🗣️Breton for English speakers

1. Breton: a Celtic language on the Atlantic coast of France

Breton — brezhoneg to its speakers — is the Celtic language of Brittany, the peninsula at the north-western corner of France. It is Indo-European and Celtic, ISO 639-3 bre, Glottocode bret1244.¹² Its closest living relatives are Cornish and Welsh, not French: Breton is a Brythonic language carried to Armorica from Britain, and its grammar has almost nothing in common with the Romance language that surrounds it.

That last point is worth pausing on, because it is the single most useful thing an English speaker can know at the start. Breton looks French on the page — Latin alphabet, French loanwords, French place names on the road signs — and behaves nothing like it. Words change their first consonant depending on what stands in front of them. The finite verb wants to be the second thing in a main clause, whatever the first thing is. Prepositions conjugate for person, so 'with me' is one word and 'with her' is another. Counting runs in twenties.

Breton at a glance

How many people speak Breton, and why the number needs its label

The figure most often quoted is around 107,000. It comes from a TMO survey commissioned by the Brittany Region, which interviewed 8,336 residents by telephone between 30 August and 8 November 2024 and extrapolated from the 2.7% who said they spoke Breton very well or quite well.³ That is a survey estimate of self-reported proficiency across a five-department territory. It is not a census count, and it does not measure how often anyone actually uses the language.

Two other numbers from the same release matter more for understanding where Breton is going. The mean age of speakers was 58.5, down from 70 in the 2018 study — the speaker population is getting younger, which is unusual and significant. And when speakers were asked where they got the language, 16% said family transmission and 78% said education.³ Breton today is overwhelmingly a language people learn at school rather than at home. For the 2025–26 school year the Académie de Rennes reports 9,212 pupils in bilingual public primary streams, 3,285 in middle school and 292 in high school — real numbers, and only a fraction of all Breton learning, since they exclude the Diwan immersion schools, Catholic bilingual streams and every adult course.⁶

Glottolog's own vitality record for Breton is internally inconsistent: the page shows an AES heading of "not endangered" while the comment it cites reports "At risk" with low certainty from a 2012 source.¹ This guide therefore quotes the 2024 survey and declines to attach a single vitality label.

2. The sounds — and why this guide will not hand you one IPA chart

Most language guides open with a phoneme table. This one cannot honestly do that, and the reason is worth understanding because it tells you something real about Breton.

PHOIBLE, the standard cross-linguistic phonological database, holds three separate Breton inventories rather than one. SPA inventory 157 lists 42 segments, sourced to Ternes (1970). UPSID inventory 260 lists 45, from Ternes and Bothorel et al. (1982). EA inventory 2584 lists 66 — and that one is explicitly labelled as the speech of Bothoa, a single locality, analysed by Iosad (2013).⁷ The Bothoa record is 21 to 24 segments larger than the two general ones. Presenting the union of the three as "the sound system of Breton" would be inventing a language nobody speaks.

Three Breton inventories, three answers

What can be said safely: Breton descriptions include contrasts of vowel length and/or nasality, though the exact set varies by source; at least one analysis includes aspirated stops; the Bothoa analysis includes several voiceless sonorants.⁷ Beyond that, the responsible move is to pick a variety, name it, and use audio recorded by speakers of that variety. The Office public de la langue bretonne's Desketa platform, launched June 2024, covers A0–A1 with audio recorded by experienced speakers, and is the sensible starting point.⁸

Spellings you can rely on without a phoneme chart

A handful of grapheme facts hold across the standard orthography and will get you reading aloud passably:

• c'h is a single letter — the raspy velar or uvular fricative, as in bac'h. It is not c followed by h.
• zh is the letter that gives peurunvan its nickname. It was designed as a compromise spelling for a sound realised as /z/ in most of Brittany and /h/ in Vannetais, so that one spelling could serve both: brezhoneg.
• ñ marks nasalisation of the preceding vowel, not a palatal nasal: kreñv, teñval.
• ou is /u/, as in French; eu is a front rounded vowel; ao and aou are diphthongs.
• Stress in most of Brittany falls on the penultimate syllable. Vannetais is the notable exception, stressing the final.

3. Which Breton spelling? The orthography question, stated honestly

Breton has more than one writing system, and the difference is visible in almost every sentence. ARBRES, the CNRS-hosted research grammar edited by Mélanie Jouitteau, describes several coexisting orthographies and identifies the zh system — peurunvan, "wholly unified" — as the majority written standard of the twenty-first century.⁴ This guide and its deck use peurunvan throughout, and say so rather than leaving you to infer it.

Breton orthographies you will actually encounter

Two rules follow, and they are the ones ARBRES itself applies. First, declare your system and stay in it. Second, do not mark a form from another documented system as a mistake — brezoneg is not a misspelling of brezhoneg, it is the same word in a different orthography.⁴ Dialect transcriptions in particular may depart from the base spelling in order to preserve information, and normalising them silently destroys the data.

Reader A1 — Un devezh e Breizh (A day in Brittany)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not a Breton literary work; section 9 lists real Breton writing to move on to.

