78-774: The Lyonnais ( French pronunciation: [ljɔnɛ] , Arpitan : Liyonês ) is a historical province of France which owes its name to the city of Lyon . The geographical area known as the Lyonnais became part of the Kingdom of Burgundy after the division of the Carolingian Empire . The disintegration of Imperial control, especially after the fall of the Hohenstaufens in 1254, led to French encroachment and eventual acquisition by King Philip IV of France in 1313. Lyonnais now often simply refers to
156-468: A dialect continuum that includes standard French and its closest autochthonous relatives historically spoken in the northern half of France , southern Belgium , and the Channel Islands . They belong to the larger category of Gallo-Romance languages , which also include the historical languages of east-central France and western Switzerland , southern France , portions of northern Italy ,
234-494: A much more conservative estimate of speakers in Aosta Valley at 40,000, with 20,000 using the language on a daily basis. In 2018, other linguistic academics estimated the number of speakers of Franco-provençal in Aosta Valley to be between 21,000 and 70,000, depending on whether one would choose the number of speakers designating Franco-provençal as their native language, or whether one included all those declaring they knew
312-509: A neighbouring area, known in English as Burgundy ( French : Bourgogne ). Other areas also had historical or political claims to such names, especially (Meune, 2007). Some contemporary speakers and writers prefer the name Arpitan because it underscores the independence of the language and does not imply a union to any other established linguistic group. "Arpitan" is derived from an indigenous word meaning "alpine" ("mountain highlands"). It
390-544: A platform for literary writing. Apart from French, an official language in many countries (see list ), the Oïl languages have enjoyed little status in recent times. Currently Walloon, Lorrain (under the local name of Gaumais ), and Champenois have the status of regional languages of Wallonia . The Norman languages of the Channel Islands enjoy a certain status under the governments of their Bailiwicks and within
468-520: A regional law passed by the government in Aosta requires educators to promote knowledge of Franco-Provençal language and culture in the school curriculum. Several cultural groups, libraries, and theatre companies are fostering a sense of ethnic pride with their active use of the Valdôtain dialect as well (EUROPA, 2005). Paradoxically, the same federal laws do not grant the language the same protection in
546-670: A same language" and "French as the common langue d'oïl" appear in a text of Roger Bacon , Opus maius , who wrote in Medieval Latin but translated thus: " Indeed, idioms of a same language vary amongst people, as it occurs in the French language which varies in an idiomatic manner amongst the French, Picards , Normans and Burgundians . And terms right to the Picards horrify the Burgundians as much as their closer neighbours
624-464: A single homogeneous language but to mutually intelligible linguistic varieties . In those times, spoken languages in Western Europe were not codified (except Latin and Medieval Latin), the region's population was considerably lower than today, and population centers were more isolated from each other. As a result, mutually intelligible linguistic varieties were referred to as one language. In
702-432: A type of language that brings together, along with some characteristics which are its own, characteristics partly in common with French, and partly in common with Provençal, and are not caused by a late confluence of diverse elements, but on the contrary, attests to its own historical independence, little different from those by which the principal neo-Latin [Romance] languages distinguish themselves from one another. Although
780-410: Is French ( oïl was pronounced [o.il] or [o.i] , which has become [wi] , in modern French oui ). There are three uses of the term oïl : In the singular, langue d'oïl refers to the mutually intelligible linguistic variants of lingua romana spoken since the 9th century in northern France and southern Belgium ( Wallonia ), since the 10th century in the Channel Islands , and between
858-598: Is "probable" that the language will be "on the road to extinction" in this region in ten years. In 2005, the European Commission wrote that an approximate 68,000 people spoke the language in the Aosta Valley region of Italy, according to reports compiled after the 2003 linguistic survey conducted by the Fondation Chanoux. In 2010, anthropologist and ethnologist Christiane Dunoyer proposed
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#1732765240310936-610: Is a language within the Gallo-Romance family, 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,
1014-587: Is also 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. Although
1092-530: Is currently most spoken in Aosta Valley, with Valdôtain having the greatest population of active daily speakers. A 2001 survey of 7,250 people by the Fondation Émile Chanoux revealed that 15% of all Aosta Valley residents claimed Franco-Provençal as their mother tongue, a substantial reduction to the figures reported on the Italian census 20 years earlier (and used in the 2001 European Commission report). At
