EL PROCESO HISTÓRICO DEL TURISMO COMUNITARIO

3.1.1 Gallo geography

Most books on Gallo quickly follow a discussion of what Gallo is (see Section 3.1.3) with a statement about where it is spoken—particularly, where within Brittany. They usually describe Gallo as being spoken on the eastern half of the Armorican

Peninsula in western France. This peninsula is surrounded by the sea, with the English Channel to the north, the Bay of Biscay is to the south, and the peninsula pointing out toward the Atlantic. In most cases, such as Auffray’s (2012) grammar, Gallo is described with reference to four specific départements (or administrative districts), all of which were once located within the former boundaries of Brittany:

Gallo is the oïl language (like Norman, Picard, Walloon, Poitevin, French…)

traditionally spoken in Upper Brittany, which is to say in the eastern Côtes- d’Armor, eastern Morbihan, all of Ille-et-Vilaine and all of the Loire-Atlantique, in fact the entire eastern half of historic Brittany. […] Its boundary is clear in its current western part, otherwise known as the part that Gallo shares with Breton (it goes from Plouha to Muzillac, passing near Châtelaudren, Mûr-de-Bretagne, Guéhenno…) (Auffray 2012:7).14

Auffray’s (2012) grammar also represents this territory with the map in Figure 3.1, shown on the next page. As this map indicates, Gallo is spoken throughout the

départements of Ille-et-Vilaine and Loire-Atlantique, and in the eastern halves of Côtes- d’Armor and Morbihan. (The numbers 35, 44, 22 and 56, respectively, following the

département names and corresponding to département postal codes, are an oft-used shorthand to identify départements.) While all four of these départements were part of historic Brittany, along with the Breton-speaking département of Finistère (26), Loire- Atlantique (44) was removed from this region in 1982 under the Mitterrand government’s policy of decentralization.

In the map in the following figure, Figure 3.2, t the light blue département is Loire-Atlantique, no longer officially part of Brittany; the four départements in dark blue

14 _{“Le gallo est la langue d’oïl (comme le normand, le picard, le wallon, le poitevin, le français…)} traditionnellement parlée en Haute-Bretagne, c’est-à-dire dans les Côtes-d’Armor orientales, le Morbihan oriental, toute l’Ille-et-Vilaine et toute la Loire-Atlantique, en fait toute la moitié est de la Bretagne historique […] sa limite est nette dans sa partie occidentale actuelle, autrement dit celle que le gallo partage avec le breton (elle va de Plouha à Muzillac en passant près de Châtelaudren, Mûr-de-Bretagne,

constitute modern-day administrative Brittany. The French capital, Paris, is included as a point of reference.

Figure 3.2The region of Brittany, administrative and cultural

The redefinition of Brittany—from a historical/cultural entity to an administrative one, with a concomitant redrawing of the region’s boundaries—has had implications both for overall regional identity and for Gallo in particular. At more general symbolic levels, the historical regional capital of Nantes in Loire-Atlantique, where the Dukes of Brittany once had their seat of power, is now no longer located in the administrative region of Brittany. It has been replaced by the modern-day capital of Rennes (35). In 2014, when the national government proposed redrawing regional borders, rallies were held in Nantes in favor of reunifying the département of Loire-Atlantique with historical Brittany, and at

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least one Gallo advocacy group sent members to march in favor of reunification.15 A 2014 survey of the region (Bretagne Culture Diversité / TMO Régions) revealed that 58 percent of the more than 1000 individuals polled were favorable to reunification. When eventual governmental plans for regional redistribution were announced, however, they left the region of Brittany unchanged.

With Gallo-speaking Loire-Atlantique now no longer part of the administrative region of Brittany, as it is now located in the region of Pays de la Loire, where Gallo has no official status (Hornsby & Nolan 2011), Gallo in Loire-Atlantique remains officially unrecognized as an important part of a region’s patrimoine or cultural heritage. While some local groups organize Gallo-centric events in Loire-Atlantique, and some Gallo advocacy groups have satellite initiatives such as Gallo classes there, the relative lack of access to regional financial and moral support for minority languages has meant that Gallo is less visible in the département’s public space. Accordingly, in my dissertation I

have concentrated chiefly on Gallo advocacy spheres within the administrative region of Brittany, leaving the state of affairs in Loire-Atlantique to future researchers.

