Research on contemporary Breton from any perspective has no choice but to take into account the sociohistorical dynamics that have shaped the language over the past several centuries. Breton in Contemporary Media presents a nuanced view both of the language itself and of its speakers in all their diversity, focusing on lexical variation in print, radio, and online media. Extensive interviews with speakers complement the analyses of quantitative data to provide readers with an understanding of the complexity of Breton’s role in contemporary society, exploring the central question of how speakers of a minoritized language use media to enact their linguistic and cultural identities and ideologies. Though this volume examines Breton specifically, readers interested in new speaker phenomena or in language maintenance and revitalization in any context would find the methodologies and overarching theoretical contributions highly relevant.
In the first chapter, Davies-Deacon contextualizes the studies presented in the subsequent chapters within theorizations of new speaker phenomena across linguistic contexts. The definitions that are provided ground the work within a range of theoretical interests, from second-wave sociolinguistics to language policy and planning. This stage setting articulates the motivations and stakes of the studies that Davies-Deacon later describes with respect to research beyond just the Breton context, though the thoroughness and nuance of her work in this specific language are of great value to those interested in Breton from both scholarly and non-academic perspectives. In this opening chapter, Davies-Deacon explores the tensions inherent in minoritized language maintenance and revitalization: between authenticity and anonymity (Woolard Reference Woolard, Süselbeck, Mühlschlegel and Masson2008), between static and dynamic linguistic and cultural identities, and between striving to reverse language shift (Fishman Reference Fishman1991) and transforming a language to meet the needs of contemporary society. All of these theoretical frameworks illuminate the challenge of categorizing speakers according to the typical ‘traditional speaker’ versus ‘new speaker’ binary, a dichotomy which much of the previous literature on Breton tends to accept as a presupposition of any sociolinguistic study of the language. Though Davies-Deacon’s lucid summary of these wide-ranging theoretical issues successfully frames her inquiry, some of the chapter’s openness to multiple perspectives creates a confusing ambivalence. For example, while Davies-Deacon understandably resists taking a stance on the definition of a ‘new speaker’ and to whom the label is applied, there are also certain terms conspicuously left unclarified, such as ‘post-traditional’ (17), which the author applies both to the media itself and to the language use of contemporary speakers more generally.
Chapter 2 lays the foundation for later chapters’ empirical contributions through an impressively clear and comprehensive sociolinguistic history of Breton, framed through the lenses provided by Chapter 1. Davies-Deacon treats the population of Breton speakers with complexity and nuance rather than falling into the trap of dividing them along the ‘new’/‘traditional’ boundary for the sake of simpler quantitative analyses, contrasting the term ‘néo-bretonnant’, used within the speaker community and in academic contexts to denote the stereotyped culturally militant speakers associated with purist language ideologies, with the more neutrally linguistic descriptor ‘new speaker’, which is applied generally to speakers who acquired Breton by means other than intergenerational transmission. Because not all new speakers fit the description of the ‘néo-bretonnant’ identity, the author warns of the risk of over-generalizing—and therefore further marginalizing—these speakers and their relationships to the Breton language, both in scholarship and in language policy. The studies of Breton-language media presented in subsequent chapters illustrate the importance of considering language ideologies and cultural identities as continuous and dynamic in order to truly understand the current situation of Breton, its use in contemporary media, and how speakers engage with it through a range of modalities.
Following the overview of the contemporary situation of the Breton language, Chapter 3 introduces the study of lexical variation within a corpus of print, radio, and online media compiled by the author for the purposes of the study. Davies-Deacon introduces each source and motivates its inclusion in the corpus on the basis of ideological associations inferred from orthographic choices, publishing location (i.e., within historically Breton-speaking parts of the region or in urban centers populated with a higher proportion of new to traditional speakers), and content themes. Data was also collected from radio broadcasts of brief news bulletins as well as longer cultural feature programs, and lastly, from public Facebook posts in the group Facebook e Brezhoneg (Facebook in Breton). The combined data produced a corpus of 32,691 words in total. Davies-Deacon presents initial descriptive statistics about each sub-corpus, arguing that the patterns of lexical variation correlate with particular ideological stances: for example, the print publication that has fewer dialect-specific lexemes is intended to be accessible to a wider audience with a range of Breton proficiency levels, while the one that adheres to more conservative orthographic patterns aligns with a generally more traditionalist orientation.