1170-507: Is no single official standard that covers Franco-Provençal as a whole. The orthographies in use include the following: The table below compares a few words in each writing system, with French and English for reference. (Sources: Esprit Valdôtain (download 7 March 2007), C.C.S. Conflans (1995), and Stich (2003). Langues d%27o%C3%AFl The langues d'oïl ( / d ɔɪ ( l )/ doy(l) , US also / d ɔː ˈ iː l / daw- EEL , French: [lɑ̃ɡ dɔjl] ) are
1248-504: Is now based in Fribourg. In 2010 SIL adopted the name "Arpitan" as the primary name of the language in ISO 639-3 , with "Francoprovençal" as an additional name form. Native speakers call this language patouès (patois) or nosta moda ("our way [of speaking]"). Some Savoyard speakers call their language sarde . This is a colloquial term used because their ancestors were subjects of
1326-636: Is sometimes considered pejorative, the trend today among French linguists is to refer to these languages as langues d'oïl rather than dialects . Five zones of partially mutually intelligible Oïl dialects have been proposed by Pierre Bec : Non-standard varieties: Gallo has a stronger Celtic substrate from Breton . Gallo originated from the oïl speech of people from eastern and northern regions: Anjou ; Maine ( Mayenne and Sarthe ); and Normandy ; who were in contact with Breton speakers in Upper Brittany . See Marches of Neustria Named after
1404-480: Is standard French, in which the ancestral "oïl" has become "oui". Langue d'oïl (in the singular), Oïl dialects and Oïl languages (in the plural) designate the ancient northern Gallo-Romance languages as well as their modern-day descendants. They share many linguistic features, a prominent one being the word oïl for yes . ( Oc was and still is the southern word for yes , hence the langue d'oc or Occitan languages ). The most widely spoken modern Oïl language
1482-716: Is the same as for French nouns; however, there are many exceptions. A few examples follow: lo trabalh (masc.) la besogne (fem.), le travail (masc.), le labeur (masc.) Verbs in Group 1a end in -ar ( côsar , "to speak"; chantar , "to sing"); Group 1b end in -ier ( mengier , "to eat"); Groups 2a & 2b end in -ir ( finir , "to finish"; venir , "to come"), Group 3a end in -êr ( dêvêr , "to owe"), and Group 3b end in -re ( vendre , "to sell"). The consonants and vowel sounds in Franco-Provençal: There
1560-615: The langues d'oc group ( Provençal ) and gave Franco-Provençal its name. Ascoli (1878, p. 61) described the language in these terms in his defining essay on the subject: Chiamo franco-provenzale un tipo idiomatico, il quale insieme riunisce, con alcuni caratteri specifici, più altri caratteri, che parte son comuni al francese, parte lo sono al provenzale, e non proviene già da una confluenza di elementi diversi, ma bensì attesta sua propria indipendenza istorica, non guari dissimili da quella per cui fra di loro si distinguono gli altri principali tipi neo-latini. I call Franco-Provençal
1638-548: The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages . The langues d'oïl were more or less influenced by the native languages of the conquering Germanic tribes , notably the Franks . This was apparent not so much in the vocabulary (which remained overwhelmingly of Latin origin) as in the phonology and syntax; the invading Franks, Burgundians and Normans became the rulers and their accents were imposed as standard on
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#17327652403101716-529: The Kingdom of Sardinia ruled by the House of Savoy until Savoie and Haute-Savoie were annexed by France in 1860. The language is called gaga in France's Forez region and appears in the titles of dictionaries and other regional publications. Gaga (and the adjective gagasse ) comes from a local name for the residents of Saint-Étienne , popularized by Auguste Callet's story " La légende des Gagats " published in 1866. The historical linguistic domain of
1794-484: 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: 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
1872-578: 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 suggested a Basque substrate in the toponyms of the easternmost Valdôtain dialect . Franco-Provençal is first attested in manuscripts from
1950-537: The Province of Turin because there Franco-Provençal speakers make up less than 15% of the population. Lack of jobs has resulted in their migration from the Piedmont's alpine valleys, and contributed to the language's decline. Switzerland does not recognize Romand (not be confused with Romansh ) as one of its official languages . Speakers live in western cantons where Swiss French predominates; they converse in
2028-685: The Val d'Aran in Spain , and under certain acceptations those of Catalonia . Linguists divide the Romance languages of France , and especially of Medieval France , into two main geographical subgroups: the langues d'oïl to the North, and the langues d'oc in the Southern half of France. Both groups are named after the word for "yes" in their recent ancestral languages. The most common modern langue d'oïl
