Franco-Provençal


Franco-Provençal is a Gallo-Romance language that originated and is spoken in eastern France, western Switzerland, and northwestern Italy.
Franco-Provençal has several distinct dialects and is separate from but closely related to neighbouring Romance dialects.
Even with all its distinct dialects counted together, the number of Franco-Provençal speakers has been declining significantly and steadily. According to UNESCO, Franco-Provençal was already in 1995 a "potentially endangered language" in Italy and an "endangered language" in Switzerland and France. Ethnologue classifies it as "nearly extinct".
The designation Franco-Provençal dates to the 19th century. In the late 20th century, it was proposed that the language be referred to under the neologism Arpitan, and its areal as Arpitania. The use of both neologisms remains very limited, with most academics using the traditional form, while language speakers refer to it almost exclusively as patois or under the names of its distinct dialects.
Formerly spoken throughout the Duchy of Savoy, Franco-Provençal is nowadays spoken mainly in the Aosta Valley as a native language by all age ranges. All remaining areas of the Franco-Provençal language region show practice limited to higher age ranges, except for Evolène and other rural areas of French-speaking Switzerland. It is also spoken in the Alpine valleys around Turin and in two isolated towns in Apulia.
In France, it is one of the three Gallo-Romance language families of the country. Though it is a regional language of France, its use in the country is marginal. Still, organizations are attempting to preserve it through cultural events, education, scholarly research, and publishing.

Classification

Although the name Franco-Provençal suggests it is a bridge dialect between French and the Provençal dialect of Occitan, it is a separate Gallo-Romance language that transitions into the Oïl languages Burgundian and Frainc-Comtou to the northwest, into Romansh to the east, into the Gallo-Italic Piemontese to the southeast, and finally into the Vivaro-Alpine dialect of Occitan to the southwest.
The philological classification for Franco-Provençal published by the Linguasphere Observatory follows:
A philological classification for Franco-Provençal published by Ruhlen is as follows:

History

Franco-Provençal emerged as a Gallo-Romance variety of Latin. The linguistic region comprises east-central France, western portions of Switzerland, and the Aosta Valley of Italy with the adjacent alpine valleys of the Piedmont. This area covers territories once occupied by pre-Roman Celts, including the Allobroges, Sequani, Helvetii, Ceutrones, and Salassi. By the fifth century, the region was controlled by the Burgundians. Federico Krutwig has also suggested a Basque substrate in the toponyms of the easternmost Valdôtain dialect.
Franco-Provençal is first attested in manuscripts from the 12th century, possibly diverging from the langues d'oïl as early as the eighth–ninth centuries. However, Franco-Provençal is consistently typified by a strict, myopic comparison to French, and so is characterized as "conservative". Thus, commentators such as Désormaux consider "medieval" the terms for many nouns and verbs, including pâta "rag", bayâ "to give", moussâ "to lie down", all of which are conservative only relative to French. As an example, Désormaux, writing on this point in the foreword of his Savoyard dialect dictionary, states:
Franco-Provençal failed to garner the cultural prestige of its three more widely spoken neighbors: French, Occitan, and Italian. Communities where speakers lived were generally isolated from each other because of the mountains. In addition, the internal boundaries of the entire speech area were divided by wars and religious conflicts.
France, Switzerland, the Franche-Comté, and the duchy, later kingdom, ruled by the House of Savoy politically divided the region. The strongest possibility for any dialect of Franco-Provençal to establish itself as a major language died when an edict, dated 6 January 1539, was confirmed in the parliament of the Duchy of Savoy on 4 March 1540. The edict explicitly replaced Latin with French as the language of law and the courts.
The name Franco-Provençal is due to Graziadio Isaia Ascoli , chosen because the dialect group was seen as intermediate between French and Provençal. Franco-Provençal dialects were widely spoken in their speech areas until the 20th century. As French political power expanded and the "single-national-language" doctrine was spread through French-only education, Franco-Provençal speakers abandoned their language, which had numerous spoken variations and no standard orthography, in favor of the culturally prestigious French.

Origin of the name

Franco-Provençal is an extremely fragmented language, with scores of highly peculiar local variations that never merged over time. The range of dialect diversity is far greater than that found in the langue d'oïl and Occitan regions. Comprehension of one dialect by speakers of another is often difficult. Nowhere is it spoken in a "pure form" and there is not a "standard reference language" that the modern generic label used to identify the language may indicate. This explains why speakers use local terms to name it, such as Bressan, Forèzien, or Valdôtain, or simply patouès. Only in recent years have speakers who are not specialists in linguistics become conscious of the language's collective identity.
The language region was first recognized in the 19th century during advances in research into the nature and structure of human speech. Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, a pioneering linguist, analyzed the unique phonetic and structural characteristics of numerous spoken dialects. In an article written about 1873 and published later, he offered a solution to existing disagreements about dialect frontiers and proposed a new linguistic region. He placed it between the langues d'oïl group of languages and the langues d'oc group and gave Franco-Provençal its name.
Ascoli described the language in these terms in his defining essay on the subject:
Although the name Franco-Provençal appears misleading, it continues to be used in most scholarly journals for the sake of continuity. Suppression of the hyphen between the two parts of the language name in French was generally adopted following a conference at the University of Neuchâtel in 1969; however, most English-language journals continue to use the traditional spelling.
The name Romand has been in use regionally in Switzerland at least since 1424, when notaries in Fribourg were directed to write their minutes in both German and Rommant. It continues to appear in the names of many Swiss cultural organizations today. The term "Romand" is also used by some professional linguists who feel that the compound word "Franco-Provençal" is "inappropriate".
A proposal in the 1960s to call the language Burgundian did not take hold, mainly because of the potential for confusion with an Oïl language known as Burgundian, which is spoken in a neighbouring area, known in English as Burgundy. Other areas also had historical or political claims to such names, especially.
Some contemporary speakers and writers prefer the name Arpitan because it underscores the independence of the language and does not imply a union to any other established linguistic group. "Arpitan" is derived from an indigenous word meaning "alpine". It was popularized in the 1980s by Mouvement Harpitanya, a political organization in the Aosta Valley. In the 1990s, the term lost its particular political context. The Aliance Culturèla Arpitana is advancing the cause for the name "Arpitan" through the Internet, publishing efforts, and other activities. The organization was founded in 2004 by Stéphanie Lathion and Alban Lavy in Lausanne, Switzerland, and is now based in Fribourg. In 2010 SIL adopted the name "Arpitan" as the primary name of the language in ISO 639-3, with "Francoprovençal" as an additional name form.
Native speakers call this language patouès or nosta moda. Some Savoyard speakers call their language sarde. This is a colloquial term used because their ancestors were subjects of the Kingdom of Sardinia ruled by the House of Savoy until Savoie and Haute-Savoie were annexed by France in 1860. The language is called gaga in France's Forez region and appears in the titles of dictionaries and other regional publications. Gaga comes from a local name for the residents of Saint-Étienne, popularized by Auguste Callet's story "La légende des Gagats" published in 1866.

Geographic distribution

The historical linguistic domain of the Franco-Provençal language are:

Italy