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Breton (, ; ; or in Morbihan) is a Southwestern Brittonic language of the Celtic languages spoken in Brittany, part of modern-day France. It is the only Celtic language still widely in use on the European mainland, albeit as a member of the insular branch instead of the extinct continental grouping.Jared Diamond (2012) The World Until Yesterday New York: Viking. p.399.
Breton was brought from Great Britain to Armorica (the ancient name for the coastal region that includes the Brittany peninsula) by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages, making it an Insular Celtic language. Breton is most closely related to Cornish language, another Southwestern Brittonic language. Welsh language and the extinct Cumbric language, both Western Brittonic languages, are more distantly related, and the Goidelic languages (Irish language, Manx language, Scottish Gaelic) have a slight connection due to both of their origins being from Insular Celtic.
Having declined from more than one million speakers around 1950 to 107,000 in 2024, Breton is classified as "severely endangered" by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Yet, the number of children attending bilingual classes rose 33% between 2006 and 2012 to 14,709.
The French monarchy was not concerned with the minority languages of France, spoken by the lower classes, and required the use of French for government business as part of its policy of national unity. During the French Revolution, the government introduced policies favouring French over the regional languages, which it pejoratively referred to as patois. The revolutionaries assumed that reactionary and monarchy forces preferred regional languages to try to keep the peasant masses under-informed. In 1794, Bertrand Barère submitted his "report on the patois" to the Committee of Public Safety in which he said that "federalism and superstition speak Breton".
Since the 19th century, under the Third, Fourth and now Fifth Republics, the French government has attempted to stamp out minority languages—including Breton—in state schools, in an effort to build a national culture. Teachers humiliated students for using their regional languages, and such practices prevailed until the late 1960s.
In the early 21st century, due to the political centralization of France, the influence of the media, and the increasing mobility of people, only about 200,000 people are active speakers of Breton, a dramatic decline from more than 1 million in 1950. The majority of today's speakers are more than 60 years old, and Breton is now classified as an endangered language.
At the beginning of the 20th century, half of the population of Lower Brittany knew only Breton; the other half were bilingual. By 1950, there were only 100,000 monolingualism Bretons, and this rapid decline has continued, with likely no monolingual speakers left today. A statistical survey in 1997 found around 300,000 speakers in Lower Brittany, of whom about 190,000 were aged 60 or older. Few 15- to 19-year-olds spoke Breton. In 1993, parents were finally legally allowed to give their children Breton names.
In 1977, Diwan schools were founded to teach Breton by immersion. Since their establishment, Diwan schools have provided fully immersive primary school and partially immersive secondary school instruction in Breton for thousands of students across Brittany. This has directly contributed to the growing numbers of school-age speakers of Breton.
The Asterix comic series has been translated into Breton. According to the comic, the village where Asterix lives is in the Armorica, which is now Brittany. Some other popular comics have also been translated into Breton, including The Adventures of Tintin, Spirou, Titeuf, Hägar the Horrible, Peanuts and Yakari.
Some original media are created in Breton. The sitcom, Ken Tuch, is in Breton. Pdf. Radio Kerne, broadcasting from Finistère, has exclusively Breton programming. Some movies ( Lancelot du Lac, Shakespeare in Love, Marion du Faouet, Sezneg) and TV series ( Columbo, Perry Mason) have also been translated and broadcast in Breton. Poets, singers, linguists, and writers who have written in Breton, including Yann-Ber Kallocʼh, Roparz Hemon, Añjela Duval, Xavier de Langlais, Pêr-Jakez Helias, Youenn Gwernig, Glenmor, Vefa de Saint-Pierre and Alan Stivell are now known internationally.
Today, Breton is the only living Celtic languages that is not recognized by a national government as an official or regional language.
The first Breton dictionary, the Catholicon, was also the first French dictionary. Edited by Jehan Lagadec in 1464, it was a trilingual work containing Breton, French and Latin. Today bilingual dictionaries have been published for Breton and languages including English, Dutch, German, Spanish and Welsh. A monolingual dictionary, Geriadur Brezhoneg an Here was published in 1995. The first edition contained about 10,000 words, and the second edition of 2001 contains 20,000 words.