Demat. Me a zo Yann. Yann eo ma anv. Breizhad on. E Breizh emaon o chom, en un ti bihan e-kichen ar mor. Bras eo ar mor, ha glas eo. Bemdez e sellan ouzh ar mor. Bemdez e klevan ar gwent. Ur c'hi am eus ivez. Bihan eo ma c'hi, ha du eo. Trewa... nann, ket brezhoneg eo se. Ki eo ar ger brezhonek. Ma c'hi a zo ur c'hi bihan ha du, ha me a gar anezhañ.

— Hello. I am Yann. Yann is my name. I am a Breton. I live in Brittany, in a small house beside the sea. The sea is big, and it is blue. Every day I look at the sea. Every day I hear the wind. I have a dog too. My dog is small, and it is black. Trewa... no, that is not Breton. Ki is the Breton word. My dog is a small black dog, and I love him.

Er mintin e savan. Bara ha kafe am bez. Mat eo ar bara. Tomm eo ar kafe. Goude e vont er-maez gant ma c'hi. Amañ ez eus ur garzh hir, ha war an tu all eus ar garzh ez eus ul liorzh. El liorzh e vez gwez ha geot ha bleunioù. Un erer a nij uhel a-us d'an ti. Un erer eo, pe ur gwalc'h? Ne ouzon ket. Uhel-tre eo, ha ne welan ket mat.

— In the morning I get up. I have bread and coffee. The bread is good. The coffee is hot. Then I go outside with my dog. Here there is a long hedge, and on the other side of the hedge there is a garden. In the garden there are trees and grass and flowers. An eagle flies high above the house. Is it an eagle, or a hawk? I don't know. It is very high, and I can't see well.

D'abardaez e teuan d'ar gêr. Kousket a ra ma c'hi war al leur. Ul levr am eus, ha lenn a ran. Ur geriadur am eus ivez, rak ne ouzon ket an holl c'herioù c'hoazh. Bemdez e lennan un tamm, ha bemdez e skrivan gerioù nevez en ul levr bihan. Diaes eo ar yezh-mañ, met plijus eo ivez. Alies e soñjan: perak e teskan brezhoneg? Rak brav eo ar yezh, ha rak amañ emaon o chom. Ur yezh a zo ur skeud eus ur vro. Ma fell deoc'h anavezout Breizh, deskit brezhoneg. Warc'hoazh e teskin gerioù nevez adarre. Bremañ ez an da gousket. Nozvezh vat!

— In the evening I come home. My dog sleeps on the floor. I have a book, and I read. I have a dictionary too, because I don't know all the words yet. Every day I read a little, and every day I write new words in a small book. This language is difficult, but it is enjoyable too. Often I think: why am I learning Breton? Because the language is beautiful, and because I live here. A language is a reflection of a country. If you want to know Brittany, learn Breton. Tomorrow I will learn new words again. Now I am going to sleep. Good night!

4. Initial consonant mutation: the thing that makes Breton Breton

The first consonant of a Breton word changes according to what precedes it. This is not decoration and it is not optional. ARBRES defines it as a change affecting a word-initial consonant and documents several distinct series rather than one uniform softening.⁹ Its standard table covers initial K, T, P, G, D, B, M and Gw, and distinguishes lenition, spirantization, provection (fortition), the mixed mutation and a reduced system.⁹

The standard mutation table, after ARBRES⁹

Learn mutation by trigger, one construction at a time — not as a list of letter swaps. ARBRES is explicit that mutation is sensitive to lexical category and morphosyntactic environment, which means a vocabulary item cannot be taught with a single decontextualised "changed form".⁹ This is exactly why the deck for this guide carries kador and not gador, kar and not gar: the mutated spellings are grammar output, not separate words.

Three triggers to start with

• The possessive da 'your' lenites: ki → da gi 'your dog'; tad → da dad 'your father'.
• The possessive ma 'my' spirantises: ki → ma c'hi 'my dog'; tad → ma zad 'my father'; penn → ma fenn 'my head'.
• The definite article lenites a feminine singular noun: ar + kador → ar gador 'the chair'.

That third one is why the article has three shapes to begin with. an stands before n, d, t, h and vowels; al before l; ar everywhere else. The same three-way split governs the indefinite article: un, ul, ur.

5. Being, having, and introducing yourself

Breton's verb 'to be', bezañ, has more than one present tense, distributed by what the sentence is doing — identity, location, habit. A first course does not need the whole system, but it does need to know the system exists, so that the forms below look like members of a paradigm rather than random words.

Ten sentences that will carry you through a first conversation

Note the negation. Breton negates with a pair: ne before the verb and ket after it, exactly as French does with ne … pas. Before a vowel ne becomes n'. The deck carries both halves as separate cards for this reason.

Reader A2 — Ar marc'had (The market)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not a Breton literary work; section 9 lists real Breton writing to move on to.

