Family in Brittany win legal battle to overturn a ban on giving their son a Breton name

Luke James

A family in Brittany have won a legal battle to overturn a ban on their decision to give their son a Breton name.

Mélissa Yana and Étienne Pichancourt named their son Fañch, which is the Breton equivalent of the name Francis or Ffransis.

When they went to register his birth in June 2023, their choice of name was rejected on the grounds that the accent over the letter N, known as a tilde, does not exist in the French language.

Constitution

A letter sent to Fañch’s parents by the French ministry of justice stated that French is the only language of public administration according to the constitution.

“I cannot, legally, do anything other than proceed with the administrative rectification of the error in the spelling of the first name of your child,” concluded the public attorney.

However, a court in Lorient today ruled that the now 20 month year old Fañch can keep his Breton name.

The ruling “recognised that the public attorney had followed an unsuitable procedural route” rather than the “focusing the debate on the real issue, which is the child’s best interests”, said the family’s lawyer, Iannis Alvarez.

The lawyer said he hoped the case would set a precedent for other Breton families by rendering obsolete the legal arguments in the letter received by Fañch’s parents.

In 2019, France’s highest court ruled in favour of parents from Rennes who had been told they could not use the name by local authorities, who claimed authorising the use of the accent would be tantamount to “breaking the will of the state to maintain the unity of the country and equality without distinction of origin.”

‘Social violence’

But that didn’t stop another couple being ordered to appear in court last year after giving their child the Breton name, a decision described as an “unforgivable social violence” by the President of Brittany, Loïg Chesnais-Girard.

The French government has previously also banned the use of the Breton letter (Ꝃ), which represented the sound “Ker”, which, in old Breton as in Welsh means Caer, as was used in both the names of places and people.

France’s national assembly passed a law on regional languages in 2021, which included the right to use accents like the ‘tildé’ in the name Fañch.

But that part of the legislation was later struck down by the constitutional court, along with provisions for immersive education in France’s minority languages.