Although archives are understood as unique and undivided records accumulated throughout an individual or a collective's existence, archivists and researchers at large can be confronted by the dissemination in various institutions or countries of documents with a similar origin. Whether a voluntary action on the part of the donor or a consequence of the archives' own history, this division of archival sources has an undeniable impact on their understanding as well as on their interpretation. This article examines how a team of information specialists and researchers from Brittany and Wales managed such a case of dissemination. By describing a collection of multilingual letters at item level, and working on identifying through shared online platforms both the authors and recipients of the documents, their work revealed links that had yet to be studied between Brittany, Wales, Ireland and Scotland.
The archives of Breton bard and poet Yves Berthou (1861-1933), held at the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique, have been the subject of a promotion campaign since 2019. This involves identifying the authors and recipients of correspondence, as well as documenting, digitizing, and publishing online a selection of documents on Nakala, a national data repository. The metadata of the documents deposited on Nakala are modeled in RDF (Resource Description Format) and can be queried using the SPARQL query language. This functionality goes beyond the use of metadata for document search and paves the way for their analysis and linking to knowledge bases such as Wikidata.
This article makes the case for the pivotal role played by Edward Thomas (Cochfarf) in Welsh-Breton relations in the first decade of the twentieth century. It makes accessible in French for the first time archival texts written in Welsh by Cochfarf, both journalism and private correspondence, and letters written to him in Welsh by Bretons. Analysis of these texts reveals the complexities the dual identities of the Breton-French and British-Welsh in the heyday of Pan-Celticism.
The aim of this article is both pedagogical and scientific: to present the old Breton manuscripts held by the National Library of Wales (NLW), to recall the references that have been made to them and to show their scientific interest. In other words, to answer the questions what, how, who and why.
The comparison of archives preserved on both sides of the English Channel, in Brittany and Wales, allows us to better analyze what motivated relations between Bretons and Welsh in the 19th century. The article thus deals with the evolution of the humanities and the construction of scientific disciplines. More specifically, it shows how debates shifted in two directions: from archaeology to folklore, and from Wales to Brittany, culminating in the “Barzaz-Breiz controversy” of 1867, in a climate of fierce debate and unwavering support for its author, Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué.
Célestin Lainé is one of the most singular Breton nationalist leaders. When he came to politics in the mid-1920s, he soon advocated clandestine violent action, before imagining the training of a future Breton army. It is finally a supplementary troop of the German occupier that he will be allowed to form, at the end of 1943, and who takes refuge in Germany at the Liberation. Pursued by the French justice system for intelligence with the enemy, he exiles to Ireland, where he dies in 1983. His archives followed his singular trip, from one country to another, before being gathered at the home of Louis Feutren, one of his seconds, who gave a part to the Breton and Celtic Research Centre in 2008, and the other in 2010 at the National Library of Wales, where they regularly spark debates much more ideological than scientific. Now the archives are for the historian, who is neither judge nor lawyer, the material from which he tries to simply say why what happened happened. The Lainé papers, in Brest and Aberystwyth, allow one to calmly consider a whole section of 20th century political history. This is what various historians, essentially French, often students of the University of Western Brittany, have understood.
Through his friendship with François Jaffrennou (« Taldir », 1879-1956) and other Bretons, and his involvement in the Pan-Celtic movement, the Welsh artist J. Kelt Edwards (1875-1934) contributed to the development of cultural exchanges between Wales and Brittany in the late 19th and early 20th century. His studies in Paris, 1898-1902, and in Florence, 1902-1904, endowed him with an artistic style and European outlook which would, however, prove a barrier to his financial success in England and Wales. With his lack of English networks and his adoption of a lifestyle at odds with contemporary Welsh social norms, in the end he was unable to realize his ambition to serve Wales through his art.
