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This article was born out of two separate approaches carried out independently of one another. The first dealt with genetic demography and the second with variational linguistics, aiming to study the population and language of Brittany from a certain perspective. In their recent study of the genetic history of France, Saint Pierre et al. show that Brittany “is substantially closer to the population from north-west Europe than to the north of France, in spite of both being equally geographically close” (2020: 863). They propose that the Bretons’ earliest ancestors could be the descendants of early Neolithic pastoralist nomads from the Steppes (SP) who would have arrived in Brittany (i.e. the ‘NW cluster’) via north-western Europe. The second hypothesis would support the idea of a more recent migration from northern Europe with high SP proportion, i.e., Celtic and/or Anglo-Saxon. Our initial hypothesis is that the convergences in linguistics and genetics may be explained by a unique historical event, namely, the Brittonic settlement of the Armorican peninsula from the 4th through at least the 7th centuries and perhaps as late as the 8th century. The application of linguistic distance measurements in the study of vernacular Breton varieties by means of a dialectometric analysis made it possible to observe clear correspondences between levels of linguistic similarity and the distribution of the genetic pools linked to cystic fibrosis. The convergence of our collective findings is most clearly manifested in the radical opposition of the north-western and the south-eastern zones of Breton-speaking Brittany in terms of the linguistic and genetic data. In our view, the scientific approach inherent to genetic and dialectometric research and the concordance of these data appear to not only reinforce many of the hypotheses advanced previously but to open new avenues for future research.

Local variation in Breton is a well known feature but aggregate analyses on this topic are still rare. A dialectometric approach, i.e. a computational method for comparing data from the different locations of a linguistic atlas, applied to the Nouvel Atlas Linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne (Le Dû 2001) but restrained to a small area at the center of the Lower-Brittany has identified a few phenomena involved in linguistic variation and has quantified their importance. We discuss these results in the light of the frequency of these facts for each site. This approach is an opportunity to associate basic corpus approach to linguistic geography for a better understanding of linguistic variation.

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