Dec'h ez is d'ar marc'had gant ma mignon Anna. Er marc'had ez eus kalz a draoù: bara, kig, frouezh, holen, kafe. Ez eus ivez krampouezh — krampouezh eo an dra ar muiañ brudet e Breizh. Ur grampouezhenn am eus prenet. Mat-tre e oa. Anna he deus prenet div grampouezhenn, rak naon he doa.

— Yesterday I went to the market with my friend Anna. At the market there are lots of things: bread, meat, fruit, salt, coffee. There are also crêpes — crêpes are the most famous thing in Brittany. I bought a crêpe. It was very good. Anna bought two crêpes, because she was hungry.

Ur wreg gozh a werzhe frouezh. « Demat, » emezi. « Demat deoc'h, » a lavaris. « Pegement eo ar frouezh? » « Pemp euro, » a lavaras. Pemp euro! Ker eo, a soñjis, met prenañ a ris anezho memes tra. Mat e oant. Goude-se hon eus kavet un ti-krampouezh, hag e oa ur c'hrampouezher o labourat e-barzh.

— An old woman was selling fruit. "Hello," she said. "Hello to you," I said. "How much is the fruit?" "Five euros," she said. Five euros! That's expensive, I thought, but I bought them all the same. They were good. After that we found a crêperie, and there was a crêpe-maker working inside.

War hor c'his d'ar gêr e komzomp brezhoneg. Anna a gomz gwelloc'h egedon. Bemdez e komz brezhoneg gant he zad hag he mamm; me ne gomzan nemet er skol. Alies e chomomp hep gerioù, hag e komzomp galleg un tamm. Goude-se e komzomp brezhoneg adarre. « Ne vern, » a lavaras Anna. « Deskiñ a rez bemdez, hag ar re a zesk bemdez a gomzo un deiz. Ma mamm-gozh ne oa ket bet er skol, ha brezhoneg a gomze. Te a zo bet er skol, hag e komzi ivez. » Fellout a ra din krediñ anezhi. Warc'hoazh ez in d'ar marc'had adarre, ha prenañ a rin frouezh ha bara ha krampouezh. Ha marteze e komzin brezhoneg gant ar wreg gozh a werzh frouezh, ha ne gomzin ket galleg outi. Un dra vihan eo. Met eus an traoù bihan-se e vev ur yezh.

— On our way home we speak Breton. Anna speaks better than I do. Every day she speaks Breton with her father and her mother; I only speak it at school. Often we run out of words, and we speak a bit of French. Then we speak Breton again. "Never mind," said Anna. "You learn every day, and those who learn every day will speak one day. My grandmother had never been to school, and she spoke Breton. You have been to school, and you will speak too." I want to believe her. Tomorrow I will go to the market again, and I will buy fruit and bread and crêpes. And perhaps I will speak Breton with the old woman who sells fruit, and I will not speak French to her. It is a small thing. But it is on small things like these that a language lives.

6. Where the verb goes: V2, and why "Breton is VSO" is wrong

You will read that Breton is a VSO language. You will also read that it is V2. ARBRES's position is that neither works as a context-free summary: it analyses Breton main clauses as predominantly V2, with the finite or tense-bearing element in second position and the first constituent free to be something other than the subject, while embedded clauses are frequently VSO.¹⁰ The distinction is between clause types, not between analysts.

The practical consequence for a learner is that the first slot in a Breton main clause is a choice, and the choice carries meaning. UD Breton-KEB, the manually annotated dependency treebank of 884 sentences and 9,725 tokens, contains a pair that shows this cleanly.¹¹

Attested word-order examples from UD Breton-KEB. These are corpus records, not sentences written for this guide.

The corpus gives Examples 1 and 2 the same English translation while their first constituents differ, which makes them a useful attested pair for investigating what the front slot actually does. A complete information-structure account would need the original grammatical source and the discourse context, and this guide does not have those.¹¹ What it can say is that the fourth sentence shows an embedded clause introduced by e with its own verb oa — the pattern ARBRES describes as frequently VSO.¹⁰

The ober periphrasis

The second and fourth examples above use a construction with no English equivalent. Mont a rin is literally "going I-will-do": the verbal noun is fronted and the tense is carried by ober 'to do' as an auxiliary. Wiktionary records this second function of ober explicitly — "used as an auxiliary verb to conjugate any verb".¹² It is extremely common in speech, and recognising it is the difference between parsing ordinary Breton and being stopped by it.

7. Conjugated prepositions

Breton prepositions inflect for the person of their object. There is no English analogue at all; the closest familiar thing is Irish or Welsh. The deck carries the full paradigm of two of them as separate cards, because that is how you will meet them.

Two conjugated prepositions in full

8. Counting in twenties

Breton counts vigesimally above twenty, like Welsh and unlike English. Forty is daou-ugent, "two twenties"; sixty is tri-ugent; eighty is pevar-ugent. Fifty is hanter-kant, "half a hundred". Numbers between the twenties use warn-ugent: unan warn-ugent 'twenty-one'.

