1 Breton
Since the 1980s, a major vehicle for research on Breton has been the journal La Bretagne linguistique, which covers theoretical linguistics and sociolinguistics as well as literature and history and is produced by the Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique at the Université de Bretagne occidentale. The most recent volume was published in 2019; research in the same areas continued to appear in a variety of other locations in 2020.
In the domain of historical linguistics, Jean Le Dû, ‘The Celtic Element in Gallo-Romance Dialect Areas’, Studia Celto-Slavica, 11 (2020), 23–50, argues that the influence of a Celtic substrate on the linguistic development of French is more substantial than is normally claimed. Milan Rezac, ‘Mihi est from Brythonic to Breton I’, Indogermanische Forschungen, 125 (2020), 313–362, examines the evolution of possessive constructions in Middle Breton, including comparisons with Middle Cornish, and the associated shifts in the role of clitic pronouns; part II of this article, currently available in draft form, follows the development of the process to the present day.
Much of the work on the internal linguistics of Breton published in 2020 focused on morphology and syntax, with publications examining both dialectal and more standardized/literary varieties. Jean-François Mondon, ‘Breton Non-Local Spirantization Reexamined’, Indo-European Linguistics, 8 (2020), 254–274, investigates a non-locally triggered mutation phenomenon present in certain Breton dialects, positing a syntactic dislocation within the framework of Distributed Morphology. Kevin J. Rottet, ‘Complex Prepositions in Breton’, in Complex Adpositions in European Languages: A Micro-Typological Approach to Complex Nominal Relators, ed. by Benjamin Fagard, José Pinto de Lima, Dejan Stosic, and Elena Smirnova (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2020), pp. 195–232, illustrates the variation in Breton preposition use in a corpus of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century literature, showing that different patterns of preposition usage coexist, not all of which are accounted for in descriptive grammars.
The focus on prepositions continues in Gary D. Manchec-German, ‘The Recategorization of the Conjugated Preposition a “of” as Direct Object and Subject Pronouns in Cornouaillais Breton’, Studia Celtica, 54 (2020), 147–184, and in Elisabeth Stark and Paul Widmer, ‘Breton a-Marking of (Internal) Verbal Arguments: A Result of Language Contact?’, Linguistics, 58 (2020), 745–766, both of which examine aspects of the preposition a. Stark and Widmer analyse the prepositional use of a as a partitive, investigating the extent to which this is affected by language contact with French and related Romance varieties, and noting that the evidence examined thus far is inconclusive. Manchec-German focuses on the use of inflected forms of a as subject and object pronouns, and of a itself as a resumptive pronoun; he highlights the utility of data from specific local dialects, as well as comparisons with Welsh, as tools for understanding this phenomenon more broadly. Language contact is also considered here: Manchec-German asserts that these uses of a are not connected to French influence despite their non-occurrence in other Celtic languages, and stresses the need to take these developments in Breton into account even though some prescriptive linguists have perceived them negatively.
Mélanie Jouitteau, ‘Verb Second and the Left Edge Filling Trigger’, in Rethinking V2, ed. by Rebecca Woods and Sam Wolfe (Oxford: OUP, 2020), pp. 455–481, uses Breton as evidence to support the suggestion that the typology of languages with respect to their word order should be reconsidered, providing data from both standard literary Breton and dialectal varieties. Jouitteau highlights the differences among these in more detail in Mélanie Jouitteau, ‘Standard Breton, Traditional Dialects, and How They Differ Syntactically’, Journal of Celtic Linguistics, 21 (2020), 29–74, which illustrates a number of the syntactic differences among the different dialects and the standard; she shows that the standard can also be characterized as a dialect, as well as drawing an important distinction between ‘Standard Breton’ and ‘néo-breton’ which plays into sociolinguistic and sociological issues surrounding the status of new speakers of the language, and calls for more investigation into the varieties spoken by an emerging group, those who are both native speakers of Breton and have received formal education in the language.
