Piedmontese language

Piedmontese (also known as Piemontese, Piemontèis) is spoken in Piedmont, northwestern Italy. It is normally considered an Italian dialect, but some claim language status for it. It is geographically and linguistically close to the northern Italian dialects Lombard and Ligurian, as well as to French and Provençal.

Contents

1 Origins 2 Characteristics 3 Current status 4 External links

Origins

The first documents in the Piedmontese were written in the 12th century. The literary Piedmontese developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. It did not earn literary esteem comparable to that of French and Italian, other literary 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 a give a Piedmontese phrase the following form: (subject) + verbal pronoun + verb, as in mi i vom [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 fa set [That, by which we make seven])
5. The co-presence of three affirmative interjections (that is, three ways to say yes): Si (from the latin form sic est, as in Italian); É (from the Latin form est, no known correspondences in other languages); Òj (from the Latin form hoc est as in Occitan, or maybe illud est, as in Arpitan and French)
6. The absence of the SH sound (as in sheep), for which an S sound (as in sun) is usually substituted
7. The presence of an S-C sound (pronounced as you would in s-church)
8. The presence of an N- sound (pronounced as the gerundive termination in going), which usually precedes a vowel, as in galin-a [hen]
9. The presence of the sixth piedmontese vowel Ë, which is read as a very short sound (somehow close to the half-mute sound in sir)
10. The almost total absence of double consonantal sounds, with the exception of simple intervocalic consonants following an Ë (as in sënner [ash])
11. The existence of a prostenic Ë sound, which gets interposed when two consonantal sounds get to collide. So stèila [star] becomes set ēstèile [seven stars].

Piedmontese has a number of dialects, and 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. Imports from the North African languages are also present, as a remnant of the Saracen occupation in the 10th century, while more recent imports tend to come from France. Only over the last 150 years has the Piedmontese dictionary shown a progressive shift towards Italian forms and sounds.

Current status

As elsewhere in Italy, Italian is by far the language actually spoken by the population. Piemontese is used to a reducing extent in rural areas and by older people. Usage of dialect has been discouraged through the years after World War II to avoid segregation of southern-italian immigrants, who arrived especially in Turin in large numbers. Use of dialect has therefore received a mild xenophobic trait, and is considered politically incorrect in a public context, unless used for simple expressions, jokes, insults etc.

In 2004, Piedmontese has been recognized as Piedmont's regional language by the regional administration, largely because of political reasons (the autonomist party Lega Nord was in the regional administration). In theory it should now be taught to children in schools, but this is unlikely ever to happen. Its present situation is quite critical, as over the last 150 years the number of people with a written knowledge of the language has shrunk to less than 1% of the native speakers. Efforts to make it one of the official languages of the Turin 2006 Olympics failed.

External links

• The Piedmontese magazine with the largest on-line access is É - afermativ piemontèis (http://www.e-opinion.info)
• A Piedmontese mailing-list, used by native speakers worldwide to meet and socialize, may be found at Piemont Viv (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/piemontviv)
• A Piedmontese grammar for English speakers is THE PIEDMONTESE History, Grammar, Syntax, Vocabulary (http://xoomer.virgilio.it/nmndem/piem3.html)
  
• Ethnologue report for Piemontese (http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=pms)pl:Język piemoncki