Piemontese Language

Piedmontese (; autonym: or , in it, piemontese) is a language spoken by some 2,000,000 people mostly in Piedmont, northwestern region of Italy. Although considered by most linguists a separate language, in Italy it is often mistakenly regarded as an Italian dialect. It is linguistically included in the Gallo-Italic languages group of Northern Italy (with Lombard, Emilian, Ligurian and Romagnolo), which would make it part of the wider western group of Romance languages, which also includes French, Occitan, and Catalan. It is spoken in the core of Piedmont, in northwestern Liguria, near Savona and in Lombardy (some municipalities in the westernmost part of Lomellina near Pavia).

It has some support from the Piedmont regional government but is considered a dialect rather than a separate language by the Italian central government.

Due to the Italian diaspora Piedmontese has spread in the Argentinian Pampas, where many immigrants from Piedmont settled. The Piedmontese language is also spoken in some states of Brazil, along with the Venetian language.

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.

Current status

In 2004, Piedmontese was recognised as Piedmont's regional language by the regional parliament,''Piemontèis d'amblé - Avviamento Modulare alla conoscenza della Lingua piemontese''; R. Capello, C. Comòli, M.M. Sánchez Martínez, R.J.M. Nové; Regione Piemonte/Gioventura Piemontèisa; Turin, 2001 although the Italian government has not yet recognised it as such. In theory, it is now supposed to be taught to children in school, 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.
Knowledge and Usage of the Piedmontese Language in Turin and its Province
'', carried out by ''Euromarket'', a Turin-based market research company on behalf of the ''Riformisti per l'Ulivo'' party in the Piedmontese Regional Parliament in 2003 . 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,F. Rubat Borel, M. Tosco, V. Bertolino. ''Il Piemontese in Tasca'', a Piedmontese basic language course and conversation guide, published by Assimil Italia (the Italian branch of ''Assimil'', the leading French producer of language courses) in 2006.
assimil.it
/ref> IRES Piemonte and 3 million speakers (EthnologueLewis, M. Paul (ed.), 2009. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL Internationa
ISO 639-3, pms (Piemontese)
Retrieved 13 June 2012) 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.

Regional variants

Piedmontese is divided into three major groups

* Western which include the dialects of Turin and Cuneo.
* Eastern which in turn is divided into south-eastern (Astigiano, Roero, Monregalese, High Montferrat, Langarolo, Alessandrino) and north-eastern (Low Montferrat, Biellese, Vercellese, Valsesiano).
* Canavese, spoken in the Canavese region in north-western Piedmont.

The variants can be detected in the variation of the accent and variation of words. It is sometimes difficult to understand a person that speaks a different Piedmontese from the one you are used to, as the words or accents are not the same.

Eastern and western group

The Eastern Piedmontese group is more phonologically evolved than its western counterpart.

The words that in the west end with jt, jd or t in the east end with ʒe/o ʃfor example the westerns , , and ( milk, all and old) in the east are , and .

A typical eastern features is as allophone of : in word end, at the end of infinitive time of the verb, like in to read and to be (''western'' , ''vs''. eastern , ) and at words feminine plural gender. Although this development is shared partially (in the case of the infinitive time) also by most of the western dialects, including the Turin one, that is the most spoken dialect of western piedmontese (and also of the whole piedmontese language).

A morphological variation that sharply divides east and west is the indicative imperfect conjugation of irregular verbs, in the east is present the suffix ava/iva, while in the west is asìa/isìa.

And different conjugation of the present simple of the irregular verbs: dé, andé, sté (to give, to go, to stay).

Phonology

Consonants

is realized as labio-velar in the word-final position as well as between and .

Vowels

Allophones of // are [] in stressed syllables.

Alphabet

Piedmontese is written with a modified Latin alphabet. The letters, along with their International Phonetic Alphabet, 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 stress (except for ''o'' which is marked by an acute to distinguish it from ''ò'') and breaks diphthongs, so ''ua'' and ''uà'' are , but ''ùa'' is pronounced separately, .

Numbers

Characteristics

Some of the characteristics of the Piedmontese language are:

# 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.
# 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').
# The interrogative form, which adds an enclitic interrogative particle at the end of the verbal form (''Veus-to…?'' 'Do you want to...?'])
# The absence of ordinal numerals higher than 'sixth', so that 'seventh' is ''col che a fà set'' 'the one which makes seven'.
# 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 language, Portuguese); ''òj'' (from Latin ''hoc est'', as in Occitan, or maybe ''hoc illud'', as in Franco-Provençal, French and Old Catalan and Occitan).
# The absence of the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like the ''sh'' in English ''sheep''), for which an alveolar S sound (as in English ''sun'') is usually substituted.
# The existence of an S-C combination pronounced tʃ
# The existence of a velar nasal �(like the ''ng'' in English ''going''), which usually precedes a vowel, as in ''lun-a'' 'moon'.
# The existence of the third Piedmontese vowel Ë, which is very short (close to the vowel in English ''sir'').
# 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)'.
# 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

Lexical comparison with other Romance languages and English:

References

Further reading

*

External links

*
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 booksPiemontese basic lexicon (several dialects) at the Global Lexicostatistical Database

{{DEFAULTSORT:Piedmontese Language

Gallo-Italic languages
Languages of Piedmont