The sociolinguistics of Breton as a language undergoing revitalization has attracted particular interest from researchers: the sharp decline in the number of traditional speakers from the early twentieth century to the present has occurred in tandem with the increasing visibility of a small but active population of new speakers who have often acquired Breton in formal educational contexts. Research on this phenomenon initially became prominent from the late 1980s onwards; more recent work has situated Breton speakers more firmly within a cross-linguistic new speaker paradigm, notably Michael Hornsby, Revitalizing Minority Languages: New Speakers of Breton, Yiddish, and Lemko (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 182 pp. Work on this sociolinguistic aspect of Breton continues with publications produced by researchers from both within and outside the Breton-speaking community, and with a variety of views on the role that new speakers and their language should play in the continued development of Breton. Gary Manchec-German, ‘Elements of a Sociolinguistic Theory: The Case of Breton’, Dialectologica et Geolinguistica, 28 (2020), 1–53, presents a summary of the sociolinguistic theory advanced in Jean Le Dû and Yves Le Berre, Métamorphoses: trente ans de sociolinguistique à Brest (1984–2014) (Brest: Centre de recherche bretonne et celtique, 2019), exploring the ties between language revitalization and nationalism and thus highlighting how local populations can be marginalized by norms and standards that have been imposed on them. From a different perspective, Olier Ar Mogn, ‘Normalisation toponymique: le cas d’une langue sans statut: le breton’, in Euskal onomastika aplikatua XXI. Mendean, ed. by Roberto González de Viñaspre (Berlin: Vervuert, 2020), pp. 27–37, describes the rationale and processes involved in normalizing Breton toponymy to match today’s standard orthography, stressing that a number of factors must be considered, including speakers’ preferences.
Hervé Le Bihan, ‘La langue bretonne: une visibilité toute en retenue’, Glottopol: Revue de sociolinguistique en ligne, 34 (2020), 106–117, maintains the focus on the difficult situation facing Breton as a revitalized language and highlights the necessary importance of the work that voluntary and official organizations have undertaken since the decline of intergenerational transmission began. He points out that while the language has gained visibility since the later part of the twentieth century, speakers still lack a number of rights, with the ultimate aim being revernacularization.
Breton is one of the four minoritized languages investigated in Nicole Dołowy-Rybińska, ‘No-One Will Do This for Us’: The Linguistic and Cultural Practices of Young Activists Representing European Linguistic Minorities (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2020), 394 pp. Drawing on interviews with young language activists, Dołowy-Rybińska gives a comprehensive account of their motivations, practices, and aspirations in speaking and promoting their languages. Similarities and differences are pointed out among Breton and the other languages under investigation, which range in terms of their speaker population and the level of state support they are given. This monograph stresses the role of identity and community for the young speakers in question, showing how they move away from or adapt certain traditions while dedicating themselves to the promotion of Breton in contemporary society.
Two articles in the 2020 volume of Litteraria Pragensia, dedicated to the Celtic languages, deal with Breton. Nelly Blanchard, ‘Nineteenth- to Twenty-First-Century Breton Literature: Authors of a Combative Literature and Their Evolving Mechanisms’, Litteraria Pragensia, 30 (2020), 48–61, emphasizes the status of Breton literature as that of a marginalized people, and the consequent development of a ‘national’ Breton literature in the early twentieth century; she additionally highlights the importance of translation of global literature in the Breton literary sphere today. Martina Reiterová, ‘ “Une arme de premier ordre”: Representation of Breton and Welsh in Revivalist Discourse around 1900’, Litteraria Pragensia, 30 (2020), 62–76, similarly focuses on militantism, showing how the Breton language can be understood to have been weaponized to a greater extent than Welsh was during the period studied, and suggesting that this was linked to the more secure position of the latter language.
A small number of articles appeared in 2020 that concentrated on Breton in the context of natural language processing and machine translation. In a general discussion of machine translation for minoritized languages, Mikel L. Forcada, ‘Building Machine Translation Systems for Minor Languages: Challenges and Effects’, Revista de llengua i dret/Journal of Language and Law, 73 (2020), 1–20, the author refers to Breton as a case study, noting the machine translation technologies that exist and the further work required to increase their accuracy. This is covered in more detail in Victor M. Sánchez-Cartagena, Mikel L. Forcada, and Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, ‘A Multi-Source Approach for Breton-French Hybrid Machine Translation’, in Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, ed. by André Martins, Helena Moniz, Sara Fumega, et al. (Lisbon: European Association for Machine Translation, 2020), pp. 61–70, which investigates the application of different machine translation technologies to Breton–French translation. Lastly, Francis M. Tyers, and Nick Howell, ‘Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation for Breton’, Language Resources and Evaluation, 55 (2020), 431–473, presents additional natural language processing resources for Breton that will no doubt be of help as the development of increasingly sophisticated machine translation tools continues.
