Journalist and historian, Rozenn Milin remembers the day she felt Breton.
“I am Breton. This has always been obvious since I was raised in a family of modest Léonard farmers, at the very end of North Finistère, and the daily language of my parents and my grandfather who lived with us was Breton.
For them, French was a language learned during the few years spent at school, and they only used it in a few specific circumstances, when they were speaking to children or to non-Brittophone outsiders: shopkeepers, representatives, veterinarians, etc. All of this seemed natural to me at the time, in the order of things, and I didn’t really ask myself any questions on the subject.
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Until one day, when I was about 8 years old, to relieve my boredom, I explored some old stuff in the attic of the house and… I found a small illustrated book on the history of Brittany. How had it gotten there, when I had never seen my parents read anything other than the newspaper? Mystery. It was probably a school reward that my father or my aunt had received as a child.
In any case, quick to devour all the books that fell into my hands, I immersed myself in reading this little booklet that seemed extraordinary to me. It told me the history of my country, the one that no one taught me at school, with all these chivalrous characters whose existence I had not known until then, and who bore names promising incredible adventures: Nominoë, Erispoë, Conan Mériadec, Alain Barbetorte…
From then on, everything changed in my life. I started by making the connection between the history of Brittany and the Breton language. Then the mysterious initials FLB (Front de libération de la Bretagne) appeared everywhere on the walls of the water towers and public buildings in my area, generating so many questions in the mind of the little girl that I was.
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And finally, Alan Stivell came to the Olympia, gradually allowing us to free ourselves from the image of rednecks that stuck to our skin, because being Breton at the time was not a very desirable identity! I then decided that the language of my parents, my grandparents, and many generations before them, perhaps even the language of these characters that I had discovered in a history book that had come out of the dust of an attic, would also be mine. And since then I have never stopped speaking it.
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