The three ancient Armorican kingdoms or states, Domnonée, Cornouaille, and the Bro-Waroch, had their own distinct dialects.
There is and was a considerable variation in the speech throughout Brittany, though it is and was all Breton. The dialects of Vannes, Quimper, and Tréguier are the least known outside their own immediate neighbourhood; the Léonais of St. Pol de Léon is the regular and common tongue of all Bas Bretons.
The old-time limits of the Breton tongue are wavering to-day, and from time to time have drawn appreciably toward the west, so that the boundary-line, which once ran from the mouth of the Loire to Mont St. Michel, now starts at the mouth of the Vilaine, and finishes at a point on the northern coast, a little to the westward of St. Brieuc.
It was during the decadence of the Breton tongue--known to philologists as the third period--that the monk Abelard cried out: "The Breton tongue makes me blush with shame."
The nearer one comes to Finistère, the less liable he is to meet the French tongue unadulterated. The numbers knowing the Breton tongue alone more than equal those who know French and Breton, leaving those who know French alone vastly in the minority. The figures seem astonishing to one who does not know the country, but they are unassailable, nevertheless.
Here in this department at least, and to a lesser degree in the Côtes du Nord and the Morbihan provinces, one is likely enough to hear lisped out, as if it were the effort of an Englishman: "_Je na sais pas ce que vous dîtes_," or "_Je n'entend rien_." No great hardship or inconvenience is inflicted upon one by all this, but now and again one wishes he were a Welshman, for the only foreigners who can understand the lingo are Taffy's fellow country-men.
Breton legend is as weird and varied as that of any land. It is astonishingly convincing, too, from the story of King Grollo and his wicked daughter, who came from the Britain across the seas, the Bluebeard legend, the Arthurian legend, which Bretons claim as their own, as do Britons, to those less incredible tales of the Corsairs of St. Malo and the exploits of Duguesclin and Surcouf.
There is a quaint Breton saying referring to little worries, which runs thus: "When the wind blows up from the sea, I turn my barrel to the north; when it blows down from the hills, I turn my barrel to the south." "And when it blows all four ways at once?" "Why, then I crawl under the barrel."