Breton also has gendered forms for 2, 3 and 4, agreeing with the noun counted: daou/div, tri/teir, pevar/peder. And eighteen is triwec'h, "three sixes" — a genuinely vigesimal-adjacent oddity that surprises people.

Reader B1 — Ar fest-noz (The night dance)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not a Breton literary work; section 9 lists real Breton writing to move on to.

Ar fest-noz a zo un dra vev e Breizh, ha n'eo ket un dra kozh hepken. Bep bloaz e vez dalc'het mil fest-noz pe ouzhpenn, hag e teu tud a bep seurt: re yaouank, re gozh, tud eus ar vro ha tud a-ziavaez. Er bloavezh 2012 e voe lakaet ar fest-noz war roll UNESCO evit an hêrezh sevenadurel divaterel. N'eo ket ur mirdi eta: bev eo, hag e cheñch bep bloaz.

— The fest-noz is a living thing in Brittany, and not merely an old one. Every year a thousand fest-noz or more are held, and people of every kind come: the young, the old, people from the region and people from outside. In 2012 the fest-noz was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. It is not a museum, then: it is alive, and it changes every year.

Petra a c'hoarvez en ur fest-noz? Sonerien a son, kanerien a gan, ha an holl a zañs. Alies e vez daou ganer o kanañ an eil goude egile — unan a gan ul lodenn, hag egile a adkan anezhi. Kan ha diskan eo anv an doare-se. Ne vez ket ezhomm da vezañ mestr war an dañs: mont a rit e-barzh ar boullad, kregiñ a rit, ha desket e vez gant an dorn hag ar c'horf kentoc'h eget gant al levrioù.

— What happens at a fest-noz? Musicians play, singers sing, and everyone dances. Often two singers sing one after the other — one sings a phrase, and the other sings it back. Kan ha diskan is the name of that style. You don't need to be a master of the dance: you go into the circle, you begin, and it is learned with the hand and the body rather than with books.

Ar pezh a zo dedennus eo an dra-mañ: en un fest-noz e vez klevet brezhoneg gant tud ha n'o deus ket desket anezhañ er gêr. Ur yezh a vev el lec'h ma vez implijet, ha setu unan eus al lec'hioù ma vez implijet c'hoazh. Ur fest-noz n'eo ket ur c'hentel, ha n'eo ket ur skol. Tud a zeu evit dañsal, ha komz a reont etrezo. Klevout a rit brezhoneg en ho tro, ha n'eo ket brezhoneg al levrioù: brezhoneg ar vuhez eo. Mard oc'h o teskiñ brezhoneg hag e c'hallit mont d'ur fest-noz, it. Ne gomprenot ket pep tra. Ne vern. Selaouit, ha dañsit, hag e teuio ar gerioù goude.

— What is interesting is this: at a fest-noz you hear Breton spoken by people who did not learn it at home. A language lives where it is used, and this is one of the places where it is still used. If you are A fest-noz is not a lesson, and it is not a school. People come to dance, and they talk among themselves. You hear Breton around you, and it is not the Breton of books: it is the Breton of life. If you are learning Breton and you can get to a fest-noz, go. You will not understand everything. Never mind. Listen, and dance, and the words will come afterwards.

9. The four countries, and what a dialect label does not tell you

Breton is conventionally divided into four dialects named after the historic bishoprics: Kerne (Cornouaille), Leon, Treger (Trégor) and Gwened (Vannetais). The first three are grouped as KLT and are the basis of most written standards; Gwened is the outlier, with different stress placement and enough divergence that the peurunvan zh compromise was designed largely to bridge it.

What a four-way label hides is how much geographic variation is actually documented. ARBRES's account of the Atlas linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne identifies Pierre Le Roux's six-volume atlas, published 1924–1953 with about 100 maps per volume, as the major source for twentieth-century Breton dialectology; the CNRS/CRBC ichthyonymy project records that the ALBB surveyed 77 points and that Jean Le Dû's later Nouvel atlas linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne expanded coverage to 187.¹³ Those are field records with dates and survey points attached — and a form mapped in 1930 is evidence about 1930, not about how anyone speaks now.¹³

10. Collective and singulative nouns

Breton does something with number that English does not. For many natural kinds the unmarked form is a collective, and you derive the single item from it by adding -enn. This is the reverse of the English pattern, and it is one of the genuinely delightful corners of the grammar.

Collectives and their singulatives — both members are on the deck

The deck carries both members of each pair deliberately. Reducing them to one card would throw away the fact that makes them worth learning.

Reader B2 — Ar yezh hag ar skol (The language and the school)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not a Breton literary work; section 9 lists real Breton writing to move on to.

Ma sellit ouzh ar sifroù eus ar studiadenn sokioyezhoniel 2024, e welit un dra souezhus. Etre 2018 ha 2024 eo bet izeloc'h oad keitat ar gomzerien: eus dek vloaz ha tri-ugent betek eizh vloaz ha hanter-kant. Er peurliesañ eus ar yezhoù en arvar e sav an oad keitat bep bloaz, rak ar re goshañ hepken a chom o komz. Amañ eo bet ar c'hontrol.