2 Cornish
The vast majority of published work on the structure and theoretical linguistics of Cornish focuses on the traditional varieties of the language, spoken prior to language death in the early modern period, with a not insignificant proportion of this research being undertaken in the interest of providing a more complete foundation on which to base the ongoing development of revived Cornish. The Cornish Studies series of edited collections has typically been the major outlet for much of this work, with a number of chapters covering linguistic aspects of traditional Cornish as well as the demographics of the medieval Cornish-speaking population appearing in the second series (1993–2013); these fed into the language revival through their publication at a time when debates about the standardization and spelling of revived Cornish were at their height.
While such work has become less immediately relevant to the state of the contemporary language since the establishment of a standard orthography for revived Cornish in 2009, research on traditional Cornish for its own sake nonetheless continues, and a small number of publications from 2020 can be added to this body of work. Joseph F. Eska and Benjamin Bruch, ‘Prolegomena to the Diachrony of Cornish Syntax’, in Morphosyntactic Variation in Medieval Celtic Languages, ed. by Elliott Lash, Fangzhe Qiu, and David Stifter (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2020), pp. 313–337, offers analysis of Cornish syntax from the Old to Late Cornish periods, emphasizing the instability and variability of the corpus and the difficulty in reaching firm conclusions. Charles Insley, ‘Languages of Boundaries and Boundaries of Language in Cornish Charters’, in The Languages of Early Medieval Charters, ed. by Robert Gallagher, Edward Roberts, and Francesca Tinti (Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2020), pp. 342–377, focuses on the historical and sociolinguistic context of early Cornish texts, pointing out the alternation between the use of Cornish and English and showing how this reflects a complex political situation, and draws conclusions about the multilingual character of early medieval Cornish society.
Nicholas Williams (ed.), The Charter Fragment and Pascon Agan Arluth (Dundee: Evertype, 2020), a new edition of two of the earliest surviving Cornish texts, joins other recent textual editions of some of the major works of Middle Cornish literature such as Graham Thomas and Nicholas Williams (eds), Bewnans Ke/The Life of St Kea: A Critical Edition with Translation (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007). Williams’s new publication presents a facsimile of each of the two texts covered, a paleographic transcription, a modernized transcription accompanied by a version in one of the currently used Cornish orthographies, and a translation into English, as well as a wordlist and both literary and linguistic notes. This comprehensive resource is the first volume in the new Corpus Textuum Cornicorum series, which envisages covering all literature written in traditional Cornish.
In the field of revived Cornish, academic work has typically focused on language-external matters and has in many cases consisted of general surveys that give a broad description of the language’s uncommon situation. Kensa Broadhurst, ‘The Death and Subsequent Revival of the Cornish Language’, The Open Review, 6 (2020), 20–27, continues this pattern, covering the sociolinguistic reasons for the decline of Cornish and some of the challenges faced by the current revival movement. Merryn Davies-Deacon, ‘The Orthography of Revived Cornish as an Attempt at Pluricentricity’, Language Problems and Language Planning, 44 (2020), 66–86, offers a more critical outlook on revived Cornish, focusing on the outcome of the recent orthography standardization process and pointing out some of the difficulties that arose from the eventual decision to promote multiple variant forms in tandem.
As with Breton, work on Cornish also appears in the field of machine translation: Delyth Prys, ‘Adapting a Welsh Terminology Tool to Develop a Cornish Dictionary’, in Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, ed. by André Martins, Helena Moniz, Sara Fumega, et al. (Lisbon: European Association for Machine Translation, 2020), pp. 235–239, discusses the design and implementation of the current version of the official online Cornish dictionary, and also notes future plans for this resource with a particular focus on second language learners, who form the majority of the Cornish-speaking population.
