With just over 200,000 active speakers, Breton is considered “seriously threatened” by UNESCO. 79% of Breton residents are over 60 years old, according to a 2018 study commissioned by the Brittany region.
In 2024, the nearly 20,000 students educated in Breton will still represent only 3.5% of the population at the Rennes academy. The vast majority of these students abandon learning the language before the end of their schooling and lose the use of it. “There is nothing to be optimistic about,” laments Rozenn Milin, former director of TV Breizh. The Diwan network only aims to train...100 speakers per year, says its president Yann Uguen in Ouest-France. It is civil society which has become indifferent to Breton, says sociolinguistics researcher Erwan Le Pipec, who predicts that there will be only 50,000 speakers in 60,000 by the year 2024.