In the early 21st century, the Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg ("Public Office for the Breton language") began a campaign to encourage daily use of Breton in the region by both businesses and local communes. Efforts include installing bilingual signs and posters for regional events, as well as encouraging the use of the Spilhennig to let speakers identify each other. The office also started an Internationalization and localization policy asking Google, Firefox and SPIP to develop their interfaces in Breton. In 2004, the Breton Wikipedia started, which counts more than 89,000 articles as of August 2025. In March 2007, the Ofis ar Brezhoneg signed a with Regional Council of Brittany and Microsoft for the consideration of the Breton language in Microsoft products. In October 2014, Facebook added Breton as one of its 121 languages after three years of talks between the Ofis and Facebook.
France has twice chosen to enter the Eurovision Song Contest with songs in Breton; once in 1996 in Oslo with "Diwanit bugale" by Dan Ar Braz and the fifty piece band Héritage des Celtes, and most recently in 2022 in Turin with "Fulenn" by Alvan Morvan Rosius and vocal trio Ahez. These are two of five times France has chosen songs in one of its minority languages for the contest, the others being in 1992 (bilingual French and Antillean Creole), 1993 (bilingual French and Corsican), and 2011 (Corsican).
The four traditional dialects of Breton correspond to medieval bishoprics rather than to linguistic divisions. They are leoneg (léonard, of the county of Léon), tregerieg (trégorrois, of Trégor), kerneveg (cornouaillais, of Cornouaille), and gwenedeg (vannetais, of Vannes). Guérandais was spoken up to the beginning of the 20th century in the region of Guérande and Batz-sur-Mer. There are no clear boundaries between the dialects because they form a dialect continuum, varying only slightly from one village to the next.Iwan Wmffre (2025). 9783039113651, Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. ISBN 9783039113651 Gwenedeg, however, requires a little study to be intelligible with most of the other dialects.Kergoat, Lukian. "Breton Dialects" in Celtic Culture, pp. 250 ff. ABC-CLIO (Sta. Barbara), 2006. Due to this difficulty in intelligibility, the Glottolog project split the Gwenedeg dialects into a separate language entry from the KLT Breton dialects in v5.2 under the name Vannetais.
| +Distribution of Breton speakers by region !scope="col" | Region ! scope="col" | Population !scope="col" | Number of speakers !scope="col" | Percentage of speakers |
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which obliges signatory states to recognize minority and regional languages, was signed by France in 1999 but has not been ratified. On 27 October 2015, the Senate rejected a draft constitutional law ratifying the charter.
Under the Toubon Law, it is illegal for commercial signage to be in Breton alone. Signs must be bilingual or French only. Since commercial signage usually has limited physical space, most businesses have signs only in French.
Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg, the Breton language agency, was set up in 1999 by the Brittany region to promote and develop the daily use of Breton. It helped to create the Ya d'ar brezhoneg campaign, to encourage enterprises, organisations and communes to promote the use of Breton, for example by installing bilingual signage or translating their websites into Breton.
The Diwan schools were founded in Brittany in 1977 to teach Breton by immersion. Since their establishment, Diwan schools have provided fully immersive primary school and partially immersive secondary school instruction in Breton for thousands of students across Brittany. This has directly contributed to the growing numbers of school-age speakers of Breton. The schools have also gained fame from their high level of results in school exams, including those on French language and literature. Diwan FAQ, #6. Breton-language schools do not receive funding from the national government, though the Brittany Region may fund them.
Another teaching method is a bilingual approach by Div Yezh ("Two Languages") in the State schools, created in 1979. Dihun ("Awakening") was created in 1990 for bilingual education in the Catholic schools.
