Breton grammar
grammar of the Breton language
Breton is a Brittonic Celtic language in the Indo-European family, and its grammar has many traits in common with these languages. Like most Indo-European languages it has grammatical gender, grammatical number, articles and inflections and, like the other Celtic languages, Breton has mutations. In addition to the singular–plural system, it also has a singulative–collective system, similar to Welsh. Unlike the other Brittonic languages, Breton has both a definite and indefinite article, whereas Welsh and Cornish lack an indefinite article and unlike the other extant Celtic languages, Breton has been influenced by French.
Nouns
Gender
Like in most other Indo-European languages, Breton nouns belong to distinct grammatical genders/noun classes: masculine (gourel) and feminine (gwregel). The neuter (nepreizh), which existed in Breton's ancestor, Brittonic, survives in a few words, such as tra (thing), which takes and causes the mutations of a feminine noun but in all other grammatical respects behaves as if it were masculine.
The gender of a noun is hard to predict, and for some words can even vary from dialect to dialect. However, certain semantic groups of word tend to belong to a particular gender. For example, names of countries and cities often are feminine, whereas most divisions of time are masculine. Some suffixes denote the same gender:
Masculine suffixes include: -ach, -adur, -aj, -er, -lec'h, -our, -ti, -va.
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