— If you look at the figures from the 2024 sociolinguistic study, you see something surprising. Between 2018 and 2024 the mean age of speakers fell: from seventy years to fifty-eight and a half. In most endangered languages the mean age rises every year, because only the oldest keep speaking. Here it has been the opposite.

Perak? Rak ar skol. Eizh a bep dek komzer a lavar o deus desket brezhoneg er skol, ha c'hwezek dre ar familh hepken. Ur cheñchamant don eo. E-pad kantvedoù e oa bet treuzkaset ar yezh gant an tadoù hag ar mammoù; bremañ e vez treuzkaset gant ar gelennerien. An dra-se a sav goulennoù start: ur yezh a vev-hi pa vez desket er skol ha n'eo ket komzet er gêr?

— Why? Because of the school. Eight out of every ten speakers say they learned Breton at school, and sixteen per cent through the family alone. It is a profound change. For centuries the language was transmitted by fathers and mothers; now it is transmitted by teachers. That raises hard questions: does a language live when it is learned at school and not spoken at home?

N'eus den a c'hallfe respont d'ar goulenn-se hiziv. Ar pezh a c'haller lavarout eo n'eo ket marv ar brezhoneg, ha n'eo ket yac'h kennebeut. Bev eo dre ar skolioù, dre ar radio, dre an Ti Embann, dre ar festoù-noz. Diaes eo lavarout hiziv petra a c'hoarvezo a-benn hanter kant vloaz. Un dra a c'haller lavarout koulskoude: n'eo ket ar memes tra ur yezh desket er skol hag ur yezh klevet er gêr abaoe ar bugaleaj. Ar re a zesk er skol o deus gerioù ha yezhadur; ar re a glev er gêr o deus tonioù ha troioù-lavar ha kalz a draoù ne vezont ket skrivet e levr ebet. Ezhomm ez eus eus an daou. Ar pezh a zo sur eo an dra-mañ: pep hini a zesk brezhoneg a zo ul lodenn eus ar respont.

— Nobody can answer that question today. What can be said is that Breton is not dead, and it is not healthy either. It is alive through the schools, through the radio, through the publishing house, through the fest-noz. It is difficult to say today what will happen in fifty years. One thing can be said all the same: a language learned at school and a language heard at home since childhood are not the same thing. Those who learn at school have words and grammar; those who hear it at home have tunes and turns of phrase and a great many things that are written in no book at all. Both are needed. What is certain is this: everyone who learns Breton is part of the answer.

11. Reading Breton critically: where the descriptions come from

At an advanced level the useful skill is no longer learning new forms but knowing what kind of evidence a claim about Breton rests on. The sources behind this guide fall into four distinct tiers, and conflating them is the most common failure in Breton material online.

Four evidence tiers, and what each is good for

The deck attached to this guide sits squarely in the fourth tier and says so. It also carries a visible gap that illustrates the discipline: it has no card for kazh 'cat', kêr 'town', bugel 'child' or skol 'school', because the specific Wiktionary range pages holding those words were not among the ones harvested for this build. Those words are real Breton and you will meet them immediately. They are absent because the deck carries only what was actually read from a source, and a later harvest will add them.

Register: the peurunvan question is partly political

Choosing an orthography in Breton has never been a purely technical act. The peurunvan system was agreed in 1941, under the German occupation, and that history has attached to it ever since; Skolveurieg was in part a post-war response. ARBRES's own practice is instructive: it uses peurunvan as a transcription base while explicitly allowing adaptation where dialect data require it, and it describes the zh system as the majority written standard rather than as the correct one.⁴ That is the register this guide adopts — describe the distribution, decline the verdict.

Reader C1 — Doare ar skrivañ (The manner of writing)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not a Breton literary work; section 9 lists real Breton writing to move on to.

N'eus ket un doare hepken da skrivañ brezhoneg, hag an dra-se a zo ur gudenn hag ur pinvidigezh war un dro. Ar reizhskrivadur peurunvan a zo ar reizhskrivadur muiañ implijet er c'hantved-mañ, hervez ARBRES. Met n'eo ket ar reizhskrivadur nemetañ, ha n'eo ket bet asantet gant an holl. Skolveurieg a zo unan all; etrerannyezhel a zo unan all c'hoazh.

— There is not one single way of writing Breton, and that is a problem and a richness at the same time. The peurunvan orthography is the most used orthography in this century, according to ARBRES. But it is not the only one, and it has not been agreed to by everyone. Skolveurieg is another; interdialectal is another again.

Perak eo pouezus an dra-se evit an neb a zesk? Rak pa lennit ul levr kozh e welit brezoneg e-lec'h brezhoneg, dillad e-lec'h dilhad, selled e-lec'h sellout. N'eo ket fazioù. Skrivadurioù eus ur reizhskrivadur all int. Ma soñjit e vez fazioù, e kollit an titour: ne ouzoc'h ket eus pelec'h e teu an destenn nag eus peseurt mare.

