Saving Breton in France: 'The best way to help it is to learn it'

William McMillan, a 27-year-old doctoral student in Brest, does more than serve beer to customers at the bar where he works. He is contributing to a decades-long fight for the survival of a rare Celtic language.

Mr McMillan often speaks with customers in Breton, a regional language from Brittany that UNESCO has classified as "severely endangered."

Originally from Minnesota, Mr McMillan moved to France a few years ago for his master's degree at Université Rennes 2. This American student, passionate about France – and specifically Brittany – now spends much of his daily routine immersed in the rhythmic cadence of Breton.

"I'm using Breton every single day with my job," Mr McMillan told The Connexion. "And I am using it with a lot of young people."

His engagement with the language – which, as of 2024, only 107,000 of Brittany's 3.3 million people spoke – goes far beyond the bar. Having completed his master's in language sciences, Mr McMillan will continue studying Breton as a doctoral candidate, this time taking a national approach that compares Brittany to the Basque Country, Catalonia and Corsica. He also creates social media content in Breton, and his account has amassed more than 4,000 followers and almost 40,000 views on certain reels.

His efforts come at a critical time for Breton's survival. Between 2018 and 2024, the language lost half of its speakers, going from 214,000 to 107,000, according to a study commissioned by the Brittany region.

That was mainly due to demographic shifts in a language spoken chiefly by older people, said Ronan Calvez, lecturer and researcher at the Centre for Breton and Celtic Research at the University of Western Brittany. The study found that the average age of Breton speakers dropped from 70 in 2018 to 58.5 in 2024, meaning that many speakers had died.

However, at the start of the 2025 school year, almost 20,000 pupils were enrolled in French-Breton bilingual programmes in more than 700 schools. In general, there has been a steady increase in the number of pupils enrolled in these programmes. The French state and Brittany region agreed in 2022 to a goal of 30,000 bilingual French-Breton pupils by 2027.

This is supported by various educational initiatives. For example, the non-profit network Diwan teaches children via total language immersion in Breton. The association Div Yezh supports bilingual French-Breton classes within the public school system.

However, education initiatives alone are not enough to encourage more speakers, despite it being "very easy" to learn the language today, Mr Calvez said.

"People are often supportive of Breton, but that doesn't mean they are going to learn it," he said.

For Mr McMillan, the key to motivating young people to learn Breton came from a group of middle school students he was working with. They pointed out that they could not watch a "get ready with me" (a popular short-form content format) or play video games in Breton.

"From there I decided I can do vlogs or things about events with my Breton," he said.

What started as a few reels on Instagram eventually had real-world impacts. He said people who previously spoke no Breton now come to the bar and greet him in the language after watching his content. He even heard from one viewer that they signed up for a 35-hour-a-week Breton learning programme because of his videos.

"It is really heartwarming because it does show that people care about this language, and that the language will not die out," he said.

Mr McMillan's interest in Brittany started many years earlier, when he would watch Ligue 1 as a young teenager trying to improve his French. He fell in love with the football club Stade Rennais, and from there started researching more about Brittany and Breton. Today, Breton is one of the five languages he speaks, alongside English, French, Catalan and Spanish.

Mr Calvez said it is rare, but not unheard of, for foreigners to take an interest in Breton. For example, he knows of a Korean master's student at his university who learned Breton online and is teaching the language in Nantes.

After a long history of oppression by the French government – Breton was banned in schools until 1951 – Mr McMillan said he hopes the language can follow the example of other endangered Celtic languages such as Welsh and Irish, by building broader support and inspiring an equally popular movement.

He also said Breton occupies a unique status compared to other marginalised languages: it is less politicised than Catalan, and is the only Celtic language on the European continent, yet it is separated from its fellow Celtic languages because the imposed language was not English. As a promoter of a relatively isolated endangered language, the stakes, then, for Mr McMillan look a little different.

"If you're learning a marginalised language, you also need to know that you are becoming a knowledge base," he said.

However, that does not mean contributing to the language protection movement is always complicated.

"The best way to help it is to learn it," Mr McMillan said.