The Breton language was banned and punished between 1830 and 1960. In 1960 it ceased to be punished, since Breton was no longer mentioned in schools in Brittany.

Well, my parents didn't suffer, they weren't from Brittany, but my husband's parents did. When his father, born in 1936, came to school, like many people, he didn't know a single word in French. And immediately, without giving him time to do so, he made him understand that he had to speak in French, which had to be humiliated and humiliated. And then we have the question of the symbol, it took different shapes, a gallon of wood, a drilled coin, or a ball in the mouth during the rest. If in the morning the teacher surprised the student talking in Breton, he gave him the symbol and in the afternoon he punished him, striking him at the tips of his fingers with a ruler or stopping to write.

They were treated as plouc (vagabundo, embraced), people from the countryside, peasants, considered the lowest level. French was synonymous with social ascension. There were postcards that said that domestic animals and peasants ate in the same room [animals and peasants had the same place]. We were humiliated. The Breton was not considered a language, it only served to speak with the animals.

Now, there's a lot of people who have a psychological lockdown on the breton. They beat, punished and lowered so much, they don't understand why we're back.

Delving into the cultural identity of Brittany and Brittany, early bilingualism, tolerance, student autonomy, are the foundation of the education given in Diwan schools.

I am the Miss of the youngest. We do our best to ensure that the breton is heard as soon as possible, even from nursery school. There are scientists who say it's beneficial, not just to learn new languages. And then, seeing their parents involved in the search for funding, supporting bilingualism -- it gives young people a vision of being citizens of the world and they're more open to the outside.

Do Diwan have a specific educational curriculum right for him? How is the didactic material created?

A few years ago, we started using the services of the school publisher, TES (Ti embann ar skolioù), sponsored by the Diwan school and the Breton school community. At first they took textbooks written in French and translated them into Breton. We still have some in the field of mathematics, history, geography, and we still have original works in Breton, created by people who work in these full-time publishers. In this way, TES staff creates new jobs, books, stories, reading albums for young and older children, or school books that are also used in the school... In short, when I started working at Diwan twenty-two years ago, the publications that had to be translated were many.

Kemperle is located in southwestern Brittany. What is the situation of the Breton in this region? What about the rest of Britain?

The situation of Kemperl's breton is not so bad. The community in the area received a prize for its work in favour of the Breton. All written official communication and telephone calls are made in bilingual. Also in Kemperle, the signs and others are bilingual.

What about the services offered by the municipal health personnel?

No, not yet. Training courses of three or six months are offered to the staff of the City Hall and the Commonwealth, but are not compulsory. There are workers who sign up.

Due to the discontinuous transmission in the family, the students' parents do not speak Breton.

We can say that 90 percent of students' parents don't speak Breton.

I have rarely heard of Breton in this region. What are your breaths?

There are not many spaces, but there are. In fact, they're initiatives to create out-of-school announcements to speak in Breton. For example, here in Kemperl, we have reading groups that meet once a month in the media, they opened over a year ago. We also have Breton culture houses, Ti ar Vro, where they meet for the promotion of the Breton and other cultural groups, where it is also possible to speak in Breton. However, children can go to camps, colonies and shorter stays during holidays. These are also available for adults to practice breton. The weekends also meet those who know a little bit of breton, among friends.

Here, at school, it is the support commission that organizes the meeting “café pemp eur”, “café at five”. They meet once a month and they talk about a topic of conversation. The Support Commission also organizes plays for children and adults.

Where can adults learn the breton?

You can study in the cultural houses, and also in the schools of Diwan. The Diwan School not only works within school hours, but in the afternoon and throughout the year we organize courses to learn Breton on three levels.

In fact, the Breton is taught in several associations, at night schools and in the camps or stays mentioned, which can last six months, to learn Breton or to deepen the language. You can also learn at home using the ASSIMIL methods (via CD) or the Internet.

How many are the dialects of the Breton? Is there a standard form of language?

There are four main dialects, the gwened, that I speak with my little ones, the kernev, the leonese and the treger; and we also have the unified breton [peurunvan (“fully unified” in Breton)], based on the leonese, because in this dialect the words are pronounced whole and as they are written. In Kerrefrigerator and in the treger you often eat the central syllable of the word.

But it is also true that there is an attitude against the unified Breton and it is an orthographic system called KLT (Kerfridge-Lealla-Treger), as well as the KLTG system (Kerfridge-Leonera -Tregerrera-Gwenedera).

Since 1976, Diwan schools have opted for the unified Breton. However, I was surprised by the attempt to establish different spelling systems in the history of the Breton.

As the Breton has suffered a gap in family transmission and the need to create new terms, Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg (Breton Public Office) is the institution responsible for generating new terms from the roots of the language. This is how neologisms have emerged, for example, in the field of informatics; however, there are other associations or people who think that this united Breton is not necessarily a good breton, so they write or speak differently. We can therefore say that the Breton is not yet fully unified. In Diwan schools, we have the same common ground, although we occasionally release teachers and don't write in Breton like the rest. However, thanks to the content created by the school editorial, more and more teachers and students use unified spelling.

How did you learn the breton?

I haven't spoken the Breton at home, my parents were some of the first parents of Diwan schools, but I only learned there for two years, while I was 3 and 5 years old. Later I couldn't go on because the two parents started working and they couldn't bring me to school, otherwise they would have to get up too soon, so -- it wasn't possible. In spite of everything, they were always sensitive to the Breton culture, and we kept that feeling in the family, even if at home we do not speak Breton. Then I had a few hours of breton in public school, and so on until high school. I finally went to Rennes to study Breton, but no, I don't speak Breton of birth.

