(1) Leon in Finistere; (2)
Cornouailles in Finistere, the Cotes-du-Nord and a part of Morbihan;
(3) Treguier in the Cotes-du-Nord and Finistere; (4) Vannes in
Morbihan and a portion of the Cotes-du-Nord. The first three resemble
one another fairly closely, but the speech of Vannes has gone its own
way entirely. The dialect of Leon is regarded as the literary dialect,
thanks to Legonidec.

The modern language is unfortunately saturated with words borrowed
from French which form at least a quarter of the whole vocabulary. The
living speech is further characterized by innumerable cases of
consonantal metathesis and by parasitic nasalization. Loth gives
specimens of the most important varieties of Breton in his
_Chrestomathie bretonne_, pp. 363-380, but here we must confine
ourselves to pointing out the two most salient differences between the
speech of Vannes and the rest of Brittany. In Vannes the stress has
not been shifted from the final syllable. In Haute-Cornouailles and
Goelo there is a tendency to withdraw the stress on to the
antepenultimate, whilst in Treguier certain enclitics attract the
accent to the final. s, z of the other dialects representing Welsh th
become h in Vannes, e.g. W. _caeth_, Br. _keaz, kez_, "poor,
miserable," Vannes _keah, keh_. This phenomenon occurs sporadically in
other dialects. It may also be mentioned that Prim. Celt, non-initial
d, W. dd, is retained as z in Leon but disappears when final or
standing between vowels in the other dialects, e.g. O. Br. _fid_, W.
_ffydd_, "faith," Leon _feiz_, in Cornouailles, Treguier and Vannes,
_fe_. It is doubtful if the most serious differences between the
dialects are older than the 16th century.

In the middle ages the language of the Breton aristocracy was French.
Upper Brittany was politically more important than the western
portion. The consequence was that no patronage was extended to the
vernacular, and Breton sank to the level of a patois with no unity for
literary purposes. But a new era dawned with the beginning of the 19th
century. The national consciousness was awakened at the time of the
Revolution, when the Bretons became aware of the difference between
themselves and their French neighbours. It may be mentioned by the way
that the Breton language was regarded with suspicion by the leaders of
the First Republic and attempts were made to suppress it. A Breton
name