Piedmontese language

Piedmontese (piemontèis or lenga piemontèisa) is a Romance language spoken by over 1 million people in Piedmont, northwest Italy. It is geographically and linguistically included in the Northern Italian group (with Lombard, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Ligurian, and Venetian). It is part of the wider western group of Romance languages, including French, Occitan, and Catalan.

Many European and North American linguists (e.g. Einar Haugen, Gianrenzo P. Clivio, Hans Göbl, Helmut Lüdtke, George Bossong, Klaus Bochmann, Karl Gebhardt, and Guiu Sobiela Caanitz) acknowledge Piedmontese as an independent language, though in Italy it is often still considered a dialect;^[3] on the other hand, in the Italian context, dialetto 'dialect' refers to an indigenous language, not to a variety of Italian.^[4] Today it has a certain official status recognized by the Piedmont regional government, but not by the national government.^[3]

Piedmontese was the first language of emigrants who, in the period from 1850 to 1950, left Piedmont for countries such as France, Brazil, the United States, Argentina, and Uruguay.

History

The first documents in the Piedmontese language were written in the 12th century, the sermones subalpini, when it was extremely close to Occitan. Literary Piedmontese developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it did not gain literary esteem comparable to that of French or Italian, other languages used in Piedmont. Nevertheless, literature in Piedmontese has never ceased to be produced: it includes poetry, theatre pieces, novels, and scientific work.^[5]

Current status

In 2004, Piedmontese was recognised as Piedmont's regional language by the regional parliament,^[6][7][8] although the Italian government has not yet recognised it as such. In theory it is now supposed to be taught to children in school,^[9] but this is happening only to a limited extent.

The last decade has seen the publication of learning materials for schoolchildren, as well as general-public magazines. Courses for people already outside the education system have also been developed. In spite of these advances, the current state of Piedmontese is quite grave, as over the last 150 years the number of people with a written active knowledge of the language has shrunk to about 2% of native speakers, according to a recent survey.^[10] On the other hand, the same survey showed Piedmontese is still spoken by over half the population, alongside Italian. Authoritative sources confirm this result, putting the figure between 2 million (Assimil,^[11] IRES Piemonte^[12]) and 3 million speakers (Ethnologue^[13]) out of a population of 4.2 million people. Efforts to make it one of the official languages of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics were unsuccessful.

Alphabet

Piedmontese is written with a modified Latin alphabet. The letters, along with their IPA equivalent are shown in the table below.

Certain digraphs are used to regularly represent specific sounds as shown below.

All other combinations of letters are pronounced as written. Grave accent marks break diphthongs, so ua and uà are /wa/, but ùa is pronounced separately, /ˈya/.

Characteristics

Piedmontese linguistic map

Some of the characteristics of the Piedmontese language are:

1. The presence of clitic so-called verbal pronouns for subjects, which give a Piedmontese verbal complex the following form: (subject) + verbal pronoun + verb, as in (mi) i von 'I go'. Verbal pronouns are absent only in the imperative form and in the Piedmontese interrogative form.
2. The bound form of verbal pronouns, which can be connected to dative and locative particles (a-i é 'there is', i-j diso 'I say to him').
3. The interrogative form, which adds an enclitic interrogative particle at the end of the verbal form (Veus-to…? 'Do you want to…?'])
4. The absence of ordinal numerals higher than 'sixth', so that 'seventh' is col che a fà set 'the one which makes seven'.
5. The existence of three affirmative interjections (that is, three ways to say yes): si, sè (from Latin sic est, as in Italian); é (from Latin est, as in Portuguese); òj (from Latin hoc est, as in Occitan, or maybe hoc illud, as in Franco-Provençal, French and Old Catalan and Occitan).
6. The absence of the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (like the sh in English sheep), for which an alveolar S sound (as in English sun) is usually substituted.
7. The existence of an S-C combination pronounced [stʃ].
8. The existence of a velar nasal [ŋ] (like the ng in English going), which usually precedes a vowel, as in lun-a 'moon'.
9. The existence of the third Piedmontese vowel Ë, which is very short (close to the vowel in English sir).
10. The absence of the phonological contrast that exists in Italian between short (single) and long (double) consonants, for example, Italian fata 'fairy' and fatta 'done (F)'.
11. The existence of a prosthetic Ë sound when consonantal clusters arise that are not permitted by the phonological system. So 'seven stars' is pronounced set ëstèile (cf. stèile 'stars').

Piedmontese has a number of varieties that may vary from its basic koiné to quite a large extent. Variation includes not only departures from the literary grammar, but also a wide variety in dictionary entries, as different regions maintain words of Frankish or Lombard origin, as well as differences in native Romance terminology. Words imported from various languages are also present, while more recent imports tend to come from France and from Italian.

A variety of Piedmontese was Judeo-Piedmontese, a dialect spoken by the Piedmontese Jews until the Second World War.

Lexical comparison with other Romance languages and English

References

Further reading

• Zallio, A. G. (1927). "The Piedmontese Dialects in the United States". American Speech 2 (12): 501–4. doi:10.2307/452803. JSTOR 452803. 

External links

Piedmontese edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• Piedmontese language at DMOZ
• Cultural Association "Nòste Rèis": features online Piedmontese courses for Italian, French, English, and Spanish speakers with drills and tests
• Piemunteis.it - Online resources about piedmontese language: poems, studies, audio, free books
• Piemontese basic lexicon (several dialects) at the Global Lexicostatistical Database

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