In 2007, some 4,500 to 5,000 adults followed an evening or correspondence one Breton-language course. The transmission of Breton in 1999 was estimated to be 3 percent.
| { class="wikitable" | +Growth of the percentage of pupils in bilingual education
! Year !! Number !! Percentage of all pupils in Brittany |
| 1.24% | |
| 1.30% | |
| 1.38% | |
| ± 1.4% | |
| 1.45% | |
| 1.48% | |
| 1.55% | |
| 1.63% | |
| 1.70% | |
| 1.73% | |
| 1.78% | |
| 1.86% | |
| 1.93% | |
| 2.00% | |
| 2.00% | |
| 2.00% | |
| ± 2.2% | |
| ± 2.3% | |
| ± 2.5% |
| +Percentage of pupils in bilingual education per department
! Department !! Primary education (2022) Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg: Teul ar c'helenn divyezhek e 2022 |
| 9.0% |
| 6.7% |
| 4.4% |
| 1.8% |
| 0.5% |
| |
Schools in secondary education (collèges and lycées) offer some courses in Breton. In 2010, nearly 5,000 students in Brittany were reported to be taking this option. Additionally, the University of Rennes 2 has a Breton language department offering courses in the language along with a master's degree in Breton and Celtic Studies.
All vowels can also be nasalization, (2025). 9781904808114, Evertype/Al Liamm. ISBN 9781904808114 which is noted by appending an 'n' letter after the base vowel, or by adding a combining tilde above the vowel (most commonly and easily done for a and o due to the Portuguese letters), or more commonly by non-ambiguously appending an letter after the base vowel (this depends on the orthographic variant).
There are certain non-determinant factors that influence gender assignment. Biological sex is applied for animate referents. Metals, time divisions (except for eur "hour", noz "night" and sizhun "week") and mountains tend to be masculine, while rivers, cities and countries tend to be feminine.
However, gender assignment to certain words often varies between dialects.
Although modern Breton has lost the dual number as a productive grammatical category, remnants of its use are preserved in certain nouns referring to paired body parts, such as the eyes, ears, cheeks, legs, armpits, arms, hands, knees, thighs, and wings. These forms typically feature a prefix (daou-, di-, or div-), which is etymologically derived from the numeral two. The dual number is no longer a productive feature of Breton grammar and survives only in a lexicalized form. Certain words, such as daoulagad (‘eyes’) and divskouarn (‘ears’), are historically dual in origin. These forms can nevertheless undergo pluralization once more, yielding daoulagadoù (‘pairs of eyes’) and diskouarnoù (‘pairs of ears’).
Like other Brythonic languages, Breton has a singulative suffix that is used to form singulars out of collective nouns, for which the morphologically less complex form is the plural. Thus, the singulative of the collective logod "mice" is logod enn "mouse". "Breton exhibits a more complex system than Welsh in this respect. Collective nouns can undergo pluralization, yielding forms with meanings distinct from the base collective. For example, pesk (‘fish,’ singular) forms the collective plural pesked (‘fish’), which may then be singulativized as peskedenn to denote an individual fish from a group. This singulative of the plural can in turn be pluralized once more, producing peskedennoù (‘fishes’)."
"In addition, the Breton plural system is complicated by the existence of two distinct pluralizing functions. Alongside the ‘default’ plural, there is a second formation used to convey a sense of variety or diversity. As a result, a single noun may yield two semantically different plurals; for example, park (‘park’) forms parkoù (‘parks’) and parkeier (‘various different parks’)." Ball reports that the latter pluralizer is used only for inanimate nouns. Certain formations have been lexicalized to have meanings other than that which might be predicted solely from the morphology: dour "water" pluralized forms dourioù which means not "waters" but instead "rivers", while doureier now has come to mean "running waters after a storm". Certain forms have lost the singular from their paradigm: keloù means "news" and *kel is not used, while keleier has become the regular plural, 'different news items'.
Meanwhile, certain nouns can form doubly marked plurals with lexicalized meanings – bugel "child" is pluralized once into bugale "children" and then pluralized a second time to make bugaleoù "groups of children".
The diminutive suffix -ig also has the somewhat unusual property of triggering double marking of the plural: bugelig means "little child", but the doubly pluralized bug aleig où means "little children"; bag boat has a singular diminutive bagig and a simple plural bagoù, thus its diminutive plural is the doubly pluralized bag oùig où.