While the eastern border of le pays gallo, then, is political as much as linguistic, the Gallo-speaking area’s westward border is exclusively based on a linguistic isogloss; no political division splits Gallo-speaking Upper Brittany from Breton-speaking Lower Brittany. Because the isogloss corresponds to no official border, the exact towns given as a point of reference for the linguistic boundary vary across different texts. Auffray

15 _{According to organizers, at least 10,000 people attended, among them several prominent regional} politicians; the Regional Council of Brittany again expressed its support for reunification. The ‘Bonnets Rouges’ movement against the écotaxe was also represented. (Le Monde, 19.04.2014,

http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2014/04/19/plusieurs-milliers-de-personnes-defilent-a-nantes-pour- la-reunification-de-la-bretagne_4404342_823448.html).

(2012), the source of Figure 3.1 above, consulted Gilliéron and Edmont’s (1902-1907)

Atlas Linguistique de la France when compiling his grammar; his stated language boundary is thus likely derived from the dialectological record. Other writers choose different landmarks: Pelhate (2011) situates the southern border at Vannes, a prominent city to the west of Auffray’s chosen marker of Muzillac; Hornsby and Nolan (2011) equate the border with a line from Saint-Brieuc in the north to the mouth of the river Vilaine in the south—both of these being significantly farther to the east than Auffray’s landmarks.

In the map in Figure 3.1 above, only the eastern part of the peninsula is featured, as for centuries, what was spoken in the western part was not Gallo, or any langue d’oïl, but the Celtic language of Breton. There have been Celtic-speaking peoples on the Armorican peninsula since the fifth century BCE; however, the language those inhabitants spoke was neither Breton nor any direct precursor, but rather Gaulish

(Chevalier 2008). Gaulish would remain in use through the end of the Roman Empire but would gradually be replaced by Latin. The language identifiable as Breton first arrived in Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, as the result of large-scale migrations of Celts across the English Channel from Wales, Devon and Cornwall (Chevalier 2008). The area they encountered had already been largely romanized, but over the next few centuries, the peninsula once again became Celtic-speaking. Those who have sought to reconstruct Breton’s historic purview through place-names have estimated that, at its apogee in the ninth century, Breton was spoken to the west of a line from Mont-Saint-Michel in the north to the mouth of the Loire River in the south (Ternes 1992, summarizing findings by Loth 1907). That is, Breton was presumably once spoken as far east as the hinterlands of

Rennes. However, Breton rapidly retreated between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, with Gallo replacing it, and continued to retreat slowly thereafter (Walter 1994). The boundary has remained fairly stable since the 16th century, at which time it could be drawn roughly between Saint-Brieuc and Saint-Nazaire (Chevalier 2008). Figure 3.3, below, represents Walter’s (1994) presentation of the changing nature of the Gallo- Breton language border from the ninth through twentieth centuries:

Figure 3.3The shifting Gallo-Breton border (from Walter 1994:91 ‘Breton’)

The labels across the Breton-speaking areas in Figure 3.3 denote the four dialects into which descriptive linguists generally divide Breton. Three of these

(Kerneveg/cornouaillais, Leoneg/léonard and Tregerieg/trégorrois) are largely mutually intelligible;16 the fourth (Gwenedeg/vannetais), spoken near Vannes, is phonologically, syntactically and lexically distinct. This figure illustrates how the Breton-Gallo boundary

16 _{Neo-Breton, a standardized dialect used in education, is most similar to léonard, the variety spoken in} northern Finistère (Adkins & Davis 2012).

has moved westward over the centuries, to its current rough position along a line curving first west, then east, between Plouha (southeast of Paimpol) in the north and the

hinterland of Vannes in the south. Given this relative stability since the early modern period, Gallo and Breton, and later French, have been in a language contact situation for quite some time. The numerous loan words in both Gallo and Breton attest to the

centuries of exchange on either side of the border. Locally, the two geographic, cultural and linguistic entities defined by the border are known as Basse-Bretagne (Lower Brittany) to the west, and Haute-Bretagne (Upper Brittany) to the east. These

designations lack formal administrative recognition but were common designations in Gallo advocate circles.

