is no self-esteem without the judgement of others (André 2009, 26 and Oswalt 2008, 2010). It follows that the opinions expressed by others are critical in the

4 On the suject of the intimidating nature of ‘educated’ or written forms of venaculars and especially Breton on their native speakers, as well as possible adverse effects of standardization on the languages themselves, see Hornsby 2005, 191–212.

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formation of self esteem, in particular in children (Oswalt 2008, 14), who elaborates:

During early childhood, children start to develop a ‘self-concept”, the attributes, abilities, attitudes and values that they believe define them. By age 3 [...], children have developed their Categorical Self, which is a concrete way of viewing themselves in ‘this or that’ labels. For example, [...] in terms of age ‘child or adult’, gender ‘boy or girl’, physical characteristics ‘short or tall’, and value, ‘good or bad’.

In the light of the above, one may expect that disparaging characterization of a child’s own culture and language, as in the following examples, would negatively impact a child’s self-concept.

Filth and intellectual retardation were recurrent allegations made against inhabitants of Brittany throughout French history. A host of chroniclers and visitors to rural Brittany, from La Fontaine, to Mérimée and Victor Hugo to mention but a few made very negative characterizations of Brittany. While not being in any way competent in socioeconomics, ethnology, linguistics or education, such authors enjoyed a notoriety that gave weight to their uninformed opinions:

People from Lower Brittany speak an idiom that is harsh and hard to understand. Their habits, their mores, their gullibility and their superstitions barely place them above the savage. There, the peasant, is disgustingly filthy. His dwelling is comparable to that of the Hottentots […] By and large, peasants have unfortunate facial features, altogether stupid and brutish.5

Prosper Mérimée, in a letter dated 1836, to a friend from southern France, Esprit Requien, follows suit:

Would you believe that I have covered four hundred leagues in Brittany without having a chance to open my fly. For it is quite impossible to touch creatures of the opposite sex in Brest, Morlaix, Saint Brieux (sic), Rennes, Vannes, or Quimper, without using

5 Les Bas-Bretons ont un langage dur et difficile à comprendre. Leurs habitudes, leurs coutumes, leur crédulité et leurs superstitions leur laissent à peine une place au dessus de l’homme sauvage. Le paysan y est d’une malpropreté dégoûtante. Son habitation peut presque se comparer à celle d’Hottentots. […] En général les paysans ont une mauvaise physionomie, stupide et brutale à la fois (Malte-Brun 1841, 232–233).

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tweezers. Only upon my reaching Nantes, did Providence grant me a chance to relieve myself.6

Mérimée also attacks the oddity of the Breton language, compared to other languages he knows:

By contrast with your lovely (Provençal) lingo, out of which the listener is always able to grasp a term or two, the (Breton) language they speak over there is an idiom fashioned by the Devil Himself, which has no less than four very different dialects. Lavaret d’in (sic) pélèc’h azô ünenbennak ago (sic) zéfé gâllec? Here is all I was able to learn how to say, making my throat bleed in the process: ‘Tell me where there is someone who speaks French’. Never, could a Provençal manage to pronounce the word pélèc’h without first undergoing surgery. Try to eat a raw olive, and the sound you will make when spitting it out will be an approaching rendition of that c’h.7

Mérimée fondly accepts the regional Romance languages of Southern France and Corsica, but the utter foreignness of the Breton language turns him off and triggers his indignation.

Of all people, professionals from the state education system often passed the harshest judgements:

The Breton child is left to his own devices as soon as he can walk. Dirty and scantly dressed, he roams the muddy tracks all day long […]. He might be physically eight years of age, but intellectually he is three. Under those circumstances, shall we take into account the few Breton words that have sufficed him to lead his rudimentary

6 Croiriez-vous que j’ai fait quatre cent lieues en Bretagne sans déboutonner ma braguette. Impossible de toucher sans pincette les personnes du sexe de Brest, Morlaix, Saint Brieux (sic), Rennes, Vannes, Quimper. Ce n’est qu’à Nantes que la Providence m’a envoyé soulagement. (Mérimée 1836, 6) 7 Au lieu de votre joli patois dont on comprend toujours quelque chose, c’est une langue que le diable a inventé que l’on parle là-bas et qui n’a pas moins de quatre dialectes très différents. Lavarèt d’in pélèc’h azô ünenbennak ago zéfé gâllec ? Voilà tout ce que j’ai pu apprendre à dire m’écorchant le gosier: Dites-moi où il y a quelqu’un qui parle français. Jamais, à moins qu’on ne lui fasse une opération chirurgicale, un Provençal ne prononcera pélèc’h. Mangez une olive crue, et en crachant, vous ferez un bruit approchant ce c’h. (Mérimée, 1836, 6)