Was enough what you learned up to Baccalaureate?

I didn't speak well, because I had only had two hours of class a week, it wasn't enough. In college, I was able to hold the level so that I could participate in conversations and gain a broader vocabulary.

To distinguish between those who have learned Euskera at home and away from home, we have words in Euskaldunzaharras and Euskaldunberri in Basque. Is there a similar distinction in the Breton? There are those who think that breton learned as a family is more authentic.

Learning the Breton as a mother tongue, it's true that there's a nice accent, that there's a dictionary, that grammar is natural, that they don't have to think about how to say it. But when we learn outside the family, we have to learn how to put the tone directly into the syllable, and all of this makes the breton often differentiate between those who have learned at home and away from home. Those of us who have learned away from home, the Breton is more literary, more chemical, but those who have learned from their parents don't master many new words, because the parents don't know them, and it was interrupted in the transmission of the Breton.

In Diwan, school regulations create problems for teachers. When a school is assigned to a teacher, it's not necessarily the one next to his home. On the other hand, as a teacher, we are asked to talk about the local breton of the school and learn little by little. And so it happens that, being young, when they lived with grandparents and grandmothers, the teachers learned from Breton ear cannot adapt [to a new language], they cannot leave it because they are Bretons learned from ear, but we who learned the Breton joined when we were adults, we have no dialects and therefore we have the ability to adapt to the place where we work.

The vocabulary between dialects is different.

Not necessarily, but the way words are spoken is very different. And as with our chemical shawl, as they say [of humor], we want to learn from those who speak Breton since they were young at home, and because they were touched and lowered, they don't want to help, we don't have much information about how to pronounce their breton. Those who learned briton at home are less and less and are on the way to disappear because they are very old, my neighbor was 92 years old and died a few years ago, it was a very showy breton. It is difficult to access this information anywhere. I'm a professor, and they tell me. “You’ve learned, you’ve gone to school, so I can’t teach you anything with what they have.” In the region, the old do not dare to teach the Breton they speak, it was so hard what they suffered when they were children. That's right, it's very hard.

This year, some Diwan students have done the Brevet in Breton and have not accepted the tests. The same has happened to us in Euskal Herria. French language policy does not contribute to the development of language.

The development of French minority languages will not take place unless Article 2 of the French Constitution is amended. This article says that there is only one language and that it is French. Therefore, if no constitutional change is made, it is not possible to make progress, and they, in the various governments, know that very well. But what we can do is go and look for support for the regions, because we all suffer, in Euskal Herria, in Corsica… everywhere!

On the other hand, not all the activities offered can be carried out in Breton. Here in the Kemperl Commonwealth there are commissioned associations to help schools in many outstanding environmental activities and cannot be done in Breton because their working groups do not have Breton speakers. So there are activities that we have to do in French, because French is a fundamental language, and French is an option, right? [ironically laughs at him]. Finally, the teacher has two options: to stay in school and not organize almost anything outside school, or to perform the activity. So we do, we recraft what we see outside of school in Breton inside the classroom.

Diwan schools are the ikastolas of Brittany.

Indeed, the Diwan classes were created taking into account the model of the ikastolas, such as Korrika, we copied them and created Ar Redadeg. I remember the first year we organized, it was around midnight, here the little Kemperl were awake, moved. Ar Redadeg would go ahead of the school and there we were waiting for the children, the military [in security tasks] came and asked with indifference: “What is Ar Redadeg?” The previous days, although the news of Ar Redadeg was broadcast in the newspapers and on Breton television... It is difficult!

What is the Brittany of your dreams like?

Brittany where we can speak Breton and French, where we can choose the language we want, bilingualism everywhere, in all circumstances.

What is Diwana?

When did Diwan class emerge?

The first was born in May 1977 in Lambaol-Gwitalmez, a private house owned by parents of students. The second opened in Kemper in September 1977, where I was educated.

And why? What situation does it respond to?

Because in schools there was a shortage of a breton. We have recently celebrated 40 years of Breton classes.

How are Diwan classes structured?

Diwan's classes are associative associations of the 1901 law. When we want to create a new school, a support commission is created that will organize various fundraising activities to help open the school. Subsequently, when the new school has registered the necessary premises and the number of pupils required, it will send an information report to the Diwan School Headquarters. Whether or not to open the school will be decided at headquarters. Once created, in order to raise funds, it is the parents of students and assistants of Diwan who will organize events (parties, meals…) in the support commission and in the Association d’Éducation Populaire, and each school, depending on the number of students, will have to find financial resources and give the school to the network. The parents of the students will be the employers, that is, those who manage the hiring, the workers who perform cleaning tasks, those who take care of the children…

And the French administrations…

We are subcontracted as associations of the French Ministry of Education, that is, we follow the programme of the Ministry of Education. We already have teachers who have passed the Ministry of Education entrance test, which is a specific test for Diwan's classes. And, therefore, the administration pays its wages. However, we also have teachers who have not passed the access test, so the headquarters will pay their salaries. Diwan is headquartered at Landern between Brest and Kemper, where the secretaries, the accountants and the director of Diwan are responsible for the salaries and financial burden of the headquarters, the schools and the administrative staff working there, the service staff and the teachers without proof of access.

The aid commission raises money and Diwan's classes are free... Are there any other subsidies?

Yes, depending on each city hall, there are also aids: dining room service, food distribution. It is not a Baladan aid. In some schools, the day-care service before and after school is provided by the City Hall. Well, it won't be in Breton, but it's a little less expense to deal with it. The aid can be very different between the town hall and the city hall.