Ar geriaoueg: The Use of Lenition by Speakers of Modern Standard Breton

Acquiring a new language is known to pose challenges, especially when it differs greatly from the speakers’ mother tongue. For learners of Modern Celtic languages, mutations can present particular challenges, as these are found in neither English or French. The way in which mutations are used by L2 speakers may thus be regarded as a metric of language skill. The use of mixed mutations among young speakers of Breton has been studied extensively by Kennard (Kennard and Lahiri 2017). But lenition, the most common mutation in Breton, has hitherto been overlooked in modern scholarship. This paper addresses this issue through exploring the standard uses, non-standard uses, and absence of lenition in a study conducted among a selection of fluent Modern Breton speakers. The data analysed here shows that native traditional speakers used lenition twice as often as any other speaker, and that some speakers employed various grammatical strategies in order to avoid using lenition in certain contexts. Different hypotheses regarding the reasons for this are proposed.