Although the first issue of Bretagne Linguistique opened with the name of Joseph Loth, little is known today about the work of the celtologist, who was a pioneer in Celtic studies. In Brittany, it is mainly his work on toponymy that is still mentioned, but a large part of his work concerns Wales, such as translations of major works from Welsh into French or comparative linguistic approaches between Welsh and Breton. An initial approach is proposed here, based on exchanges with the National Library of Wales, in order to understand Loth's relationship with Wales, Welsh scholars, and other Bretons who looked across the Channel.
The traditional approach to European Late Iron Age art involves significant biases that particularly affected Brittany. However, it has evolved considerably in recent years. « Celtic » art from the La Tène period has often been compared to a form of language, but this approach comes up against many practical problems, raising the questions of context and meaning. An alternative approach consists in considering decorated objects rather than as a way of transmitting a message, as a tool at the service of social mechanisms. This article offers a critical analysis of the construction of the concept of Celtic art, then an overview of the potential of its study in Brittany in order to shed light on other archaeological data on Iron Age societies and their evolution.
A great deal of attention is paid to the positioning and knowledge of learners' level of mastery of the Breton language, but this is not accompanied by consideration of the materials and tools used to assess language skills. What texts are used in Breton exams and competitions? How are they chosen? How do they relate to written production in Breton? To answer these questions, I have compiled a corpus of Breton examination subject texts from recent sessions of the baccalauréat and the CRPE. After defining the purpose of the study and explaining how the corpus was put together, this contribution maps out the subject texts and offers an initial quantitative and methodological analysis.
In this paper, we examine the sociolinguistic category of neo-speaker on the basis of a case study and an extensive review of the scientific literature on the subject. More precisely, we have problematised it by relating it to speakers of a regional (and often minority) language in migratory situation, a profile that is little discussed in the literature.
Occitan is the regional language with the most numerous speakers in France, yet it is not very well known or identified by the general population. Indeed, after undergoing, along with all the other regional languages of France, the French linguistic discriminatory policy of « patois annihilation », it appears to be going through a second process of minorization, at least in terms of representations. After presenting the language and its current sociolinguistic situation, this article explores several invisibilization factors by questioning the relationships between language and territory, as well as the role of the media in the propagation of erroneous representations. This will be illustrated by a few examples from national media sources.
This article analyses the productions of young children who speak Alsatian and were interviewed for the Frach oder Frech segment of the regional television programme Rund Um broadcast on France 3 Alsace during 2021-2022. After a brief presentation of the Alsatian sociolinguistic context and the context of the research, we carry out both a thematic and linguistic analysis of the corpus in order to shed light on the effects of language contact in the productions of these young informants and the strategies they use to communicate in Alsatian.
The Norman Conquest of England (1066) profoundly and permanently altered not only the social order of England but also the English language. A diglossic relationship resulted, with Anglo-Norman French becoming the language of the ruling classes, while Latin continued as the language of the clergy. Until the beginning of the 14th century, English was considered the speech of merchant class and the peasantry.As early as the 10th century, but in a radically different sociohistorical and geopolitical framework, the Breton nobility gradually adopted French. In both cases, Breton and English adopted massive numbers of new words from French and Latin, often the same ones. This source remains a largely unexploited comparative tool for lexicographers of the three languages. In the case of English, native speakers still viscerally feel this Latinate vocabulary to be more sophisticated and intellectually superior to that of English origin, a form of diglossia internal to English which has lasted for 956 years. A similar situation existed in Brittany throughout the Middle Breton period.In this article, I trace the way in which the English language, by the middle of the 14th century, progressively served as a symbol of a new national identity that was at once religious, popular, and ethnic. It was also during this century that the Anglo-Norman nobility abandoned French, creating the conditions which contributed to the birth of a standard language from the 15th century onwards.