As seen elsewhere in many Celtic languages, the formation of the plural can be hard to predict, being determined by a mix of semantic, morphological and lexical factors.
The most common plural marker is -où, with its variant -ioù; most nouns that use this marker are inanimates but collectives of both inanimate and animate nouns always use it as well.
Most animate nouns, including trees, take a plural in -ed. However, in some dialects the use of this affix has become rare. Various masculine nouns including occupations as well as the word Saoz ("Englishman", plural Saozon) take the suffix -ien, with a range of variants including -on, -ion, -an and -ian.
The rare pluralizing suffixes -er/-ier and -i are used for a few nouns. When they are appended, they also trigger a change in the vowel of the root: -i triggers a vowel harmony effect whereby some or all preceding vowels are changed to i (kenderv "cousin" → kindirvi "cousins"; bran "crow" → brini "crows"; klujur "partridge" → klujiri "partridges"); the changes associated with -er/-ier are less predictable.
Various nouns instead form their plural merely with ablaut: a or o in the Word stem being changed to e: askell "wing" → eskell "wings"; dant "tooth" → dent "teeth"; kordenn "rope" → kerdenn "ropes".
Another set of nouns have lexicalized plurals that bear little if any resemblance to their singulars. These include placʼh "girl" → mercʼhed, porcʼhell "pig" → mocʼh, buocʼh "cow" → saout, and ki "dog" → chas.
In compound nouns, the head noun, which usually comes first, is pluralized.
The Welsh examples are in literary Welsh. The order and preposition may differ slightly in colloquial Welsh (Formal mae car gennym, North Wales mae gynnon ni gar, South Wales mae car gyda ni).
As phonetic and phonological differences between the dialects began to magnify, many regions, particularly the Vannes country, began to devise their own orthographies. Many of these orthographies were more closely related to the French model, albeit with some modifications. Examples of these modifications include the replacement of Old Breton - with - to denote word-final (an evolution of Old Breton in the Vannes dialect) and use of - to denote the initial mutation of (today this mutation is written ). and thus needed another transcription.
In the 1830s Jean-François Le Gonidec created a modern phonetic system for the language.
During the early years of the 20th century, a group of writers known as Emglev ar Skrivanerien elaborated and reformed Le Gonidec's system. They made it more suitable as a super-dialectal representation of the dialects of Cornouaille, Leon and Trégor (known as from Kernev, Leon and Treger in Breton). This KLT orthography was established in 1911. At the same time writers of the more divergent Vannetais dialect developed a phonetic system also based on that of Le Gonidec.
Following proposals made during the 1920s, the KLT and Vannetais orthographies were merged in 1941 to create an orthographic system to represent all four dialects. This Peurunvan ("wholly unified") orthography was significant for the inclusion of the digraph , which represents a in Vannetais and corresponds to a in the KLT dialects.
In 1955 François Falcʼhun and the group proposed a new orthography. It was designed to use a set of graphemes closer to the conventions of French. This Orthographe universitaire ("University Orthography", known in Breton as Skolveurieg) was given official recognition by the French authorities as the "official orthography of Breton in French education." It was opposed in the region and today is used only by the magazine Brud Nevez and the publishing house Emgléo Breiz.
In the 1970s, a new standard orthography was devised – the etrerannyezhel or interdialectale. This system is based on the derivation of the words.
Today the majority of writers continue to use the Peurunvan orthography, and it is the version taught in most Breton-language schools.
The circumflex, grave accent, trema and tilde appear on some letters. These are used in the following way:
Differences between the two systems are particularly noticeable in word endings. In Peurunvan, final , which are devoiced in absolute final position and voiced in sandhi before voiced sounds, are represented by a grapheme that indicates a voiceless sound. In OU they are written as voiced but represented as voiceless before suffixes: braz "big", brasocʼh "bigger".
In addition, Peurunvan maintains the KLT convention, which distinguishes noun/adjective pairs by nouns written with a final voiced consonant and adjectives with a voiceless one. No distinction is made in pronunciation, e.g. brezhoneg "Breton language" vs. brezhonek "Breton (adj)".