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existence? I do not think so. We might as well consider he knows nothing and start from scratch with him, as one would at pre-school.8

This depiction of the Breton child by a Mr Poitrineau (Puren 2003, 38), Vannes Schools Inspector, in 1897 is characteristic of the extreme contempt dealt out by a host of chroniclers and visitors to rural Brittany. Negative opinions have in fact been spread by a number of academics and politicians until at least as recently as 2001 (Agence Bretagne Presse Bêtisier). This is very reminiscent of the infamous Blue Books in which such disparaging generalisations were made against the Welsh as a group.

There is no way such a level of contempt could escape the notice of its recipients and as explained previously, external factors such as the opinion of others are essential in determining how people and in particular, children, see themselves and build an identity, a self-concept, a self-esteem. I had first-hand experience myself of this endemic contempt when a neighbour called my grandfather ‘a damn Breton idiot’ in front of me. This was far more meaningful to me than just calling him ‘a damn idiot’, because the word Breton referred to something that could not be, in any way, undone or reformed and that I had, de facto, inherited. Such treatment is scarring, and judging by the social condition prevailing still today amongst Afro-American, Australian or North as well as South American indigenous people, such scars are passed on over many generations. French contempt for the Breton people has been and still is part of the Breton mental landscape in spite of it having more recently lost a lot of its harshness.

In France, contempt for rurality is traditional as exemplified in Dumas’ novel Parisiens et Provinciaux. This is confirmed by the definition for the word provincial I found in the 1905 Petit Larousse dictionary (Larousse 1905) as ‘That which is characteristic of the

8 Le petit Breton est abandonné à lui-même dès qu’il peut marcher. À peine vêtu, malpropre, il patauge toute la journée par les chemins, mange à l’écart un morceau de pain noir, joue peu, ne parle pas […]. S’il a huit ans d’âge physiquement, il en a trois à peine pour le développement intellectuel. Y a-t-il lieu, dans ces conditions, de tenir compte des quelques mots bretons qui lui ont suffit pour traîner jusque là une vie rudimentaire? Je ne le crois pas. Mieux vaut admettre qu’il ne sait rien et commencer avec lui par le commencement, comme on fait à l’école maternelle. (Puren 2003, 38)

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province [Read: all of France, apart from Paris]: provincial accent. Awkward, in some way deficient: To have a provincial demeanour’.9 A current Petit Larousse definition of the word is almost identical: ‘attributed to the province as opposed to the capital. One who does not have the ease of manner that one attributes to the inhabitants of the capital.’10 This is a far cry from the etymological meaning of the word, nevertheless given at the beginning of each article, which simply refers to someone or something originating from a province. The self-esteem of native Breton speakers would have been particularly strongly impacted by this negative depiction of the rural population as they were and still are, along with all other speakers of regional languages, almost exclusively rural. (Clanché 2002, 4)

Has this resulted in a low Breton or Welsh self-esteem? It seems evident that, in part, it would have. It is however not simple to measure self-esteem, in particular that of a group measuring millions. If suicide is any indication of self-loathing and therefore of a low self-esteem, then the abnormally high rate of suicide in Brittany, where it is 60 % higher than in the rest of France (Barbançon, 2003, 8) is compelling evidence. This figure is, of course reminiscent of the remarkably high levels of suicide in aboriginal populations of Canada and Australia. The abnormally high suicide rate in Brittany is a regional and national priority for Breton and French authorities since 1996, resulting in a number of studies on the subject and an elaborate Regional Health Programme drafted in 2004.

