French jacobinism has caused a new controversy in Brittany, one of the stateless nations within France. Yves Amiard, director of La Poste (France's Postal Service) in West Brittany, asked users last week to drop Breton and write down postal addresses only in French from now on. Amiard also reccomended local councils to use French street names. Acording to him, apostrophes of the Breton language "disrupt" the new system of optical reading set up by La Poste. This comes as an unprecedented statement to say the least, considering French does make use of apostrophes, too.

Le Télégramme Breton newspaper quoted Amiard as saying that it is not a stand against the Breton language, but a call to avoid people's complaints if their letters don't reach destination due to technical problems with the reading system. "Are they taking us for mentally retarded?", replied Pêr Le Roux, president of Bretons du Monde, an organization of Breton diaspora. "Computers from all over the world are able to operate with characters of all European languages".

Amiard's nonsense has made Breton institutions to intervene. Jean-Yves Le Drian, president of the Region of Brittany has sent a letter to the president of La Poste, Jean-Paul Bailly, in which he demands that "post with Breton placenames receive the same tretment as the rest". President of the Office for the Breton Language, Lena Louarn, has asked Amiard whether the next measure will be to force people to change their surnames into French. Furthermore, president of the Cultural Council of Brittany, Patrick Malrieu, has reminded him that "machines can adapt to all languages".

In addition to what is seen as an aggression to the Breton language, the fact that Amiard has made such declarations a few months after the French Constitution recognizes for the first time all languages spoken in the territory of the Republic, has been one of the most hurtful aspects of the controversy. In the Breton language movement's point of view, the regional director's stance on language issues infringes the spirit of the article recently included in the French Magna Carta, as it establishes that languages such as Breton "are part of France's heritage".

Apostrophes between c and h
The difference between apostrophe in Breton and French is that the Celtic language requires such character within the combination of the c'h group, which represents a fricative velar sound like consonant j in Castilian/Spanish. Thus, for example, it can be found in surnames such as Guivarc'h or Wrac'h. Bretons argue that the lack of apostrophe in postal addresses would add more confusion to the "problem", because the same surname could then be written in two different ways. Strangely enough, Amiard has not pronounced on letter ñ, a character which, unlike the apostrophe, is not found in French.

Further information:

• Le Télégramme: La Poste. Une histoire d'apostrophes
• Ar Post Breizh: Some recommendations on writing addresses in Breton language
  

See the dossier Peoples and nations today: Brittany for further information.