2106-534: The late 14th century in the ancient province of Pays de France —the then Paris region later called Île-de-France . This Francien , it is claimed, became the Medieval French language. Current linguistic thinking mostly discounts the Francien theory, although it is still often quoted in popular textbooks. The term francien was never used by those people supposed to have spoken the variant; but today
2184-498: The " languages of France ", but its constitution bars it from ratifying the 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) that would guarantee certain rights to Franco-Provencal. This language has almost no political support in France and it is associated with generally low social status. This situation affects most regional languages that comprise the linguistic wealth of France. Speakers of regional languages are aging and live in mostly rural areas. Franco-Provençal
2262-608: The 11th and 14th centuries in England (the Anglo-Norman language ). Langue d'oïl , the term itself, has been used in the singular since the 12th century to denote this ancient linguistic grouping as a whole. With these qualifiers, langue d'oïl sometimes is used to mean the same as Old French (see History below). In the plural, Oïl dialects refer to the varieties of the ancient langue d'oïl . Oïl languages are those modern-day descendants that evolved separately from
2340-514: 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 such as 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
2418-502: The 13th century these varieties were recognized and referred to as dialects ("idioms") of a single language, the langue d'oïl . However, since the previous centuries a common literary and juridical "interdialectary" langue d'oïl had emerged, a kind of koiné . In the late 13th century this common langue d'oïl was named French ( françois in French, lingua gallica or gallicana in Medieval Latin). Both aspects of "dialects of
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2496-442: The 16th century that we find the first occurrence of the word "Walloon" in the same linguistic sense that we use it today. By late- or post-Roman times Vulgar Latin within France had developed two distinctive terms for signifying assent ( yes ): hoc ille ("this (is) it") and hoc ("this"), which became oïl and oc , respectively. Subsequent development changed "oïl" into "oui", as in modern French. The term langue d'oïl itself
2574-449: The 19th century. In the late 20th century, it was proposed that the language be referred to under the neologism Arpitan (Franco-Provençal: arpetan ; Italian : 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 hyphen: Francoprovençal ), while language speakers refer to it almost exclusively as patois or under
2652-410: The 8th and 12th centuries. Walloon "had a clearly defined identity from the beginning of the thirteenth century". In any case, linguistic texts from the time do not mention the language, even though they mention others in the Oïl family, such as Picard and Lorrain. During the 15th century, scribes in the region called the language "Roman" when they needed to distinguish it. It is not until the beginning of
2730-430: The Aosta Valley special powers to make its own decisions about certain matters. This resulted in growth in the region's economy and the population increased from 1951 to 1991, improving long-term prospects. Residents were encouraged to stay in the region and they worked to continue long-held traditions. The language was explicitly protected by a 1991 Italian presidential decree and a national law passed in 1999. Further,
2808-529: The Cigliàje variety of this dialect in Brantford , Ontario . At its peak, the language was used daily by several hundred people. As of 2012 this community has dwindled to fewer than 50 daily speakers across three generations. In rural areas of the cantons of Valais and Fribourg in Switzerland, various dialects are spoken as a second language by about 7,000 residents (figures for Switzerland: Lewis, 2009). In
2886-484: The Franco-Provençal language are: The Aosta Valley is the only region of the Franco-Provençal area where this language is still widely spoken as native by all age ranges of the population. Since 1948 several events have combined to stabilize the language ( Valdôtain dialect ) in this region. The constitution of Italy was amended to change the status of the former province to an autonomous region. This gives
2964-411: The French court who blamed him for using words of Artois . By the late 13th century the written koiné had begun to turn into a spoken and written standard language , and was named French . Since then French started to be imposed on the other Oïl dialects as well as on the territories of langue d'oc . However, the Oïl dialects and langue d'oc continued contributing to the lexis of French. In 1539
3042-478: The French language was imposed by the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts . It required Latin be replaced in judgements and official acts and deeds. The local Oïl languages had always been the language spoken in justice courts. The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts was not intended to make French a national language, merely a chancery language for law and administration. Although there were competing literary standards among
