Bilingual Brittany

Before Brittany became part of France in the 16th century (see my post here), it was an independent duchy. The Breton language, a Celtic language related to Welsh, Cornish and Cumbric, was used there for many centuries, since before the year 1,000. It evolved from Old Breton over Middle Breton to today’s Modern Breton. The number of speakers fell dramatically in the mid-20th century due to the national policy of recognizing only French as official language in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Today, however, the Breton language is part of the regional Breton movement, and there are not only over 50 Breton-speaking schools (Diwan schools) but also numerous private Catholic and public schools with Breton classes.

The Diwan school association estimates the number of Breton speakers at 400,000. (Brittany has around 3,3 million inhabitants.) However, many Breton speakers are elderly people, and few actually use it in everyday life.

Five times so far, France has chosen to be represented at the Eurovision Song Contest with songs in regional languages, twice of those in Breton: in 1996 and in 2022. Numerous books and comics have been translated to Breton, local hero Asterix among them but also Belgian reporter Tintin, as well as the Peanuts.

When you visit Brittany, you won’t see it much until you are about halfway into the region. That is where the bilingual signposts will start, and where municipalities will put up signs with “Welcome” and “Goodbye” (Kenavo). However, the deeper you advance into Brittany, and especially in the département Finistère, you will see pretty much all signage in both languages, whether street names, the tourist office, the train station, or “other directions” (da lec’h all).

If you compare terms, you will be able to figure out some words. Ty, for example means house, and ker means town. So what might a ty ker be? A town hall, of course. My personal favorite is one I discovered this summer, a municipal library, or ty boukin.

The départements of Brittany (including historically Breton Loire-Atlantique)
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Book Post: Bilingual Success Stories Around the World

I’m very excited to share a book that means very much to me personally. Let me first explain why:
As you might know, I’m passionate about languages and I’m an expat raising my daughter bilingually. But did you know my fascination with bilingualism dates back to middle school? It got another boost when I spent a year as an exchange student in Canada, living with a bilingual host family.

At university, I embarked upon a bilingual course with a binational diploma, and my diploma paper was on bilingualism in the German-French border area, and more specifically in kindergarten classes on both sides of the border. I read a number of books for my research, but the book I would really have needed then, and again when my daughter was born, hadn’t been written yet. Now it has, and I am proud to say, that I played a tiny little part in it.

But enough about me. Adam Beck, the author of this book, is the founder of the blog Bilingual Monkeys and the online forum The Bilingual Zoo for parents raising multilingual kids. An educator for over 30 years, Adam has worked with hundreds of bilingual and multilingual children as a classroom teacher and private tutor. Originally from the United States, he has lived in Hiroshima, Japan since 1996 and is raising two trilingual children in Japanese, English, and Spanish.

His previous publication include the bilingual-parent handbook Maximize Your Child’s Bilingual Ability, the playful “picture book for adults” titled I WANT TO BE BILINGUAL! (illustrated by Pavel Goldaev), 28 Bilingual English-Spanish Fairy Tales & Fables and a humorous novel for children and adults titled How I Lost My Ear (illustrated by Simon Farrow).

Along with his books and his online writing, he provides empowering support to bilingual and multilingual families through personal coaching, online and off, and through speaking appearances at conferences and workshops worldwide. He is on the consultation team at the Harmonious Bilingualism Network (HaBilNet), led by Annick De Houwer.

For Bilingual Success Stories Around the World, Adam interviewed families all over the world raising their children with more than one language. He presents their many different situations and lets them describe their approaches, the obstacles they encountered, and their successes in their own words. Some families have very young children, others live with teenagers or are already in their second generation. Some use the “one parent one language” method, others “minority language at home”, some have only one parent speaking the minority language, others have three languages in their daily lives. (And as you might have guessed, one of those families is mine.)

This is the book I wish I had when my daughter was born!

(Well, this and Maximize Your Child’s Bilingual Ability). I hope it will encourage many other families to embark or continue on the path of bilingualism and multilingualism.

Bilingual Success Stories Around the World: Parents Raising Multilingual Kids Share Their Experiences and Encouragement is a real-life roadmap to greater success and joy for any parent raising bilingual or multilingual children. Written in the same empowering spirit as Adam’s first book Maximize Your Child’s Bilingual Ability, this practical, worldly-wise guide features the success stories of a wide range of families and details the kinds of attitudes and actions that can enable your family to enjoy the same sort of rewarding success. The focus of this book is on the actual practice of raising children to acquire active ability in more than one language, conveyed through the revealing experiences of parents who are now succeeding admirably at their bilingual or multilingual aim. Read this book for ideas and inspiration to help you realize your own family’s joyful success story!

Here you can download a free PDF sample of the first 37 pages – go ahead, it’s just a click away!
Adam provides all the links to buy Bilingual Success Stories Around the World on this page, here are some of them:
Amazon.com
Amazon UK
Book Depository
Amazon France
Amazon Germany

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