Standardizing a threatened language: Welsh and Breton

Welsh and Breton are Celtic languages spoken in the west of Britain and France respectively, both of which have struggled against more powerful and prestigious national languages. While Welsh has long been subject to dialectal fragmentation, it does at least have a recognized standard variety as a result of two historical factors. The first was the bardic tradition of coming together in an eisteddfod (literally ‘sitting’), for singing and poetry recital, in which the bards from different parts of Wales formed a spontaneous literary koiné, or mixed dialect, by selecting the forms most comprehensible to the widest range of speakers, rather than highly localized ones. This koiné became the basis for an early translation of the Bible into Welsh in 1588, and laid the foundations for a standardized language which was widely accepted, and is used in broadcasting, Welsh medium education and for other official purposes within Wales, which, notably since the creation of the Welsh Assembly in 1999, has been keen to promote Welsh-English bilingualism in the Principality.

In Brittany, however, where the Breton language was officially suppressed by the French Republic as a matter of post-Revolutionary national policy, no such standardization occurred, and the use of Breton became more an expression of localized identity at the level of the village than a ‘national’ variety for the Celtic peninsula. Attempts to create a standard have therefore been based on ‘top down’ efforts from activists, favoring either forms perceived to be the most widely understood (and thereby discriminating against the most divergent varieties) or those seen to be ‘pure’ Celtic forms rather than loans from other languages. The resulting hybrid appears to have pleased no one: a small minority of children are schooled in Breton-medium Diwan schools, but return home often to non-Breton-speaking parents, and grandparents whose ‘village’ Breton diverges so far from standard variety that it is, to all intents and purposes, a foreign language to them.

While for linguists ‘all languages are equal’, it is certainly not the case that all languages enjoy equal prestige. In developed societies, a variety of high status, taught in schools and generally used for H functions, is known as a standard language, and the process by which it emerges and develops is called standardization. In his famous 1966 model, Einar Haugen saw standardization in terms of four interconnected processes, two social (selection of norms and acceptance) and two linguistic (elaboration of function and codification).

Selection of norms refers to the emergence within a speech community of a variety perceived to be superior to others. This variety begins as a consequence to acquire a wide range of roles befitting its new status: this is known as elaboration of function, and may require additional resources to be acquired, for example via lexical borrowing. This may in turn lead to calls for codification of the language, i.e. the setting out of clear rules for correct usage. There is thus a constant tension between elaboration, the goal of which is maximal variation in function, and codification, which strives for minimal variation in form (ideally a single grammatical, phonological or lexical variant deemed ‘correct’ for each function).

The last process, acceptance, involves recognition – even by those who prefer not to use it in everyday life – that the standard variety enjoys higher status than others and is appropriate for use on formal occasions. Haugen’s four processes are well illustrated by the standardization of English, to which we now turn.