3120-631: The French" . It is from this period though that definitions of individual Oïl languages are first found. The Picard language is first referred to by name as "langage pikart" in 1283 in the Livre Roisin . The author of the Vie du bienheureux Thomas Hélye de Biville refers to the Norman character of his writing. The Sermons poitevins of around 1250 show the Poitevin language developing as it straddled
3198-839: The Orders of Cluny and Cister , the many sections of the Way of St. James pilgrimage route that come from elsewhere in Europe out of the Iberian Peninsula, and the settlement in Iberia of people from the other side of the Pyrenees, arriving during and after the Reconquista . The anti-Portuguese factor of Brazilian nationalism in the 19th century led to an increased use of the French language in detriment of Portuguese, as France
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3276-419: The Oïl languages faced with competition. The Third Republic sought to modernise France and established primary education where the only language recognised was French. Regional languages were discouraged, and the use of French was seen as aspirational, accelerating their decline. This was also generally the case in areas where Oïl languages were spoken. French is now the best-known of the Oïl languages. Besides
3354-452: The Oïl languages in the mediæval period, the centralisation of the French kingdom and its influence even outside its formal borders sent most of the Oïl languages into comparative obscurity for several centuries. The development of literature in this new language encouraged writers to use French rather than their own regional languages . This led to the decline of vernacular literature . It
3432-436: The adjacent province of Turin were estimated to be the home of another 22,000 speakers. Regis estimated the number of speakers in Piedmont in 2019 to be around 15,000. The Faetar and Cigliàje dialect was thought to be spoken by 1,400 people in an isolated pocket of the province of Foggia , in the southern Italian Apulia region. Beginning in 1951, strong emigration from the town of Celle Di San Vito to Canada established
3510-567: The area around the city of Lyon . The local speech-form known as Lyonnais is a dialect of the Francoprovençal language that is spoken in the region, but its use is marginal. 45°45′N 4°50′E / 45.75°N 4.83°E / 45.75; 4.83 This Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes geographical article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Arpitan language Italy Switzerland Franco-Provençal (also Francoprovençal , Patois or Arpitan )
3588-496: The classical Latin sic, "thus", such as the Italian sì , Spanish and Catalan sí , Portuguese sim , and even French si (used when contradicting another's negative assertion). Sardinian is an exception in that its word for "yes", eja , is from neither origin. Similarly Romanian uses da for "yes", which is of Slavic origin. However, neither lingua romana nor langue d'oïl referred, at their respective time, to
3666-434: The culturally prestigious French. 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
3744-659: The dialects mainly as a second language. The use in agrarian daily life is rapidly disappearing. However, in a few isolated places the decline is considerably less steep. This is most notably the case for the Evolène dialect. Franco-Provençal has had a precipitous decline in France. The official language of the French Republic has been designated as French (article 2 of the Constitution of France ). The French government officially recognizes Franco-Provençal as one of
3822-542: The following terms: In the 9th century, romana lingua (the term used in the Oaths of Strasbourg of 842) was the first of the Romance languages to be recognized by its speakers as a distinct language, probably because it was the most different from Latin compared with the other Romance languages (see History of the French language ). Many of the developments that are now considered typical of Walloon appeared between
3900-559: The foreword of his Savoyard dialect dictionary, states: The antiquated character of the Savoyard patois is striking. One can note it not only in phonetics and morphology, but also in the vocabulary, where one finds numerous words and directions that clearly disappeared from French. 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 isolated from each other because of
3978-406: The former provinces of Poitou and Saintonge For the history of phonology, orthography, syntax and morphology, see History of the French language and the relevant individual Oïl language articles. Each of the Oïl languages has developed in its own way from the common ancestor, and division of the development into periods varies according to the individual histories. Modern linguistics uses
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#17327652403104056-549: The influence of French literature , small-scale literature has survived in the other Oïl languages. Theatrical writing is most notable in Picard (which maintains a genre of vernacular marionette theatre), Poitevin and Saintongeais . Oral performance (story-telling) is a feature of Gallo , for example, while Norman and Walloon literature, especially from the early 19th century tend to focus on written texts and poetry (see, for example, Wace and Jèrriais literature ). As
