Variation and communities among speakers of Breton and Cornish

Presented on 9 April 2024 as an invited talk atReies oja galow, an 9 a vis Ebrel 2024, ort Celtic Languages in the Digital Age, pednscol Lancaster University, 9 Aprila vis Ebrel.

Abstract

Berrscrif

This talk draws on research on Breton and Cornish conducted over the past few years. As a revived language, Cornish is unusual in that almost all active speakers have made the conscious decision to learn the language as adults; in the Breton case, a similar “new speaker” community is prominent in discourse and associated with a particular set of both linguistic and non-linguistic practices. These include a supposed preference for standardised linguistic varieties and for Celtic-based neologisms over borrowings from French, as well as involvement with language activism. Accordingly, this sets new speakers apart from traditional speakers, those who have acquired Breton by means of intergenerational transmission and are said to speak dialectal varieties and to have different beliefs and goals in their use of Breton. While the Cornish speaker community can be characterised as composed entirely of new speakers, this does not mean it is immune from similar splits: different approaches to how to use traditional Cornish as a source for the revived language have led to divergent opinions on how to spell, pronounce, and use Cornish in the twenty-first century.

I argue, firstly, that these splits are more complex than they are sometimes depicted. My research shows that many competent speakers of Breton do not fit neatly into the new or traditional speaker category based on their backgrounds and linguistic practices, and innovative uses of languages are emerging in online contexts in particular. In the case of Cornish, while a new standard orthography was proposed in 2008 with the aim of reconciling tensions within the community, this failed to win overall acceptance and the old divisions are still present, albeit less acceptable in public discourse. The failure of this “Standard Written Form” comes from the very fact that it was proposed as a “compromise orthography” – it does not meet the ideological needs of Cornish speakers, which, I propose, are more important to these speakers than strictly linguistic concerns. Secondly, leading on from this, I argue that it is important to take into account the linguistic and sociolinguistic diversity in these language communities in academic work, including in computational approaches, and to bear in mind the fact that some speakers are doubly minoritised: they may be users of non-mainstream language varieties within an already small minoritised language community.

Slides

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References

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