Notes:
The French word baragouiner ("to jabber in a foreign language or an unintelligible manner") is derived from Breton bara ("bread") and gwin ("wine"). The French word goéland ("large seagull") is derived from Breton gwelan, which shares the same root as English "gull" (Welsh gwylan, Cornish goelann).
Historical development
Dictionaries
Learning
Number
Number in Breton is primarily based on an opposition between singular and plural. However, the system is full of complexities in how this distinction is realized.
Verbal aspect
As in other Celtic languages as well as English language, a variety of verbal constructions is available to express grammatical aspect, for example: showing a distinction between progressive and habitual actions:
Me zo o komz gant ma amezeg Yth eso'vy ow kewsel orth ow hentrevek Táim ag labhairt le mo chomharsa I am talking to my neighbour Me a gomz gant ma amezeg (bep mintin) My a gews orth ow hentrevek (pub myttin) Labhraím le mo chomharsa (gach maidin) I talk to my neighbour (every morning)
Inflected prepositions
As in other modern Celtic languages, Breton pronouns are fused into preceding prepositions to produce a sort of inflected preposition. Below are some examples in Breton, Cornish language, Welsh language, Irish language, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx language, along with English translations.
In the examples above the Goidelic languages (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx) use the preposition meaning at to show possession, whereas the Brittonic languages use with. The Goidelic languages, however, do use the preposition with to express "belong to" (Irish is liom an leabhar, Scottish is leam an leabhar, Manx s'lhiams yn lioar, The book belongs to me).
yma lyver genev mae llyfr gennyf tá leabhar agam tha leabhar agam ta lioar aym I have a book yma diwes genes mae diod gennyt tá deoch agat tha deoch agad ta jough ayd you have a drink yma jynn-amontya ganso mae cyfrifiadur ganddo tá ríomhaire aige tha coimpiutair aige ta co-earrooder echey he has a computer yma flogh gensi mae plentyn ganddi tá leanbh aici tha leanabh aice ta lhiannoo eck she has a child yma karr genen mae car gennym tá gluaisteán / carr againn tha càr againn ta gleashtan / carr ain we have a car yma chi genowgh mae tŷ gennych tá teach agaibh tha taigh agaibh ta thie eu you have a house yma mona gansa mae arian ganddynt tá airgead acu tha airgead aca ta argid oc they have money
Initial consonant mutations
Breton has four initial consonant mutations: though modern Breton lost the nasal mutation of Welsh language (but for rare words such the word "door": "dor" "an nor"), it also has a "hard" mutation, in which voiced stops become voiceless, and a "mixed" mutation, which is a mixture of hard and soft mutations.
+ Initial consonant mutations in Breton
Word order
Normal word order, like the other Insular Celtic languages, is at its core VSO (verb-subject-object), which is most apparent in embedded clauses. However, Breton finite verbs in are additionally subject to V2 word order in which the finite main clause verb is typically the second element in the sentence. In fact, starting a sentence with a finite verb is generally ungrammatical in Breton. Noun phrases, adverbial phrases, verbal nouns, and the negative particle ne can stand in sentence-initial position to satisfy the V2 requirement. That makes it perfectly possible to put the subject or the object at the beginning of the sentence, largely depending on the focus of the speaker. The following options are possible (all with a little difference in meaning):
Vocabulary
Breton uses much more borrowed vocabulary than its relatives further north; by some estimates a full 40% of its core vocabulary consists of loans from French.Fortson, Benjamin W. 2005. Indo-European Language and Culture. Page 295: "Breton has also borrowed much more heavily from French throughout its history than any of the other British Celtic languages ever have from English, to the extent that two-fifths of the ordinary vocabulary is of French origin, according to some extents".