— Why does this matter for the learner? Because when you read an old book you see brezoneg instead of brezhoneg, dillad instead of dilhad, selled instead of sellout. These are not errors. They are spellings from a different orthography. If you think they are errors, you lose the information: you no longer know where the text comes from or from what period.

Setu ar reolenn a heuilhomp amañ, ha hi eo ar reolenn a heuilh ARBRES ivez. Dibabit ur reizhskrivadur. Lavarit pehini eo. Chomit e-barzh. Ha pa gavit ur stumm eus ur reizhskrivadur all, na lakait ket ur sin ruz warnañ — merkit eus pelec'h e teu. Ar yezhoniezh a zo ur skiant, ha n'eo ket ur skol-veur ma vefe roet notennoù. Un dra all c'hoazh: n'eo ket bet dibabet ar reizhskrivadurioù-se en un doare sioul. Istor o deus, hag istor start a-wechoù. Ar peurunvan a voe asantet e-pad ar brezel, hag an dra-se a chom stag outañ betek hiziv. An neb a zesk brezhoneg a c'hall dibab peurunvan hep asantiñ d'an istor-se. Met gwelloc'h eo gouzout eget chom hep gouzout.

— Here is the rule we follow here, and it is the rule ARBRES follows too. Choose an orthography. Say which one it is. Stay inside it. And when you find a form from another orthography, do not put a red mark on it — note where it comes from. Linguistics is a science, and not a university where marks are handed out. One more thing: these orthographies were not chosen in a calm way. They have a history, and sometimes a hard one. Peurunvan was agreed during the war, and that stays attached to it to this day. Someone learning Breton can choose peurunvan without agreeing to that history. But it is better to know than not to know.

12. Books, magazines, radio, television and music in Breton

Breton has a real contemporary media ecosystem — small, but genuinely functioning, and the fastest route from classroom Breton to the language as it is used. Everything below publishes or broadcasts in Breton.

Breton-language media

Music, and the one thing everybody should hear

Breton music is the part of the culture with the widest reach, and much of it is sung in Breton. The traditional repertoire divides into the gwerz — a long narrative ballad, usually tragic — and the sonenn, a shorter and lighter song. For the dance, the characteristic form is kan ha diskan, call-and-response singing in which one singer sings a phrase and a second overlaps and returns it.

The living context for all of it is the fest-noz, inscribed in 2012 on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.¹⁸ UNESCO's own description is worth quoting because it documents scale, not just sentiment: about a thousand fest-noz take place every year, with participants ranging from a hundred to several thousand, thousands of musicians and singers, and tens of thousands of regular dancers, drawing on inherited dance repertoires with several hundred variations and thousands of tunes.¹⁸ Bagadoù — Breton pipe bands, from bagad — compete and perform across the region.

Reader C2 — Ar gwerz hag ar sonenn (The gwerz and the sonenn)

Constructed for this guide from the words on the deck below. It is a practice text, not a Breton literary work; section 9 lists real Breton writing to move on to.

Daou seurt kan a zo er sonerezh hengounel breizhat, ha disheñvel-tre int an eil diouzh egile. Ar gwerz a zo un istor hir, ur c'hontadenn kanet: alies e komz eus ar marv, eus ar mor, eus ur vaouez a gollas he bugale, eus un den a chomas er-maez eus ar vro. Trist eo ar gwerz, ha pounner. N'eus ket ezhomm da vezañ mestr war ar yezh evit klevout se: an ton hepken a lavar deoc'h eus petra e vez komzet.

— There are two kinds of song in traditional Breton music, and they are very different from one another. The gwerz is a long story, a sung narrative: often it speaks of death, of the sea, of a woman who lost her children, of a man who stayed outside the country. The gwerz is sad, and heavy. You do not need to be a master of the language to hear that: the tune alone tells you what is being spoken of.

Ar sonenn a zo un dra all. Berroc'h eo, skañvoc'h eo, ha da zañsal e vez implijet alies. Etre an daou emañ ar c'han ha diskan: daou ganer a gan an eil goude egile, unan a lavar ul lodenn hag egile a adkan anezhi, hag e vez dalc'het ar boullad o tañsal gant an daou. Un doare kanañ eo ha n'eus ket ezhomm a benveg ebet outañ — an dud hepken a ra ar sonerezh gant o mouezh.

— The sonenn is another thing. It is shorter, it is lighter, and it is often used for dancing. Between the two stands kan ha diskan: two singers sing one after the other, one says a phrase and the other sings it back, and the circle is kept dancing by the pair of them. It is a manner of singing that needs no instrument at all — the people alone make the music with their voices.

Perak eo pouezus an dra-se evit an neb a zesk ar yezh? Rak amañ e vev ar brezhoneg hep goulenn digant den ebet. Er skol e vez desket ar gerioù hag ar yezhadur; er sonerezh e vez klevet ar yezh o labourat. Selaouit ur gwerz hep lenn ar gerioù. Ne gomprenot ket pep tra ar wech kentañ, na d'an eil wech kennebeut. Met un deiz e teuio ur ger ha goude-se ur frazenn, hag e komprenot penaos e c'hall ur yezh vihan bezañ bras. Ur yezh vihan a zo bihan dre an niver hepken. Er sonerezh n'eus yezh vihan ebet.

