Breton in Contemporary Media

In a context of growing interest in new speakers of minoritised languages, it is important to reexamine claims made about new speakers of Breton in work that is now dated but remains influential. Such work characterised the language of new speakers as artificially purified, avoiding lexical borrowings from the dominant language, French, in favour of Celtic-based neologisms. This requires further investigation based on linguistic data, particularly in light of ongoing changes in the speaker community and the growing influence of new media. This monograph investigates the lexicon of contemporary Breton with reference to a corpus of lexemes from media sources, showing how distinctions are present among different contexts and registers. As well as this quantitative component, findings are presented from interviews with employees of Breton-language media organisations, illustrating how these speakers can defy the typical definition of the new speaker. This work demonstrates how speakers of Breton manage the need to communicate within a diverse speaker community, and shows the importance of applying similar dual methodologies to other minoritised languages in order to understand their linguistic and sociolinguistic attributes.