The social, cultural and linguistic upheavals and cultural persecutions suffered by the Breton population over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their resulting self-esteem deficit have been repeatedly pointed to by Barbançon 2003 and his team of researchers as direct causes of the abnormally high Breton suicide rate. The results of their investigations were published as a volumi-nous report. Particularly relevant statements to this article are:

9 PROVINCIAL, E, AUX adj. Qui est de la province, qui lui appartient : juges provinciaux. Qui tient de la province : accent provincial. Gauche, défectueux par quelque point : avoir l’air provincial. (Larousse 1905, s.v. provincial) 10 2. De la province, par oppos. à la capitale. 3. Péjor. Qui n’a pas l’aisance que l’on prête aux habitants de la capitale. Air provincial. (Larousse 2008, s.v. provincial)

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One can without hesitation, as have done many sociologists, […] link […] rates of suicide, especially in rural areas, with the changes that the Breton countryside was subjected to for the past fifty years. These changes have brutally overturned landscapes, way of life and methods of farming alike, resulting in a decrease in agricultural employment, introduction of mechanization and penetration of capitalistic agri-culture into a world which had hitherto essentially been living in autarky.

Finally, with regard to culture, mention ought to be made of the receding religious practice, even in rural areas, observed since the 1960s, (as well as) the receding use of the Breton language.

[…] suicide concerns mainly ageing people plunged in a constantly changing world, whose traditional cultural points of reference (religion, family, collective relationships) are being eroded. They might, as a result face increasing social and psychological isolation and the resulting emotional suffering, particularly in rural areas.11

Statistics show a doubling of the suicide rate between 1910 and 1990 (Barbançon 2003, 8), the period of most rapid socio-economic changes in the region.

The hardest hit socio-professional category for the whole of Brittany is by far the agricultural sector (Barbançon, 2003, 13). This is confirmed again in 2009 by a study carried out in the region of Aodoù an Arvor/Côtes d’Armor (Clappier & Pennognon 2009, 25). Farmers also happen to be the section of the population that has, by far, the greatest proportion of Breton speakers.

11 On peut sans crainte, comme l’ont fait de nombreux sociologues, […] mettre en rapport (les) taux de suicide, notamment en milieu rural, avec le changement qui a marqué les campagnes bretonnes depuis un demi-siècle, bouleversant aussi bien les paysages que les modes de vie et de production des paysans: réduction des effectifs de la population active agricole, mécanisation et pénétration du capitalisme agroalimentaire dans un monde vivant jusqu’alors principalement en autarcie. […]

Enfin, au plan culturel, on ne peut passer sous silence le recul de la pratique religieuse, y compris dans les campagnes, principalement observé depuis le milieu des années 1960, le recul de la langue bretonne.

[…] le suicide n’en demeure pas moins surtout le fait de personnes vieillissantes qui, dans un monde en plein changement et dont les repères culturels traditionnels s’effritent (religion, famille, relations collectives), se trouvent peut-être de plus en plus confrontées à un isolement social et psychologique générateur de souffrance, en particulier en milieu rural. […] (Barbançon 2003, 15)

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My grandfather defiantly declared his pride at being Breton, yet he had a huge inferiority complex that drove his professional career and his personal relationships, and while Breton was his first language and he spoke some Breton at the dinner table, to offer food or request that something be handed to him, he did not consciously, let alone deliberately, pass on his language to my mother or myself and would himself characterize the Breton language, his mother tongue, as useless.

Like her father, my mother used to say: ‘I am Breton, but I am proud of it.’ This ‘but’ told a great deal about the fragility of her self-esteem. Incidentally, she took her life in the year 2000, aged 78. This paper is dedicated to her.

Amongst situations listed by psychiatrist Christophe André in a book on the subject of self-esteem, as situations provoking fear for one’s self-esteem, there are, in my experience, a number that are typical of the native Breton speaker’s social context: one is ‘not knowing the codes and customs of a social environment’,12 namely, the French-speaking social environment, while the other is ‘have less culture (diplomas, knowledge) than the others (especially if one is or believes to be the only one in this situation)’.13 (André 2009, 172) By belonging to a language group different from the French and indeed markedly different from Romance language groups in general, the Breton speakers of my grandparents’ generation suffered a disadvan-tage if only in the acquisition of an education, as most of the schooling was done in French and they did have difficulty being on top of the codes and usages of French society. While this handicap did not apply to Breton people of my parents’ generation who were fully cognisant of the customs of French society, they were nonetheless left with the inherited fear of being seen as backward because of their cultural and linguistic heritage.

