Franco-Provençal Language

Franco-Provençal (also Francoprovençal, Patois or Arpitan) is a language within Gallo-Romance originally spoken in east-central France, western Switzerland and northwestern Italy.

Franco-Provençal has several distinct dialects and is separate from but closely related to neighbouring Romance dialects (the langues d'oïl and the langues d'oc, in France, as well as Rhaeto-Romance in Switzerland and Italy).

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'' (Franco-Provençal: ; french: francoprovençal; it, francoprovenzale) dates to the 19th century. In the late 20th century, it was proposed that the language be referred to under the neologism ''Arpitan'' (Franco-Provençal: '; it, arpitano), and its areal as '' Arpitania''; the use of both neologisms remains very limited, with most academics using the traditional form (often written without the dash: Francoprovençal), while its speakers actually refer to it almost exclusively as ''patois'' or under the names of its distinct dialects (''Savoyard'', ''Lyonnais'', ''Gaga'' in Saint-Étienne, etc.).

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 a limited practice to higher age ranges, except for Evolène and other rural areas of French-speaking Switzerland. It was also historically spoken in the Alpine valleys around Turin and in two isolated towns ( Faeto and Celle di San Vito) in Apulia.

In France, it is one of the three Gallo-Romance language families of the country (alongside the langues d'oïl and the langues d'oc). 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

Franco-Provençal's name would suggest it is a bridge dialect between French and the Provençal dialect of Occitan. Franco-Provençal is a separate Gallo-Romance language that transitions into the Oïl languages Morvandiau and Franc-Comtois 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 (Dalby, 1999/2000, p. 402) follows:

A philological classification for Franco-Provençal published by Ruhlen (1987, pp. 325–326) 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 detected 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 (Bec, 1971). However, Franco-Provençal is consistently typified by a strict, myopic comparison to French, and so is characterized as "conservative". Thus, commentators, like 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 mountainous and isolated from one another. The internal boundaries of the entire speech area were divided by wars and religious conflicts.

France, Switzerland, the Franche-Comté (protected by Habsburg Spain), 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 duchy was partially occupied by France since 1538). The edict explicitly replaced Latin (and by implication, any other language) with French as the language of law and the courts (Grillet, 1807, p. 65).

The name ''Franco-Provençal'' (''franco-provenzale'') is due to Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1878), 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 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'' ("patois"). Only in recent years have speakers 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 (1829–1907), a pioneering linguist, analyzed the unique phonetic and structural characteristics of numerous spoken dialects. In an article written abou