Orthography
The first extant Breton texts, contained in the Leyde manuscript, were written at the end of the 8th century: 50 years prior to the Strasbourg Oaths, considered to be the earliest example of French language. Like many medieval Orthography, Old- and Middle Breton orthography was at first not standardised, and the spelling of a particular word varied at authors' discretion. In 1499, however, the Catholicon, was published; as the first dictionary written for both French and Breton, it became a point of reference on how to transcribe the language. The orthography presented in the Catholicon was largely similar to that of French, in particular with respect to the representation of vowels, as well as the use of both the Latinate digraph —a remnant of the sound change > in Latin—and Brittonic or to represent before front vowels.
Alphabet
Breton is written in the Latin script. Peurunvan, the most commonly used orthography, consists of the following letters:
Differences between Skolveurieg and Peurunvan
Both orthographies use the above alphabet, although is used only in Skolveurieg.
+Comparison of different orthographies
! Etrerannyezhel (1975) !! Peurunvan (1941) !! Skolveurieg (1956)
!English gloss glao rain piou who leor book evid for gand with anezi of her ouspenn add brava most beautiful peleh where
Pronunciation of the Breton alphabet
C (as a single letter), Q and X appear mainly in loanwords. ⟨ks⟩ or ⟨gz⟩ may be used to represent /ks/ or /ɡz/.
A a A a â â ae ae an agn añ ag ao aw aou aow B b B b Ch ch Sh sh Cʼh cʼh Ch ch , , , , cʼhw chw D d D d E e E e , ê ê ei ei eeu ey eo eo eu y eü eu eue ye F f F f 'f ff G g Q q gn nh gw qw H h H h I i I i ilh ilh J j J j K k C c L l L l , M m M m N n N n , ñ g ñv gmf O o O o oa oa ôa ôa oe oe on ogn oñ og ou w où ow oü oy P p P p R r R r , S s S s sh ss sk sc st st T t T t U u U u ui ui ul, un, ur yl, yn, yr V v V v vh ph W w W w Y y I i Z z Z z , Ø, , Ø , Ø, zh th
Sample texts
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Lord's Prayer
Words and phrases in Breton
Visitors to Brittany may encounter words and phrases (especially on signs and posters) such as the following:
welcome you're welcome Brittany Breton (language) house town hall town centre all directions school university pipe band (nearly) fest-noz lit. "night festival", a fest deiz or "day festival" also exists goodbye pancakes ( a pancake = ur grampouezh enn) cider Breton mead Cheers! always at sea rich butter and sugar cake
Language comparison
talamh spéir neamh bia teach (south tigh) eaglais duine, fear gadhar, madra (cú hound) díol, reic trade, íoc pay ith (cothaigh feed) ól (archaic ibh) feic (south chí) dubh fionn, bán, geal uaine, glas dearg (hair, etc. rua) buí leabhar lá (also dé in names of weekdays) blian/bliain leann, beoir, coirm ale téigh (verbal noun, dul) tar (participle, ag teacht) cat beo marbh ainm uisce, dobhar fíor bean damh 'stag', 'ox'; caora 'sheep' níos fearr deir (labhair speak) anocht 'tonight'; oíche 'night' fréamh, (south préamh) iarann samhradh geimhreadh
Borrowing from Breton by other languages
The English words dolmen and menhir have been borrowed from French, which took them from Breton. However, this is uncertain: for instance, menhir is peulvan or maen hir ("long stone"), maen sav ("straight stone") (two words: noun + adjective) in Breton. Dolmen is a misconstructed word (it should be taol- vaen). Some studies state that these words were borrowed from Cornish language. Maen hir can be directly translated from Welsh as "long stone" (which is exactly what a menhir or maen hir is). The Cornish surnames Mennear, Minear and Manhire all derive from the Cornish men hyr ("long stone"), as does Tremenheere "settlement by the long stone".
.bzh
.bzh is an approved Internet generic top-level domains intended for Brittany and the Breton culture and languages. In 2023, the Breton internet extension .bzh had more than 12,000 registrations. Alongside the promotion of the .bzh internet extension, the www.bzh association promotes other services to develop Brittany's image on the web: campaign for a Breton flag emoji (), and email service.
See also
Notes
Further reading
Overviews
External links
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