Chapter 4 describes the author’s interview methods and subsequent analysis of her nine participants. The sample of speakers exemplifies the importance of considering any facet of linguistic identity as a continuum, given that each speaker interviewed displayed characteristics associated with both traditional and ‘néo-bretonnant’ speaker stereotypes. Davies-Deacon applies the third-wave sociolinguistic principle that an individual’s language and identity mutually influence each other in a way that is dynamic across social contexts and over time to her analysis of the speakers’ responses to interview questions about their use of both Breton and French and their sense of Breton and French identity. The interview responses were also consistent with the concept of a linguistic muda , an inflection point in a speaker’s life at which a change occurs in linguistic practices, first employed in the context of Catalan speakers turning away from predominant use of Spanish (Pujolar & Puigdevall Reference Pujolar and Puigdevall2015: 171). In this chapter and the rest of the volume, Davies-Deacon illustrates that the implications of this research stretch far beyond the Breton context, relating the contemporary Breton landscape to that of other minoritized languages.
In Chapter 5, Davies-Deacon compares the corpus data introduced in Chapter 3 to several dictionaries and other prescriptive sources with the aim of clarifying whether the lexical patterns in the media aligned with top-down norms for lexical usage. Analyses of the interview data indicated that contemporary Breton speakers rely less on prescriptive norms or top-down standards of lexical usage than on norms within their communities, and speakers’ use of borrowings and neologisms cannot be predicted from their identification as new or traditional speakers, nor from the ideologies they share through their interviews. Rather, speakers from both ends of the traditional–new spectrum are converging toward each other, with traditional speakers employing fewer dialect-specific lexemes at the same time that new speakers employ more, resulting in a greater degree of mutual understanding across a wide range of demographic categories and language acquisition trajectories.
Chapter 6 presents a closer look at the contemporary Breton lexicon, specifically in light of language contact with French and the fact that (with very few exceptions) all Breton speakers are also competent speakers of French. Similarly to the convergence of new and traditional speakers to an inclusive norm with a degree of dialect-specificity accessible to the broadest possible segment of the community, the inclusion of diverse means of translanguaging and innovative language use within the sampled media sources illustrates speakers’ awareness of the complex relations between linguistic practices and perceptions. These analyses reveal a core tension within the contemporary Breton community: on the one hand, stereotypical purist ideologies are motivated by a desire to position Breton as dominant over French and assert its legitimacy within media spaces; on the other hand, there is a shared understanding of the need to accept and promote the use of Breton by speakers from diverse backgrounds and proficiency levels in order to promote the growth of the language.
In the seventh and final chapter, Davies-Deacon articulates a response to the central question of the monograph regarding the characteristics of contemporary Breton spoken by new speakers and used in print, radio, and online media. The conclusions presented here highlight the diversity within the Breton-speaking community as observed in both the corpus and interview data and assert that her findings challenge previous assumptions that new speakers conform to the stereotype of highly standardized and Celticized ‘néo-Breton’ norms, and that their language use connects them uniformly to any particular political or cultural outlook. The lexical data analyzed throughout this volume allow for extrapolations about variation in the use of words borrowed into Breton from French, from English, and from other Celtic languages, and illustrate the ways that speakers are themselves aware of the stereotypes that may be applied to them and make choices with respect to both top-down prescriptive norms and bottom-up localized dialect features. While the dataset does align with the previously reported tendency of new speakers to have more ‘purist’ ideologies about the avoidance of French influence in Breton, their use of a range of dialectal features shows that the language of new speakers is not based solely on one uniform, pan-dialectal ‘néo-Breton’ standard.
The rigorous theoretical grounding justifies the utility of this admittedly modestly sized dataset for addressing the questions of speaker ideologies and the use of Breton in the media. Though Davies-Deacon’s interpretations of the data are overall convincing, her arguments would be more strongly substantiated with additional detail regarding the quantitative analyses. Though statistical significance is mentioned at various points, the actual statistical tests used are left largely unspecified. Relatedly, figures and tables could aid in the reader’s apprehension of the features of the corpus and the sub-corpora within it.
Davies-Deacon concludes that new speakers of Breton are a highly diverse community, with wide-ranging linguistic experiences, ideologies, and practices. The analyses presented in the monograph lend strong support to this conclusion and indeed illustrate the risks of categorizing speakers into discrete preconceived types based on any single characteristic. Future research on minoritized languages and their speakers should consider the advantages of resisting rigid categorization to be able to generate a more nuanced understanding of the ‘total linguistic fact’, a concept that Davies-Deacon, following Silverstein’s (Reference Silverstein, Mertz and Parmentier1985) introduction of the term, uses to describe the ideologies and practices of speakers alongside the linguistic structure itself as equally necessary for a complete analysis. The synthesis of the analyses discussed in the volume emphasizes the role of new speaker agency not only in constructing their own linguistic practices, identities, and the relationships between the two, but also in co-creating contemporary Breton itself. As the population of new speakers grows and evolves, so too will the total linguistic fact of Breton.