Like all boundaries, la frontière linguistique between Breton and Gallo is

sustained as much through discourse as through geography (Diaz, in progress). Partially, this is because seeing the boundary as an opposition between Breton and Gallo obscures the predominant presence of French throughout the peninsula. Le Coadic (1998), who interviewed respondents from one “entirely Breton-speaking canton” near the border and another “entirely Gallo canton” reminds us that “speaking of ‘entirely Breton-speaking’ or ‘entirely Gallo’ cantons is only a linguistic shortcut that doesn’t reflect the reality, in the sense that, everywhere today, the French language is largely dominant, Breton and Gallo slipping into the interstitial spaces which are left to them” (26).17 _{The existence of} an isogloss on maps of the region does not mean that someone who crosses that

17 _{“ … parler de canton ‘intégralement bretonnant’ ou ‘intégralement gallo’ n’est ce qu’une commodité de} langage qui ne reflète pas la réalité, dans la mesure où, partout aujourd’hui, la langue française est

imaginary line suddenly finds herself in a transformed linguistic landscape, since French is the dominant language of everyday life throughout contemporary Brittany.

However, the line does provide a shorthand for certain cultural distinctions, which Le Coadic (1998) qualifies as an “ethnic” dimension separating Upper and Lower

Bretons, even those who lived—as did his Upper and Lower Breton participants—within about 30 kilometers of each other. Certain Gallo writers and comedians tend to evoke the boundary, and the “ethnic” dimension thereof, to humorous effect. Daniel Giraudon, who writes weekly columns in both Breton and Gallo in the widely circulating newspaper

Ouest-France, opens his folk dictionary Gallo et galloïsmes with an anecdote about ‘the

real Bretons’ who lived on the other side of the boundary, in the same area where Le Coadic did his research:

Born in Binic after the last war, during my childhood and adolescence I heard what was called ‘the patois’ or rather the ‘patoué’ as we/people said […] People opposed it to ‘Breton,’ which they considered a real language, used a few

kilometers away, in the Trégor-Goëlo, and farther away in Finistère. In the same way, for us, ‘the real Bretons’ were over there, in the western part of Brittany […] our ignorance of the Celtic idiom made of us ‘sots-Bretons’. (5-6)18

The reference to des sots-Bretons is a pun on des Haut-Bretons, or “inhabitants of Upper

Brittany.” Sot in French means ‘stupid,’ and the phrases “inhabitants of Upper Brittany” and “stupid Bretons” could be pronounced identically if one used a liaison, unacceptable before haut in Standard French. The feeling of inferiority to which Giraudon humorously refers will be discussed in more detail in Section 3.2.2; at this juncture, what matters is the observation that relatively small distances can assume large ideological significance

18 _{“ Né à Binic après la dernière guerre, j’ai entendu parler pendant mon enfance et mon adolescence ce} qu’on appelait le ‘patois’ ou plutot le ‘patoué’ […] On l’opposait au ‘breton’ que l’on considérait comme une vraie langue, en usage à quelques kilomètres de là, dans le Trégor-Goëlo, et plus loin encore dans le Finistère. De même, pour nous, ‘les vrais Bretons’ étaient là-bas, dans la partie ouest de la Bretagne […] Notre ignorance de l’idiome celtique faisait de nous des ‘sots-Bretons.’” (Giraudon 2012:5-6)

when the Breton-Gallo language boundary is evoked in discourse. On the other hand, some see the boundary between Gallo and Breton as permeable to exchanges and dialogue. My participants often voiced the opinion, occasionally attributed to actor and radio host Matao Rollo and also appearing in Pelhate (2011), that one should speak not of

une frontière but un talus—a low wall, often covered with shrubs, like those that

traditionally demarcate rural property in Brittany—because un talus is “facile d’enjamber

pour passer d’une langue à l’autre”—“easy to step over to pass from one language to the other” (Pelhate 2011:7). Figure 3.4 shows what are likely to be two such talus from a distance.

Figure 3.4“Talus” in Upper Brittany (personal photograph, 2007)

3.1.2 Gallo speakers

As discussed in Chapter 2, the ideological construct of “speaker” is often invoked in arguments over minority languages. In this section, I do not accept the term

uncritically, but I acknowledge that it is locally an important figure in discussions of Gallo as a language object.

