Breton

André . 1896--1966, French poet and art critic: founder and chief theorist of surrealism, publishing the first surrealist manifesto in 1924

Breton

1. a native or inhabitant of Brittany, esp one who speaks the Breton language

2. the indigenous language of Brittany, belonging to the Brythonic subgroup of the Celtic family of languages

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Breton

the language of the Bretons, which belongs to the Celtic group of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken in the peninsula of Brittany, along with the French language, by approximately 1.1 million people (1967 estimate). Breton is divided into four dialects: Vannetais (or southeastern) in the department of Morbihan, Trégorrois (northeastern) in the western part of the department of Côtes-du-Nord, and Cornouaillais (southwestern) and Léonais (northwestern) in the department of Finistère. There is no single colloquial literary language; magazines published in Breton use the Léonais dialect as the basis of the literary language. The first written records in the Breton language are the glosses of the eighth to the 11th centuries. The first lexicon, a Breton-Latin-French dictionary, was compiled in 1464.

REFERENCES

Vallée, F. La langue brétonne en 40 leçons. St. Brieuc, 1940.
Hemon, R. La langue brétonne. La Baule, 1947.
Ernault, E. Glossaire moyen-bréton, 2nd ed. Paris, 1896.
Loth, J. Vocabulaire vieux-bréton, avec commentaire. Paris, 1884.