Breton

Breton

Breton (Brezhoneg) is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany, France. Breton is a Brythonic language brought from Great by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages. It is most closely related to Cornish. Welsh and the extinct Cumbric are the more distantly-related Brittonic languages.

Having declined from more than one million speakers around 1950 to about 200,000 in the first decade of the 21st century, of whom 61% are more than 60 years old, Breton is classified as “severely endangered” by the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. However, the number of children attending bilingual classes has risen 33% between 2006 and 2012 to 14,709.

[Description delivered by Lleuwen Steffan for the Language Fair]