Franco-Provençal language

The Franco-Provencal or Arpitan language (in French: franco-provençal, in French and in Arpitan: arpitan) is a Romance language used in some parts of France, Italy and Switzerland. Its native distribution area is known as Arpitania.

Historical, social and cultural aspects

Speakers

The most up-to-date data on the total number of speakers of the different variants of Arpitan places a majority of about 147,000 in France and about 77,000 in Italy and Switzerland. However, it is only spoken diffusely and at the native language level in the Aosta Valley, where the Valdosta variety is used. The UNESCO has declared it an endangered language.

History

Historically the main city of Arpitania was Lyon.

Linguistic description

Classification

Franco-Provençal forms one of the two large groups into which the nuclear Gallo-Romance languages are divided.

Phonology

There is some dialectal variation, so the correspondence between orthography and phonology is not always direct. The proposal of Joseph Henriet is particularly interesting, who proposes a supradialectal orthography (as an alleged basis for an Arpitan koine). In this proposal, each letter or digraph corresponds to a phoneme (although the particular implementation may depend on the region). The main allophone is indicated in the table and the variations are indicated after the table:

Notes on pronunciation:

• c: Can be pronounced as a deaf alveolar A post-alveolar deaf African A sorda alveopalatal African t, or a combination [st].
• Cy: It can be pronounced as a deaf African t, ou une africada post-alveolar sorda .
• j: Can be pronounced as an African alveolar sound , or a sound dental fricative ð.
• r: Harrieta preconiza una consonante rótico alveolar sonora r, but according to the regions can also be pronounced as a sound uvular fricative , or a vibrant multiple uvular .
• x: It can be pronounced as a deaf sorda zipper MIN, a sorda alveopalatal fricative , or a sordid retroflex .

Spelling

The following table shows the articulation of the orthographic vowels <a, e, i, o, u> depending on the environment (simple, with circumflex, with serious accent, with nasal closure, followed by e):

Comparative lexicon

Dialectal variants

• Valdostano
• Vaudés
• Jurassien
• Lyonnés
• Savoyard
• Dauphinés

Dialectal comparison

The spelling differs according to the authors. Martin (2005) gives the example between Bressan and Saboyano. Duboux (2006) compares French and Vaudois.