Name   Breton     Total Speakers   500,000 (1989)     Usage by Country   Officially Recognized Language: Official recognition in France as a regional language     Background   It belongs to the  Indo-European family, Celtic group, Brythonic subgroup and is spoken by nearly 500,000 people, chiefly in Brittany (France), the peninsula of westernmost France lying between the Channel and the Bay of Biscay. It is the only Celtic language spoken on the European continent, having been brought from Cornwall and South Wales in the 5th and 6th centuries by Britons fleeing from Saxon invaders. The main varieties are Cornouaillais, Léonard, Trégorrois and Vanntais. Some claim to be monolingual in Breton. As all other  Celtic languages (e.g. Cornish, Welsh, Irish), a characteristic distinguishing it from other Indo-European linguistic groups is the loss of the original Indo-European sound p. Its rules of pronunciation are extremely complicated, as the spelling generally does not correspond to the pronunciation. Like all modern Celtic languages it uses the Latin script.