Alguerese

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Alguerese or Algherese is the variant of the Catalan language spoken in the city of Alghero, in the northwest of Sardinia. Catalan invaders repopulated the town after expelling the indigenous Sardinian population in 1372, following several revolts. Catalan was replaced as the official language by Spanish in the 17th century, then by Italian. According to recent linguistic research, 22.'% of the population are first language speakers and above 90% have some knowledge of the language.^{[citation needed]}

The Algherese dialect is classified in the Eastern Catalan block, but it has many differences from Central Catalan. Some of the most obvious:

• Coalescing of unstressed vowels /a/, /ɛ/ and /e/ to [a] (unlike the rest of Eastern Catalan that uses [ə]).
• Alguerese preserves /v/ as a distinct phoneme from /b/, like Balearic and most of Valencian.
• Mutation of intervocalic /d/ or /l/ to [r]; e.g. 'Barceloneta' (little Barcelona): eastern standard [bərsəluˈnɛtə], Algherese [balsaruˈnɛta]; e.g. 'vila' (town) and 'vida' (life) are homophones in Algherese ['vira].
• Mutation of syllable final /r/ to lateral [l], and the possible resulting group [l]+consonant is still simplified to [l]; e.g. 'forn' (furnace): standard [ˈforn], Algherese [ˈfol].

• Depalatalisation of syllable final sonorants: lateral /ʎ/ to [l], nasal /ɲ/ to [n]; e.g 'any' (year): standard [ˈaɲ], Algherese [ˈan].
• Simple Past Perfect has been replaced by Present Perfect (present of HABERE + past participle), possibly due to Italian influence.
• Imperfect Past preserves etymological -V- in all the conjugations: 1st -ava, 2nd -iva, 3rd -iva (unlike modern eastern and western standard Catalan with has 1st -ava, 2nd -ia, 3rd -ia) (a feature shared with Ribagorçan Catalan)
• Large-scale lexical borrowing and calques from Sardinian, Spanish, and Italian.

[edit] Bibliography

• Josep Sanna: Diccionari català de l'Alguer. 1988; ISBN 84-7129-391-9 [1]
• Linguistic data from Generalitat de Catalunya