4134-868: The language loss by generation was 90%, made up of: "the proportion of fathers who did not usually speak to their 5-year-old children in the language that their own father usually spoke in to them at the same age". This was a greater loss than undergone by any other language in France, a loss called "critical". The report estimated that fewer than 15,000 speakers in France were handing down some knowledge of Franco-Provençal to their children (figures for France: Héran, Filhon, & Deprez, 2002; figure 1, 1-C, p. 2). Note: The overview in this section follows Martin (2005), with all Franco-Provençal examples written in accordance with Orthographe de référence B (see "Orthography" section, below). Franco-Provençal has grammar similar to that of other Romance languages. In general, inflection by grammatical gender (masculine and feminine)
4212-456: The language, irrespective of native language considerations. That same year, academic Riccardo Regis calculated that there were 50,000 Franco-provençal speakers in Aosta Valley. The 2009 edition of ethnologue.com (Lewis, 2009) reported that there were 70,000 Franco-Provençal speakers in Italy. However, these figures are derived from the 1971 census. Outside of Aosta Valley, the alpine valleys of
4290-404: The line between oïl and oc. As a result, in modern times the term langue d'oïl also refers to that Old French which was not as yet named French but was already—before the late 13th century—used as a literary and juridical interdialectary language . The term Francien is a linguistic neologism coined in the 19th century to name the hypothetical variant of Old French allegedly spoken by
4368-422: 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 who are 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
4446-533: The most marked, through the status Provençal in particular achieved in southwestern Europe around the troubadour apex in the Middle Ages, when Galician-Portuguese lyric was developed. Aside the direct influence of Provençal literature, the presence of languages from modern-day France in the Galician-Portuguese area was also strong due to the rule of the House of Burgundy , the establishment of
4524-564: The mountains. In addition, the internal boundaries of the entire speech area were divided by wars and religious conflicts. France, Switzerland, the Franche-Comté (part of the Spanish Monarchy ), 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,
4602-714: The name Franco-Provençal appears misleading, it continues to be used in most scholarly journals for the sake of continuity. Suppression of the hyphen between the two parts of the language name in French ( francoprovençal ) was generally adopted following a conference at the University of Neuchâtel in 1969; however, most English-language journals continue to use the traditional spelling. The name Romand has been in use regionally in Switzerland at least since 1424, when notaries in Fribourg were directed to write their minutes in both German and Rommant . It continues to appear in
4680-717: The name Franco-Provençal suggests it is a bridge dialect between French and the Provençal dialect of Occitan , it is a separate Gallo-Romance language that transitions into the Oïl languages Burgundian and Frainc-Comtou 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
4758-561: The names of its distinct dialects ( Savoyard , Lyonnais , Gaga in Saint-Étienne , etc.). Formerly spoken throughout the Duchy of Savoy , Franco-Provençal is nowadays (as of 2016) spoken mainly in the Aosta Valley as a native language by all age ranges. All remaining areas of the Franco-Provençal language region show practice limited to higher age ranges, except for Evolène and other rural areas of French-speaking Switzerland . It
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#17327652403104836-402: The names of many Swiss cultural organizations today. The term "Romand" is also used by some professional linguists who feel that the compound word "Franco-Provençal" is "inappropriate". A proposal in the 1960s to call the language Burgundian (French: "burgondien" ) did not take hold, mainly because of the potential for confusion with an Oïl language known as Burgundian , which is spoken in
4914-438: 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 about 1873 and published later, he offered a solution to existing disagreements about dialect frontiers and proposed a new linguistic region. He placed it between the langues d'oïl group of languages ( Franco ) and
4992-452: 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: francoprovençâl ; French : francoprovençal ; Italian : francoprovenzale ) dates to
5070-454: The other cantons of Romandie where Franco-Provençal dialects used to be spoken, they are now all but extinct. Until the mid-19th century, Franco-Provençal dialects were the most widely spoken language in their domain in France. Today, regional vernaculars are limited to a small number of speakers in secluded towns. A 2002 report by the INED ( Institut national d'études démographiques ) states that