This article looks at the sociolinguistic upheavals of the last century from the point of view of reading in Breton and, more broadly, the perception of the written language. While the number of Breton speakers has fallen precipitously, and those aged 60 and over now account for almost 80% of speakers, the number of publications in Breton has risen unprecedentedly, particularly in the field of children's literature, which has accounted for more than half of all publications in recent years. A study of the issues surrounding the written Breton language, the actual reading practices of young people and the expectations of their parents in this area calls into question the evidence of a convergence of expectations around bilingualism through schools, and highlights the different rationales at work among players who would a priori have been placed in the same distribution structure, but who do not necessarily appear to be 'playing' by the same rules.
In Morbihan, three natural cavities, caves and rock shelters, explored briefly at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the following century, yielded a wealth of archaeological material from the Roman period, mainly made up of white clay statuettes (Venus, mother goddesses, etc.). In all likelihood, these were places where underground divinities were worshipped in order to obtain abundant harvests. To date, there are no other known examples of such use of underground sites in the Roman period in the Armorican peninsula.
In the 1950s, the vast majority of the Breton population stopped bringing up their children in Breton, paving the way for linguistic change. However, since the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of people have been working to ensure that the Breton language is reclaimed by the people of Brittany. Today, young parents who have learned Breton within their own families or, more often, at school or through adult education, are choosing to speak Breton to their children. It's a minority phenomenon, but one that does exist and is attracting interest from people concerned about the future of the Breton language. The aim of this article is to describe the communication strategies of parents who speak Breton exclusively, regularly or occasionally with their children, and to analyse the parents' views on these strategies. Two key questions guide this review: How do parents address their children in Breton? Do parents ask their children to speak Breton to them?
The processes of recognition from which writers benefit can be very varied, both in terms of their modalities, temporalities and spatial extensions, but also in the way they can end up being naturalised. This article looks at the various stages in the consecration process that made the Breton-language poet Anjela Duval a regional figure recognised well beyond her initial literary sphere. Anjela Duval has benefited, and continues to benefit, from a wide range of forms of recognition, some of them literary (the publication of her complete works, for example), but also from a much wider visibility (odonymy, statues bearing her effigy, names given to various institutions...).
Jeanne Malivel, Max Jacob and Albert Clouard all painted and wrote, and drew their inspiration, for one or the other of these practices, from popular Breton themes. Jeanne Malivel in Eastern Brittany; Max Jacob and Albert Clouard in Western Brittany. Rewritings of popular themes have a close link with the language in which they were collected – Gallo or Breton – and leave traces in the texts of these artists. The linguistic landscape can then designate in these texts, the diegetic scenery built in particular by references to the landscape in one or more languages; but also the coexistence within a text of a lexicon and syntax from different languages, creating a plurilingual statement. The study of this linguistic landscape makes it possible to highlight the principles of rewriting that govern the creation of these texts: starting from popular themes drawn from works, or collected, the three authors modify the original text both in its diegesis – by addition, by collage – and in its lexicon – by translation or enrichment. This emerging linguistic landscape constitutes a significant space testifying as much to the scientific issues that are implicit in these rewritings as to the relationship of three authors to the language of origin of these texts, thus reproducing the sociolinguistic landscape in which they evolve. The confrontation with this linguistic otherness in these texts ultimately makes it possible to renew a poetic language, or to nourish their graphic works. But this poetic use of the original language also reveals its disappearance in childhood, which they try in vain to reconquer through creation.
In this paper I present an overview of the linguistic distance separating the Breton-speaking communities of western Brittany, France. This was achieved by applying a dialectometric approach dedicated to the quantitative analysis of dialectal data extracted from the Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne. The literature confirms the degree to which geographical factors can have a strong influence on the distribution of dialectal features. In a previous article, I revealed that geographical parameters determine the level of linguistic similarity between small neighboring communities. In this paper, I seek to determine whether geographical factors apply also to the entire territory mapped by the NALBB. More specifically, I assess which geographical parameters contribute most to shaping linguistic similarity/distance and the extent to which these factors interact to create specific linguistic niches.