— Why does this matter for someone learning the language? Because here Breton lives without asking anyone's permission. At school the words and the grammar are learned; in the music the language is heard at work. Listen to a gwerz without reading the words. You will not understand everything the first time, nor the second time either. But one day a word will come, and after that a sentence, and you will understand how a small language can be a large one. A small language is small by numbers alone. In the music there is no small language.

12b. Adalek an deroù betek an dibenn — the whole guide, in Breton

Everything this guide has argued, restated in Breton, one paragraph per CEFR level, with the English underneath. If you can read this section without the captions, you have got what the guide was for.

A1 — Petra eo ar brezhoneg?

Ar brezhoneg a zo ur yezh keltiek, ha n'eo ket ur yezh latin. Ar galleg a zo tro-dro dezhañ, met n'int ket kar an eil d'egile. Kar eo ar brezhoneg d'ar c'hembraeg ha d'ar c'hernaoueg. Tri dra a rank ober souezh deoc'h diouzhtu: kemm a ra kensonenn gentañ ar gerioù hervez ar pezh a zo a-raok; an araogennoù a vez displeget hervez an den; ha kontañ a reer dre ugentadoù. Un den war-dro seizh mil ha kant a lavar e komz brezhoneg mat pe mat a-walc'h, hervez ar studiadenn 2024.

— Breton is a Celtic language, and not a Latin one. French is all around it, but they are not related to each other. Breton is related to Welsh and to Cornish. Three things ought to surprise you straight away: the first consonant of words changes according to what stands before it; prepositions are conjugated for person; and counting is done in twenties. About 107,000 people say they speak Breton well or well enough, according to the 2024 study.

A2 — Ar c'hemmadurioù

Ar c'hemmadur a zo kalon ar yezhadur brezhonek. N'eus ket un doare hepken da gemmañ: bez' ez eus meur a rummad — blotaat, c'hwezhañ, kaletaat, hag all. Ne rankit ket deskiñ ar rummadoù evel ur roll lizherennoù. Deskit anezho dre ar gerioù a zegas anezho: ma a c'hwezh, da a vlota, hag an ar-mañ a vlota un anv gwregel unan. Ur ger kemmet n'eo ket ur ger nevez: kador eo gador, ha ki eo ma c'hi ha da gi.

— Mutation is the heart of Breton grammar. There is not one single way of mutating: there are several series — lenition, spirantization, provection, and so on. You should not learn the series as a list of letters. Learn them through the words that trigger them: ma spirantises, da lenites, and the article lenites a feminine singular noun. A mutated word is not a new word: gador is kador, and ma c'hi and da gi are ki.

B1 — Lec'h ar verb

Lavaret e vez a-wechoù ez eo VSO ar brezhoneg, ha lavaret e vez a-wechoù all ez eo V2. Diouzh ARBRES n'eo mat hini ebet eus an daou evel diverradenn hep kaozeadenn. Er frazennoù pennañ e vez ar verb displeget en eil lec'h, ha n'eo ket ret d'an dra gentañ bezañ ar rener; er frazennoù isurzhiet e vez VSO alies. An dra gentañ er frazenn a zo un dibab, hag an dibab-se a zo ur ster gantañ. Setu perak eo talvoudus da welout Me a yelo d'ar pardon ha Mont a rin d'ar pardon an eil e-kichen egile.

— It is sometimes said that Breton is VSO, and sometimes said that it is V2. According to ARBRES neither works as a summary without discussion. In main clauses the finite verb stands in second position, and the first element does not have to be the subject; in subordinate clauses it is often VSO. The first thing in the sentence is a choice, and that choice carries meaning. That is why it is worth seeing Me a yelo d'ar pardon and Mont a rin d'ar pardon side by side.

B2 — Stroll ha unander

Un dra a ra ar brezhoneg ha ne ra ket ar saozneg: evit meur a dra naturel eo ar stumm boutin ur stroll, hag e vez graet an unander diwarnañ en ur ouzhpennañ -enn. Krampouezh a zo kalz, ha krampouezhenn a zo unan hepken. Del a zo an holl zelioù war ar wezenn, ha delienn a zo unan. Er saozneg emañ an dra d'an tu all: leaf a zo kentañ, ha leaves a zeu goude. Setu perak emañ an div stumm war ar roll gerioù: mard e lakaer unan hepken e vez kollet ar pezh a zo dedennus.

— Breton does something that English does not: for many natural kinds the ordinary form is a collective, and the single item is made from it by adding -enn. Krampouezh is many, and krampouezhenn is only one. Del is all the leaves on the tree, and delienn is one. In English it is the other way round: leaf comes first, and leaves comes after. That is why both forms are on the wordlist: if only one is kept, the interesting part is lost.

