When is a (new) speaker not a speaker?
Quite frequently, or so it would appear.
A recent article by David Ar Rouz points out that new speakers in Brittany ‘adopted the Breton language following very personal paths [and] eventually based their speech on their own family history or on their immediate environment [i.e. local dialects …] or who instead chose to stick to a Breton rooted in the emsav (a word which vaguely designates the "Breton movement")’ (Ar Rouz 2016: 157-158, my translation). As well as the dialect/standard variety continuum, new speakers also display features which can be located on a scale or continuum of linguistic practice (Hornsby 2017: 94), whereby different speakers demonstrate different levels of competence. This is hardly surprising, given that new speakers of a number of minority languages are ‘produced’ in situations of intense language contact. In Brittany, most Breton-speaking families, for many complicated reasons, stopped transmitting the language to the next generations in the 1950s, meaning that the youngest speakers who grew up with the language in the home are now in their 70s, or older. (There are exceptions to this, of course, and it is still possible to find younger speakers who learned Breton from their parents, or more likely, their grandparents).
So, the next generations of speakers of Breton are, in their vast majority, ‘new’ speakers, a term which can be applied to a variety of labels used in a number of minority language contexts (such as Wales, Ireland, the Basque Country or, in the present case, Brittany) to people who did not learn the local language through conventional family transmission, but more typically through education, e.g. bilingual or immersion schools or adult language courses (O’Rourke et al. 2015). What makes these speakers ‘new’ (since such speakers have existed for some time now, of course) is that their numbers have become so significant that they are emerging as a distinct social category in these contexts.
Their presence can prove puzzling for older, native speakers of minority languages. On the one hand, traditional native speakers can display a certain ‘authenticity’ associated with fluency and spontaneity, as well as the use of idiomatic expressions. On the other hand, new speakers can obtain legitimacy from their use of the ‘standard language’, which stands out as possibly more ‘modern’ or ‘up-to-date’ or better equipped for 21st century life than traditional ways of speaking. The establishment of standard languages commonly involves an effort towards ‘purification’, i.e. a cleansing – as it were - of the language from words, structures or other habits ‘borrowed’ from neighbouring, majority languages.
One new speaker feature that is often commented upon is accent. For example, in a Breton context, one author, Mikael Madeg, notes that any deviation of new speakers from traditional pronunciation marks ‘a considerable impoverishment of the language and a change in its very nature which works against the preservation of authenticity’ (Madeg 2010: 47, my translation). He notes elsewhere that many of the examples of non-traditional pronunciation that he lists in his work are totally incoherent ‘from a historical and a linguistic perspective, [and are] marked by the seal of non-authenticity [caused by] negligence’ (Madeg 2010: 26, my translation).
According to this rhetoric, if (new) Breton speakers shift toward a more French-sounding pronunciation, then the battle to revitalize the language has already been lost. This attitude seems related to a discourse of the ‘tainted speaker’, which Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin has discussed in a Manx setting in particular:
Language revival movements and revitalization initiatives have [sought] to isolate speakers and communities from ‘contamination’ due to multiculturalism and language contact in order to provide idealized models for language learners and reversers of cultural shift. Many scholars have, perhaps unconsciously, expanded the construction of the 'tainted speaker’ and sought to categorize the value of a language’s fluent speakers by applying a form of authenticity quotient by which they may be described as ‘traditional speakers’, ‘semi-speakers’, ‘young fluent speakers’, ‘re-nativised speakers’, ‘fluent learners’, rather than understanding a minoritized language’s speakers as having a range of practices within communities of practice rather than as representatives of particular discrete coded varieties (Ó hIfearnáin 2015: 51).
However, this may not be an issue for the new speakers themselves. A barrier to acquiring a full native-like accent may lie in the L2 speaker’s own subconscious – she/he may not actually want to sound like a 'full native speaker', since this might mean a shift in how his/her own identity is perceived both by the 'new' speakers and by others. As Carol Trosset has put it: ‘To become a fluent speaker of another language is in a sense to become another person. The fear of losing one’s identity sets up a strong resistance against the completely successful acquisition of the new language’ (Trosset 1986: 185).
The situation is indeed complicated, and quite tense, as people who grew up speaking the language try to make sense of their position in relation to these ‘new’ speakers, whose presence can reinforce a sense of double alienation – firstly, from deep memories of actively being discouraged from using the language publicly and an associated sense of shame of being a minority language speaker; and secondly, by the appearance, in their later years, of younger speakers who say they are speaking the same language as them, but who sound markedly different from what they remember growing up. For new speakers, who are attempting to reconnect with their immediate heritage or who are symbolically resisting globalization through learning a local, non-majority language, this confusion on the part of older, native speakers can produce in them a sense of entrenchment or defensiveness.
What is certainly not helpful in these situations is the denigration which these new speakers are sometimes subjected to – not necessarily, it has to be noted, by the native speakers themselves, but by academics and other commentators who take up the native speaker position and make pronouncements on their behalf, often to the detriment of younger people who are attempting to (re)learn the language in question, for a whole host of reasons. For example, Wmffre (2007: 488) notes:
The Breton spoken by most young people now – be they products of Diwan [immersion] schooling or adult learners – reflects their submersion in a French-speaking society. They speak Breton as you would expect a French speaker to speak any other language, with an execrable accent – […] ‘jabberers of strange Breton’ … are making their linguistic presence felt.
Another new-speaker-turned-nativist is Hewitt who, in a presentation in 2016, relied heavily on a discourse of ‘failure’ on the part of new speakers of Breton, with less than accurate assertions: ‘With the exception of 5-10% of learners, most neo-speakers do not readily understand traditional speech’ (no source is given for this rather opaque figure of 5-10%). Later on in the same presentation, new speakers are referred to as ‘neos’; thus, rather than a mere descriptive account of perceived divisions within the Breton-speaking community, commentators such as Hewitt actively engage in the creation of such divisions, through a rhetoric of failure to reach ‘authentic speakerhood’ and by means of unsubstantiated assertions. In this way, ‘elitism’ can be constructed and imposed from the outside in ways that might be unrecognizable to members of the actual speech community themselves.
This is not the way forward for an endangered language. If research is to be socially relevant, it needs to be applicable in helping understand why these tensions exist, and not further alienating segments of the key stakeholders in a minority language setting.
References
David Ar Rouz. 2016. À la poursuite du diamant glaz : le standard breton. Sociolinguistica - International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics / Internationales Jahrbuch für europäische Soziolinguistik 30(1), 145-173
Steve Hewitt. 2016. The problem of neo-speakers in language revitalization: The example of Breton. International Conference on Endangered Languages, Tbilisi State Univeristy (sic), Georgia, 20-24 October 2016.
Michael Hornsby. 2017. Finding an ideological niche for new speakers in a minoritised language community. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 30:1, 91-104, DOI: 10.1080/07908318.2016.1230622
Mikael Madeg. 2010. Traité de prononciation du breton du nord-ouest. Brest : Emgleo Breiz.
Tadhg Ó hIfearnáin. 2015. Sociolinguistic vitality of Manx after extreme language shift: authenticity without traditional native speakers. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231: 45 – 62.
Bernadette O’Rourke, Joan Pujolar and Fernando Ramallo. 2015. New speakers of minority languages: the challenging opportunity. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 231:1–20.
Carol S. Trosset 1986. The Social Identity of Welsh Learners. Language in Society 15 (2): 165-91.
Iwan Wmffre. 2007. Breton Orthographies and Dialects: The Twentieth-century Orthography Wars in Brittany. Oxford: Peter Lang.