Piedmontese (also known as Piemontèis, and Piemontese in Italian) is spoken by over 2 million people in Piedmont, northwest Italy. It is part of the western group of Romance languages, like French, Provençal and Catalan, and it is geographically and linguistically close to the northern Italian regional languages – Lombard, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Ligurian and Venetian – that, according to the Ethnologue classification, constitute the group of Gallo-Italic languages, also known as Cisalpine. Linguists worldwide (e. g. Einar Haugen, Hans Göbl, Helmut Lüdtke, George Bossong, Klaus Bochmann, Karl Gebhardt, Guiu Sobiela Caanitz, Gianrenzo P. Clivio) acknowledge Piedmontese as an independent language, though in Italy it is often still considered an Italian dialect. Today it is not an official language. Piedmontese was the first language of the emigrants who left Piedmont, in the period 1850-1950, for countries like France, Argentina and Uruguay.

Origins

The first documents in the Piedmontese language were written in the 12th century, the sermones subalpini, when it was extremely close to Occitan. The literary Piedmontese developed in the 17th and 18th centuries. It did not earn literary esteem comparable to that of French and 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.

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 von 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 is, i-j diso say to him)
3. The interrogative form, which adds an enclitic interrogative particle at the end of the verbal form (Veus-to? you want to…)
4. The absence of ordinal numerals, starting from the seventh place on (so that seventh will be Col che a fà set by which we make seven)
5. The co-presence of three affirmative interjections (that is, three ways to say yes): Si, sè (from the latin form sic est, as in Italian); É (from the Latin form est, as in Brazilian Portuguese); Òj (from the Latin form hoc est as in Occitan, or maybe illud est, as in Arpitan and French)
6. The absence of the (as in sheep), for which an S sound (as in sun) is usually substituted
7. The presence of a S-C combination (pronounced as you would in this-church)
8. The presence of an N- sound (pronounced as the gerundive termination in going), which usually precedes a vowel, as in lun-a ^*
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 absence of the phonological alternation that exists in Italian between short (single) and long (double) consonants, for example, it. fata and fatta [done
11. The existence of a prosthetic Ë sound, that is interposed when two consonantal sounds collide and are hard to pronounce. So stèila becomes set ēstèile [seven stars.

Piedmontese has a number of dialects that 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. Words imported from various languages, including the North African languages, are also present, while more recent imports tend to come from France.

Current status

As elsewhere in Italy, Italian dominates everyday communication and is spoken to a far greater extent by the population than Piedmontese. Usage of the language has been discouraged, both by the Kingdom of Italy, and by the Italian Republic, officially to prevent discrimination against migrants from the south of Italy, who moved to Turin in particular in large numbers.

In 2004, Piedmontese was recognised as Piedmont's regional language by the regional parliament, although the Italian government does not recognise it. In theory it is now supposed to be taught to children in school, but this is happening only in a limited way.

The last decade has seen the publication of learning material for schoolchildren, as well as general-public magazines. Courses for people already outside the education system have also been catching up. 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 knowledge of the language has shrunk to about 2% of native speakers, according to a recent survey. 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) and 3 million speakers (Ethnologue) for a population of 4.2 million people. Efforts to make it one of the official languages of the Turin 2006 Winter Olympics were unsuccessful.

Links and References

• 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 .
• 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. ISBN 88-86968-54-X. http://www.assimil.it
• Ethnologue report for Piemontese

External links

• É - afermativ piemontèis The Piedmontese magazine with the largest on-line readership
• Piemont Viv A Piedmontese mailing-list used by native speakers worldwide to meet and socialize
• Website in Piedmontese edited by Guido Dematteis with information on the language, poetry, scientific physics papers, short stories, and the novel The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany translated into Piedmontese
• Piedmontese: History, Grammar, Syntax, Vocabulary
• Lalinguapiemontese.net Online Piedmontese Course for Italian, French, English and Spanish speakers with drills and tests
• Arbut - Ël piemontèis a scòla Program for Teaching Piedmontese in Schools

Gallo-Italic languages | Languages of Italy

Piëmontees (taal) | Piemontesischer Dialekt | Idioma piamontés | Piémontais | Lingua piemontese | ピエモンテ語 | Piemontesisk språk | Język piemoncki