The language barrier also worked the opposite way, preventing French society from objectively understanding and appreciating Brittany and its culture, thus ignoring the economic and cultural

12 ne pas connaître les codes et usages d'un milieu. 13 avoir moins de culture (de diplômes, de connaissances...) que les autres (surtout si l’on est, ou croit être, seul dans ce cas).

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wealth of Brittany as a whole and often focusing on the poverty and technological backwardness of rural areas.

One might wonder whether it was the eradication policies practised by the British and French governments in the nineteenth century or the internalised negative image the speakers of Celtic languages had of themselves that caused them to stop speaking them to their children, as they did in great numbers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There is certainly a lot of evidence that many Breton people seemed to agree to being less than all right as they were. There was therefore a drive in the Bretons to shed all or part of their specificities, and what a prominent specificity it is to speak a language different from the official language and the majority language of the state you belong to.

The father of one of my relatives, for example, swore to never allow a book in Breton in his house and vowed to cast out any of his children who would attempt to learn the language. This, however, took place in the 1950s. In more recent times the dominant sentiment I have witnessed in native speakers has been shameful love. The native speakers I have met have a real attachment to the language, but they will not allow it to be promoted, whether in themselves, or in their children. It has taken me patience to break through their barriers and access the language and I have found that what was required was really for them to relax about participating in my recording efforts towards which they at first behaved as if it were some sort of eccentric and ultimately embarrassing activity.

In spite of all this, the Bretons have an above average fondness for their land as shown by a comparative study done on the perception residents of various parts of France have of their own region. While only 50 % of respondents outside Brittany declare themselves ‘very attached to their region’, the proportion goes up to 70 % in Région Bretagne respondents. Interestingly, only 40 % of Pays de la Loire residents (of which the severed Loire-Atlantique ex-Breton département is now part) declared themselves attached to their region (Simon 1999, 124). Is it because the Pays de la Loire region is a mere figment of bureaucratic imagination? Fondness for the language also appears in studies showing that while young people do not speak Breton, they are eager to put forward their ability to understand even a few words of the language (Barbançon 2003, 26). In fact, the Breton population unequivocally and increasingly declares its attachment to

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the Breton language. 75 % in 1991 and 88 % in 1997 declared themselves in favour of its preservation, while their optimism about its survival also increased: 42.5 % and 71.5 % in 1991 and 1997 respectively believed in its ultimate survival (Broudic 2009b, 2; INSEE 2009a, 53).

This contrasts with the systematically negative representation reported to be given by the Bretons of themselves in other opinion poles carried out in the Penn ar Bed (Finistère) region (Barbançon 2003, 26), in which the most common characteristics given by the respondents to define their own kind were: stubborn, introverts, hard, cold, alcoholic.

Accordng to Barbançon (2003, 26), ‘in a region where self-esteem is low, one cannot help adhering to such negative characterizations and wallowing in self-flagellation’.14 André (2009, 177) mentions this sort of self-deprecation as a protective strategy against a low self-esteem and strangely as it may seem, he, in fact, recommends practicing negative self-affirmation to manage and eventually cure a depressed self-esteem, a therapy the Breton seem to have empirically discovered.

Yet, Breton self-deprecation does not result in social apathy or resignation. Inhabitants of the peninsula care about their community as demonstrated by the substantially lower level of crime and substantially higher level of participation in all elections compared to other regions of France, as well as an above average number of local NGOs and involvement therein (INSEE 2009b). Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Bretons have suffered a momentous cultural loss which, like any loss would have given rise to a mourning process. According to Barbançon (2003, 21), this process can only follow a successful course with the restoration of healthy self-esteem.

Recovery of Breton self-esteem can already find a stepping stone in the well known and documented fondness the Bretons have for their own land (shared by the throngs of tourists who flock to Brittany every summer and swell enormously and even double the size of the local population in a number of areas (Terrier, Sylvander 2005, 2) but this strong attachment paired up with a propensity for cultural self-

14 Dans un département où l’estime de soi est faible, comment ne pas coller à des représentations négatives et s’auto-entretenir dans une auto-flagellation?

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consciousness and self-loathing is a paradox which is indicative of a very tense and unstable sense of identity indeed.

In the description of the suicidal process given in the study headed by Barbançon (2003, 32) a link is suggested between suicide and an ‘unbearable identity tension’ (tension identitaire insupportable) which generates feelings of shame, uselessness, low self-esteem and subjection.