C1 — Ar reizhskrivadurioù

N'eus ket ur reizhskrivadur hepken evit ar brezhoneg. Ar peurunvan a zo an hini muiañ implijet er c'hantved-mañ hervez ARBRES, hag eñ eo a implijomp amañ. Met ez eus reoù all: Skolveurieg, etrerannyezhel, ha stummoù kozh a-raok ar reizhadurioù. Pa welit brezoneg e-lec'h brezhoneg, n'eo ket ur fazi: ur skrivadur eus ur reizhskrivadur all eo. Div reolenn eta: dibabit unan ha chomit e-barzh; ha na varnit ket ar re all.

— There is not just one orthography for Breton. Peurunvan is the most used in this century according to ARBRES, and it is the one we use here. But there are others: Skolveurieg, interdialectal, and older forms from before the reforms. When you see brezoneg instead of brezhoneg, it is not an error: it is a spelling from another orthography. Two rules, then: choose one and stay inside it; and do not pass judgement on the others.

C2 — Petra a chom da ober

Ne gaver ket amañ pep tra. N'eus ket taolenn glok eus ar verboù, rak ezhomm ez eus eus ur yezhadur don evit se, ha n'eo ket bet gallet lenn hini ebet e-pad al labour-mañ. N'eus ket ur daolenn IPA hepken, rak teir zaolenn disheñvel a gaver e PHOIBLE ha n'int ket unvan. N'eus ket ur gartenn eus ar rannyezhoù, rak an atlasoù a zo istorel hag e rankont bezañ meneget gant o deiziad. Ha n'eus bet lennet gant den ebet a gomz brezhoneg. Setu ar wirionez, ha gwelloc'h eo he lavarout eget he kuzhat.

— Not everything is found here. There is no complete verb table, because a deep reference grammar is needed for that, and it was not possible to read one during this work. There is no single IPA table, because three different tables are found in PHOIBLE and they do not agree. There is no dialect map, because the atlases are historical and have to be cited with their dates. And none of this has been read by anyone who speaks Breton. That is the truth, and it is better to say it than to hide it.

Glossary — every Breton word in this guide that is not on the deck

The readers and the recap above are built from the deck, but six graded texts and six grammatical summaries cannot be written from a wordlist alone: they need connectives, abstract nouns, and the metalanguage for talking about grammar in Breton. Every such word is listed here. The build script checks this list against every Breton paragraph in the file and fails loudly if anything is missing, so the claim is mechanical rather than decorative. Contracted forms (d'ar for da + ar, n'eo for ne + eo, er for e + ar) are elisions of deck words and are not repeated.

One caveat the reader deserves. Deck words were harvested from a source and can be checked. The words in this glossary were supplied by the author of the guide, and although they are ordinary Breton, they have not been verified against a dictionary entry one by one. That is part of why this guide carries a review flag.

Glossary of non-deck Breton used in this guide

13. Where this guide stops, honestly

Several things a complete Breton course would contain are not here, and listing them is more useful than papering over them.

• No full verbal paradigm. Person, number, tense, aspect and mood in Breton require a page-level reference grammar. Press (1986) is the standard work; its metadata is verified but its chapters were not accessible for this build, so no paradigm has been reproduced from memory.¹⁴
• No variety-neutral IPA chart, for the reasons set out in section 2 — the three PHOIBLE inventories do not agree and their union is not a language.⁷
• No systematic dialect map. The ALBB and NALBB exist and are the right sources; they are historical field records requiring date, survey point and elicitation question to be quoted with any form.¹³
• No community review. Nothing here has been checked by a Breton speaker or a Breton-language institution.

14. Practice

15. Questions people actually ask

16. Where to go next

• Breton vocabulary — the full 777-term deck, with SRS trainerA1–C1 — Peurunvan spelling, browsable as a table, with CSV / TSV / Anki / .apkg downloads. Identical to the table on this page.
• Desketa — the Office public de la langue bretonne's free courseA0–A1 — Launched June 2024. Covers A0–A1, with audio recorded by experienced speakers. The best institutional starting point.
• ARBRES — the CNRS research grammar of BretonC1–C2 — Edited by Mélanie Jouitteau at the IKER research unit. Technical, source-traced, and the right authority for any grammatical question. Cite individual topic pages.
• UD Breton-KEB — the annotated dependency treebankC1–C2 — 884 sentences, 9,725 tokens, CC BY-SA 4.0. Search attested structures rather than guessing at them.
• PHOIBLE — the three Breton phoneme inventoriesReference — SPA 157 (42 segments), UPSID 260 (45) and Bothoa EA 2584 (66). Compare them; do not merge them.
• Fest-noz — UNESCO Intangible Cultural HeritageAll levels — Inscribed 2012. The nomination file is the best short description of the practice and its scale.
• Brezhoweb — television entirely in BretonB1–C2 — The first web television broadcasting exclusively in Breton. Comprehensible input at real speed.
• Glottolog — Breton (bret1244)Reference — Classification and reference list. Note the internally inconsistent vitality record discussed in section 1.