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Piedmontese language

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Piedmontese (in Piedmontese: Piemontèis) is a Romance language spoken by over 2 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, like French, Occitan and Catalan.

Many European & American/Canadian linguists (e. g. Einar Haugen, Gianrenzo P. Clivio, Hans Göbl, Helmut Lüdtke, George Bossong, Klaus Bochmann, Karl Gebhardt, Guiu Sobiela Caanitz) acknowledge Piedmontese as an independent language, though in Italy it is often still considered an Italian dialect. Today it is not an official language.

Piedmontese was the first language of the emigrants who left Piedmont, in the period 1850-1950, for countries like France, Argentina and Uruguay.

Origins

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. It did not gain literary esteem comparable to that of French and 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.

Characteristics

Some of the most relevant characteristics of the Piedmontese language are:

  1. The presence of verbal pronouns, which give a Piedmontese phrase 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 agglutinating 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, starting from the seventh place on (so that seventh will be Col che a fà set [The one which makes seven]).
  5. The co-presence of three affirmative interjections (that is, three ways to say yes): Si, sè (from the Latin form sic est, as in Italian); É (from the Latin form est, as in Brazilian Portuguese); Òj (from the Latin form hoc est as in Occitan, or maybe illud est, as in Franco-Provençal and French).
  6. The absence of the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in sheep), for which an alveolar S sound (as in sun) is usually substituted.
  7. The presence of a S-C combination (pronounced as you would in this-church).
  8. The presence of a velar nasal N-sound (pronounced as the gerundive termination in going), which usually precedes a vowel, as in lun-a [moon].
  9. The presence of the third piedmontese vowel Ë, which is read as a very short sound (somehow close to the half-mute sound in sir).
  10. The absence of the phonological alternation that exists in Italian between short (single) and long (double) consonants, for example, it. fata [fairy] and fatta [done].
  11. The existence of a prosthetic Ë sound, that is interposed when two consonantal sounds collide and are hard to pronounce. So stèila [star] becomes set ëstèile [seven stars].

Piedmontese has a number of dialects that may vary from its basic koiné to quite a large extent. Variations include not only departures from the literary grammar, but also a wide variety in dictionary entries, as different regions maintain words of Frankish or Longobard origin. Words imported from various languages, including the North African languages, are also present, while more recent imports tend to come from France.

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

Current status

As elsewhere in Italy, Italian dominates everyday communication and is spoken to a far greater extent by the population than Piedmontese. Usage of the language has been discouraged both by the Kingdom of Italy and by the Italian Republic, officially (and ironically) to prevent discrimination against migrants from other regions of Italy, who moved to Turin in particular, in large numbers.

In 2004, Piedmontese was recognised as Piedmont's regional language by the regional parliament, although the Italian government does not recognise it. In theory it is now supposed to be taught to children in school, but this is happening only in a limited way.

The last decade has seen the publication of learning material for schoolchildren, as well as general-public magazines. Courses for people already outside the education system have also been catching up. 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 knowledge of the language has shrunk to about 2% of native speakers, according to a recent survey. 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, IRES Piemonte) and 3 million speakers (Ethnologue) for a population of 4.2 million people. Efforts to make it one of the official languages of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics were unsuccessful.

Links and References

External links



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