A perceived threat to one’s self-esteem is a prerequisite to cultural self-consciousness or shame and for self-esteem to be a factor, there has to be a scale of judgement of worthiness known to and adhered to (at least passively) by all involved in the threatening situation. European societies of the past were highly driven by a scale measuring social status. Factors such as geographic origin determined your position on that scale. In the nineteenth century, when industry became the engine of progress while farming receded in importance, the already inferior position of the peasant sank further down to a more inferior status unless he appeared to have modernised his ways. In inland Brittany, mechanization of agriculture penetrated slowly. None of my rural relatives, for example, owned a motorcar until well after the Second World War and some did not have electricity in their houses until then. By contrast, my grandfather who had migrated to Paris had both since the early 1920s, a well remembered fact that still today, crops up in conversation amongst my relatives, his mother, who had also migrated to Paris and equally enjoyed a motorcar and electricity has remained known in the family under the reverential nickname Tañt Peish (Aunty Paris), ever since.

On the up-side, while low self-esteem may be a characteristic of cultural and linguistic minorities, it seems to have triggered in the Breton a fierce determination to catch up with and surpass other regions, as shown by the above-average level of academic achieve-ment and education in Brittany (Houssais 2003, 6 and INSEE 2009c, 99) and the second position out of 1930 French secondary schools obtained by the Breton speaking Diwan school in Carhaix, a small economically challenged town of Central Brittany in the yearly classification produced by the French daily Le Figaro for the year 2010. It is reasonable to expect that, in turn, this high level of education might play a role in promoting local cultural activities and maintenance of the language.

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When I left Brittany, three months ago, a Breton-speaking friend aged 63 took me to the Quimper station. We had a continuous conversation in Breton in the car all the way to the station. This continued as we walked through the car park to the station building. As soon as we approached people waiting at the door and once we were inside, she reverted to French. Even though I continued speaking Breton to her, she answered back in French. Eventually, I asked her why, and she simply ignored my question and continued talking French about other things. I think she was not even aware of her change of behaviour, and therefore, my question made no sense to her.

In the end, are the problematic ethnicity (Simon 1999, titlepage) of the Bretons and its self-esteem component not a reflection of a general French insecure identity? Widmer (2004, 85), when drawing a comparison between the regulatory effects of a universalising linguistic ideology (that of France) on the speakers of a language and at the other end of the spectrum, a territorialised and history-based ideology (that of Switzerland in the case of Alemannic languages), concludes that the French linguistic ideology leads to the creation of a decontextualised linguistic identity. Could this in turn, be linked to a generally insecure collective identity? French fastidiousness with linguistic norm could be seen as a proof that it does. Strangely, or perhaps predictably, an almost identical ideology has emerged among Breton language authorities in Brittany itself where efforts to promote the language have largely focused on the establishment of a universal norm for the Breton language strongly at odds with the dialectal diversity of the peninsula.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Was an insecure Brythonic identity passed on to the Frankish invaders, or did the latter suffer from an insecurity that contaminated their Celtic subordinates?

Whatever the case may be, it is cannot be a coincidence that the most linguistically anxious and therefore intolerant nation in Europe, France, also happens to be (still for some years) the most linguistically diverse, with at least seven main languages (Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Catalan, Flemish, French and Occitan) from four different families: Basque (a non-Indo-European language isolate), Celtic, Germanic and Romance spoken within its borders and a number that are spoken in its overseas dominions, the closest, geographically being Corsican. This diversity, while it can easily be seen today as something to treasure

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and an opportunity, had little chance of being appreciated by the decision makers of the nineteenth century, and indeed was not.

In conclusion, it is probably too late to make a systematic study of the level of self-esteem in native speakers of Breton born before 1940; whatever the findings may be, the impact on the following generation has already been wrought. It is equally clear that the true level of self-esteem in the younger speakers of Breton would be very tricky to accurately measure because most respondents are militant and would declare themselves very proud of their linguistic specificity, having long ‘turned the stigma into an emblem’.15 Whether there would be any point in carrying out a more subtle study on the matter can certainly be argued, but it is obvious enough that every measure, whether legislative, economic, or educational that promotes the use of Breton and uplifts its status in all areas of society would have an impact on its speakers’ self-esteem and ultimately on the rate of retention of the language.

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