Corsican language
Corsican is a Romance language which consists of a continuum of Tuscan dialects spoken on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, a territory of France, and in the northern regions of the island of Sardinia, an autonomous region of Italy. It is closely related to, and mutually intelligible with, Standard Italian which is based on its sister Florentine dialect.
Corsica is situated approximately 123.9 km off the western coast of Tuscany; and with historical connections, the Corsican language is considered a part of Tuscan varieties, from that part of the Italian peninsula, and thus is closely related to Florentine-based standard Italian.
Under the long-standing influence of Tuscany's Pisa, and the historic Republic of Genoa, over Corsica, the Corsican language once filled the role of a vernacular, with Italian functioning as the island's official language until France acquired the island from the Republic of Genoa ; by 1859, French had replaced Italian as Corsica's first language so much so that, by the time of the Liberation of France, nearly every islander had at least a working-knowledge of French. The 20th century saw a vast language shift, with the islanders adapting and changing their communications to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican-speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65% of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a minority of around 10% used Corsican as a first language.
Classification
Corsican is classed as a regional language under French law. It is almost universally agreed that Corsican is typologically and traditionally Italo-Romance, but its specific position therein is more controversial. Some scholars argue that Corsican belongs to the Centro-Southern Italian dialects, while others are of the opinion that it is closely related to, or as part of, Italy's Tuscan dialect varieties. Italian and the dialects of Corsican are in fact very mutually intelligible. Southern Corsican, in spite of the geographical proximity, has as its closest linguistic neighbour not Sardinian, but rather the Extreme Southern Italian dialects like Siculo-Calabrian. It has been theorised, on the other hand, that a Sardinian variety, or a variety very similar to Sardo-Romance, might have been originally spoken in Corsica prior to the island's Tuscanisation under Pisan and Genoese rule.The matter is controversial in light of the historical, cultural and particularly strong linguistic bonds that Corsica had traditionally formed with the Italian Mainland from the Middle Ages until the 19th century: in contrast to the neighbouring Sardinia, Corsica's installment into a diglossic system with Italian as the island's prestige language ran so deep that both Corsican and Italian might be even, and in fact were, perceived as two sociolinguistic levels of a single language. Corsican and Italian traditionally existed on a spectrum, and the dividing lines between them were blurred enough that the locals needed little else but a change of register to communicate in an official setting. "Tuscanising" their tongue, or as the Corsican elites would have once said, parlà in crusca, allowed for a practice not of code-switching, but rather of code-mixing which is quite typical of the Mainland Italian dialects. Italian was perceived as different from Corsican, but not as much as the differences between the two main isoglosses of Northern and Southern Corsican, as spoken by their respective native speakers. When Pasquale Paoli found himself exiled in London, he replied to Samuel Johnson's query on the peculiar existence of a "rustic language" very different from Italian that such a language existed only in Sardinia; in fact, the existence of Corsican as the island's native vernacular did not take anything away from Paoli's claims that Corsica's official language was Italian.
Today's Corsican is the result of these historical vicissitudes, which have morphed the language to an idiom that bears a strong resemblance to the medieval Tuscan once spoken at the time of Dante and Boccaccio, and still existing in peripheral Tuscany. The correspondence of modern Corsican to ancient Tuscan can be seen from almost any aspect of the language, ranging from the phonetics, morphology, lexicon to the syntax. One of the characteristics of standard Italian is the retention of the -re infinitive ending, as in Latin mittere "send"; such infinitival ending is lost in Tuscan as well as Corsican, resulting in the outcome mette / metta, "to put". Whereas the relative pronoun in Italian for "who" is chi and "what" is che/'' cosa, it is an uninflected chì in Corsican. The only unifying, as well as distinctive, feature which separates the Corsican dialects from the mainland Tuscan ones, with the exception of Amiatino, Pitiglianese, and Capraiese, is the retention of word-final o''-u. For example, the Italian demonstrative pronouns questo "this" and quello "that" become in Corsican questu or quistu and quellu or quiddu: this feature was also typical of the early Italian texts during the Middle Ages.
Even after the acquisition of Corsica by Louis XV, Italian continued to be the island's language of education, literature, religion and local affairs. The affluent youth still went to Italy to pursue higher studies. Local civil registers continued to be written in Italian until 1855; it was on 9 May 1859, that Italian was replaced by French as the island's official language, although the latter would start to take root among the islanders from 1882 onwards, through the Jules Ferry laws aimed at spreading literacy across the French provinces. Even so, a specifically homegrown Corsican literature in Corsica only developed belatedly and, in its earliest phase, there were no autonomous cultural instances; Corsican writers, such as Salvatore Viale, even prided themselves on their affiliation to the broader Italian sphere, considering Corsican "one of the lowest, impure dialects of Italy".
It was the Italian Fascist aggressive claims to the island in the 20th century, followed by their invasion, that provoked a popular backlash, estranging the native islanders from standard Italian and, if anything, only accelerated their shifting to the French even further. By the Liberation of France, any previously existing link between the two linguistic varieties and with Italy altogether had been severed; any promotion of Corsican, which had been politicized by the local collaborators with the regime, would be met with popular criticism and even suspicion of potentially harboring irredentist sentiments. From then on, Corsican would grow independently of Italian to become, later in the 1970s, a centerpiece of the Riacquistu movement for the rediscovery of Corsican culture. Nationalist calls for Corsican to be put on the same footing as French led the French National Assembly, in 1974, to extend the 1951 Deixonne Law, which initially recognized only a few languages, to including Corsican as well, among others, not as a dialect of Italian, but as one of France's full-fledged regional languages.
Origins
The common relationship between Corsica and central Italy can be traced from as far back as the Etruscans, who asserted their presence on the island in as early as 500 BC. In 40 AD, the natives of Corsica reportedly did not speak Latin. The Roman exile, Seneca the Younger, reported that both coast and interior were occupied by natives whose language he was not able to understand. More specifically, Seneca claimed that the island's population was the result of the stratification of different ethnic groups, such as the Greeks, the Ligures and the Iberians, whose language had long since stopped being recognizable among the population due to the intermixing of the other two groups. The occupation of the island by the Vandals around the year 469 marked the end of authoritative influence by Latin speakers. If the natives of that time spoke Latin, they must have acquired it during the late empire.Modern Corsican has been influenced by the languages of the major powers taking an interest in Corsican affairs; earlier by those of the medieval Italian powers, such as the Papal States, the Republic of Pisa and the Republic of Genoa, and finally by France which, since 1859, has promulgated the official Parisian French. The term "gallicised Corsican" refers to the evolution of Corsican starting from about the year 1950, whereas "distanciated Corsican" refers to an idealized variety of Corsican following linguistic purism, by means of removing any French-derived elements.
Dialects
Corsica
The two most widely spoken forms of the Corsican language are the groups spoken in the Bastia and Corte area, and the groups spoken around Sartène and Porto-Vecchio. The dialect of Ajaccio has been described as in transition. The dialects spoken at Calvi and Bonifacio are dialects of the Ligurian language.This division along the Girolata-Porto Vecchio line was due to the massive immigration from Tuscany which took place in Corsica during the lower Middle Ages: as a result, the northern Corsican dialects became very close to a central Italian dialect like Tuscan, while the southern Corsican varieties could keep the original characteristics of the language which make it much more similar to Sicilian and, only to some extent, Sardinian.