5148-629: The regional and lesser-used language framework of the British-Irish Council . The Anglo-Norman language , a variant of Norman once the official language of England, today holds mostly a place of ceremonial honour in the United Kingdom (now referred to as Law French ). The French government recognises the Oïl languages as languages of France , but the Constitutional Council of France barred ratification of
5226-441: The regions. The mining poets of Picardy may be compared with the tradition of rhyming Weaver Poets of Ulster Scots in a comparable industrial milieu. There are some regional magazines, such as Ch'lanchron (Picard), Le Viquet (Norman), Les Nouvelles Chroniques du Don Balleine [1] (Jèrriais), and El Bourdon (Walloon), which are published either wholly in the respective Oïl language or bilingually with French. These provide
5304-662: The rest of the population. This accounts in large part for the relative distinctiveness of French compared to other Romance languages. The English language was heavily influenced by contact with Norman following the Norman Conquest and much of the adopted vocabulary shows typically Norman features. Portuguese was heavily influenced by more than a millennium of perennial contact with several dialects of both Oïl and Occitan language groups, in lexicon (up to 15–20% in some estimates, at least 5000 word roots), phonology and orthography. The influence of Occitan was, nevertheless,
5382-456: The term could be used to designate that specific 10th-and-11th centuries variant of langue d'oïl spoken in the Paris region; both variants contributed to the koine, as both were called French at that time. For political reasons it was in Paris and Île-de-France that this koiné developed from a written language into a spoken language. Already in the 12th century Conon de Béthune reported about
5460-492: The time, 55.77% of residents said they knew Franco-provençal and 50.53% said they knew French, Franco-provençal and Italian. This opened a discussion about the concept of mother tongue when concerning a dialect. The Aosta Valley was confirmed as the only area where Franco-provençal is actively spoken in the early 21st century. A report published by Laval University in Quebec City , which analyzed this data, reports that it
5538-399: The varieties of the ancient langue d'oïl . Consequently, langues d'oïl today may apply either: to all the modern-day languages of this family except the French language; or to this family including French. " Oïl dialects" or "French dialects" are also used to refer to the Oïl languages except French —as some extant Oïl languages are very close to modern French. Because the term dialect
5616-464: The vernacular Oïl languages were displaced from towns, they have generally survived to a greater extent in rural areas - hence a preponderance of literature relating to rural and peasant themes. The particular circumstances of the self-governing Channel Islands developed a lively strain of political comment, and the early industrialisation in Picardy led to survival of Picard in the mines and workshops of
5694-413: 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
5772-760: Was first used in the 12th century, referring to the Old French linguistic grouping noted above. In the 14th century, the Italian poet Dante mentioned the yes distinctions in his De vulgari eloquentia . He wrote in Medieval Latin : " nam alii oc, alii si, alii vero dicunt oil " ("some say 'oc', others say 'sì', others say 'oïl'")—thereby distinguishing at least three classes of Romance languages: oc languages (in southern France); si languages (in Italy and Iberia ) and oïl languages (in northern France). Other Romance languages derive their word for "yes" from
5850-554: Was popularized in the 1980s by Mouvement Harpitanya , a political organization in the Aosta Valley . In the 1990s, the term lost its particular political context. The Aliance Culturèla Arpitana (Arpitan Cultural Alliance) is advancing the cause for the name "Arpitan" through the Internet, publishing efforts, and other activities. The organization was founded in 2004 by Stéphanie Lathion and Alban Lavy in Lausanne , Switzerland, and
5928-402: 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
6006-639: Was seen at the time as a model of civilization and progress. The learning of French has historically been important and strong among the Lusophone elites, and for a great span of time it was also the foreign language of choice among the middle class of both Portugal and Brazil, only surpassed in the globalised postmodernity by English. The French spoken in Belgium shows some influence from Walloon. The development of French in North America
6084-675: Was the French Revolution which imposed French on the people as the official language in all the territory. As the influence of French (and in the Channel Islands, English) spread among sectors of provincial populations, cultural movements arose to study and standardise the vernacular languages. From the 18th century and into the 20th century, societies were founded (such as the "Société liégoise de Littérature wallonne" in 1856), dictionaries (such as George Métivier 's Dictionnaire franco-normand of 1870) were published, groups were formed and literary movements developed to support and promote
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