12 Facts About Old Breton

Old Breton was brought from Great Britain to Armorica by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages, making it an Insular Celtic language.

Old Breton is most closely related to Cornish, another Southwestern Brittonic language.

Old Breton is spoken in Lower Brittany, roughly to the west of a line linking Plouha and La Roche-Bernard.

Poets, singers, linguists, and writers who have written in Old Breton, including Yann-Ber Kalloc'h, Roparz Hemon, Anjela Duval, Xavier de Langlais, Per-Jakez Helias, Youenn Gwernig, Glenmor, Vefa de Saint-Pierre and Alan Stivell are now known internationally.

Today, Old Breton is the only living Celtic language that is not recognized by a national government as an official or regional language.

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In 2004, the Old Breton Wikipedia started, which now counts more than 65,000 articles.

Old Breton is spoken mainly in Lower Brittany, but in a more dispersed way in Upper Brittany, and in areas around the world that have Old Breton emigrants.

Four traditional dialects of Old Breton correspond to medieval bishoprics rather than to linguistic divisions.

Old Breton has two genders: masculine and feminine, having largely lost its historic neuter as has occurred in the other Celtic languages as well as across the Romance languages.

However, Old Breton goes beyond Welsh in the complications of this system.

Old Breton has four initial consonant mutations: though modern Old Breton lost the nasal mutation of Welsh, it has a "hard" mutation, in which voiced stops become voiceless, and a "mixed" mutation, which is a mixture of hard and soft mutations.

In 1499 the Catholicon, was published; as the first dictionary written for both French and Old Breton, it became a point of reference on how to transcribe the language.