Current counts of Gallo speakers vary widely, from 23,800 to over 200,000 (Angoujard 2010), out of a total population of 4,587,327 in 2013 for the four

départements of administrative Brittany plus that of Loire-Atlantique (INSEE 2016). A 1999 study by INSEE, the French national statistics bureau, found that only one percent of the population of the five départements of historic Brittany reported speaking Gallo, against 11.3 percent for Breton (Le Boëtté 2003). However, Blanchet and Le Coq (2008) note that the conditions under which the survey was conducted likely led to under- declarations of regional language use, particularly in Upper Brittany. Indeed, a 2014 survey of over 1000 residents of Brittany (Bretagne Culture Diversité / TMO Régions) found that five percent of the residents of the five departments spoke Gallo “very well or quite well” and that eight percent understood it “very well or quite well.” These numbers are roughly equal to what the same survey reported for Breton: six percent and nine percent, respectively. They are much higher than the 1999 INSEE survey, and much more in line with a 2005 study by the Université Rennes 2 (CREDILIF (ERELLIF-EA 3207) that estimated 200,000 speakers.

Blanchet and Armstrong (2006) claim that the large discrepancy observed in these estimates—from 23,800 to more than 200,000—is common to all langues d’oïl, because many surveys fail to consider the sociolinguistic conditions in which many speakers exist:

The use and transmission of the ‘dialects’ are limited to private, intimate and hidden situations. If one is not a member of the circle, it is possible to live near speakers without ever hearing a single dialectal interaction. If enquiry is made of speakers whether they use such a language, they would answer ‘no,’ simply

because they do not wish to be regarded as ‘old-fashioned uneducated peasants using a shameful patois in front of a scholar.’ (254)

Furthermore, the term “Gallo” itself, while attested since the fourteenth century (Deriano 2005), was until very recently unknown to most of those who spoke Gallo natively, and knowing the label is a necessary precondition to avowing Gallo speakerhood on a survey.19 Even in 2009, Le Coq could write that “The label ‘patois’ remains much more widespread than ‘Gallo’ even if its image is evolving favorably in the families where children are learning [the language]” (n.p.).20 _{Chapter 7 of this dissertation will explore} other reasons why it might be useful to keep the term patois in the sociolinguistic landscape of Upper Brittany.

Past research has shown that Gallo is facing severe linguistic marginalization and that older speakers are rarely transmitting it to children (Blanchet & Armstrong 2006; Simoni-Aurembou 2003). However, it is still being spoken; Blanchet and Le Coq (2008) have found that even young people report hearing Gallo in daily life, and that 19 percent of rural residents and nine percent of city dwellers report that Gallo is spoken in their family environment. This number rises to 41 percent for respondents who report having occasionally heard Gallo on the radio.

Since the start of the twenty-first century, there have been several language attitude surveys or interviews conducted among Gallo speakers (e.g. Blanchet & Trehel 2002; Le Coq & Blanchet 2006; Nolan 2010; Rey 2010). Based on such studies,

19 _{That difficulty was lessened in the CREDILIF and BCD surveys, both of which reported a relatively high} number of speakers (200,000). BCD included the term patois as a synonym for Gallo, and CREDILIF started by asking participants how they labeled the local vernacular, and used that term for the rest of the interview.

Angoujard and Manzano (2008) report a vitalité souvent surprenante — “[an] often surprising vitality” (6) that runs counter to how most professional observers have seen Gallo. That is, although it is not being transmitted at home as a main language of communication, there are signs of continued interest and pride. I will discuss the two most recent studies, Nolan (2010) and Rey (2010), in more detail.

Rey (2010) examined language maintenance and identity in Upper Brittany through two lenses: language planning initiatives and sociolinguistic interviews with elder native speakers and Gallo students. Rey argues that the language attitudes of groups interviewed were more favorable toward Gallo than past research would have predicted (50 percent of native speakers and 78.6 percent of students answered that Gallo was “part of their identity as much as French”). However, she found that the ability to speak or understand Gallo was not a necessary component of the Gallo identity her participants elucidated and claimed. Rey observes that her participants were very unlikely to use Gallo with her, and almost none asked if the interview should be conducted in Gallo.21 Rey ultimately argues that Gallo may be headed toward a situation of language maintenance, given the importance of “an asserted community identity” to active language maintenance and the fact that her fieldwork suggested many participants did claim a Gallo identity, but that changes in language planning approaches were needed if social actors wished to prioritize active maintenance.

Also using an attitude survey approach, Nolan (2010) discussed Gallo’s case from the perspective of language policy and language planning studies, first examining shifts

21 _{My (adult) participants’ frequent use of Gallo points to different methodologies and interview formats, as} well, perhaps, as a different degree of integration into the local community, as Rey’s fieldwork was done over the course of a single summer.

in French language policy between 1992 (when, upon entering the European Union, France created a constitutional article naming French as the language of the Republic) and 2004, when the European Union significantly expanded its membership. Nolan’s