Legitimate Speakers of Authentic Breton: Who Decides?

Abstract

One reason many minority language speakers struggle to remain users of their minority language is the lack of prestige it is often afforded. This can lead to situations where the public ‘performance’ of otherness, indexed through the use of a minority language in a public space, can be self-censored by minority language speakers in an attempt not to draw undue attention to themselves. But it is not just societal pressure from majority language monolingual speakers which can lead minority language speakers to feel inadequate or out of place. Sometimes the othering comes from within the minority language community of speakers itself. Not only do some minority language speakers feel a sense of awkwardness or inappropriateness by the public use of a non-majority language, they can sometimes feel their own level of competence in the minority language or indeed their very right to use it can be challenged by other minority language speakers. They experience, in this way, a sense of delegitimization, either in the way they speak the language, or more fundamentally, a sense of lacking sufficient ‘speakerhood’, as not counting as a legitimate minority language speaker or user, as exemplified in Section 1.2 with reference to Welsh. In this chapter, the idea of being a legitimate speaker of Breton is explored, with claims centred on legitimate language and legitimate speakerhood being the focus of the case study. Such claims are often contested, of course, and attempts which aim to render these claims as illegitimate are also explored. The case of Breton is particularly rich in such detail and the debate on such matters has a comparatively long and somewhat acrimonious history. Despite the specificity of the example of Breton, the situation in Brittany does allow direct and useful comparisons with other situations of language minoritization and can help us work closer to a typology of ‘new’ speakers of minority languages.