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Savoyard dialect
Franco-Provençal dialect of Savoy, France From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Savoyard (endonym: savoyârd) is a Franco-Provençal dialect of the Gallo-Romance family. It is spoken in some territories of the historical Duchy of Savoy, nowadays a geographic area spanning Savoie and Haute-Savoie, France and the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It has around 35,000 speakers today.
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The Savoyard language is included in the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages as a dialect of the Franco-Provencal. However, the Savoyard is itself subdivided into many sub-dialects in almost all major valleys.
This dialect of the Franco-Provencal has seen its number of speakers greatly decrease since the annexation of Savoy to France in 1860, in particular because of the prohibition of speaking it at school, military service, as well as during the two world conflicts[4]. The 20th century saw the number of speakers decrease from almost all of the population of the Savoyard countryside to a few tens of thousands.
However, during the 1980s, a renewed interest existed with the organization of many international festivals of the Franco-Provencal language[5], the creation of several associations with the aim of safeguarding this language, in particular, the group of Conflans, and the "Institut de la langue savoyarde", the publication of many books (monographs, books, novels), as well as the teaching — although difficult, because of the lack of recognition as a regional language. Many exchanges between students who have taken this option are organized each year, especially during the Constantin-Désormeaux[6] competition to reward the best work of students in this language. Bilingual signage is also beginning to be present in Savoy at the entrance of the agglomerations.
The way in which the Savoyard must evolve, as for a possible pseudo-uniformization, a spelling common to the whole of the Franco-Provencal area, is however subject to many controversies between several currents. These currents are most often divided into two groups. Patoisants, a group mainly formed of retirees, who, for the most part, are native speakers, having unconsciously learned the language from an early age with their parents, often with regard to rural life, but who, for some of them, have only "re interested themselves" in the Savoyard at a late age[7]: for the majority, they are for a preservation of the language, and its variations, prefer to use the graphie de Conflans (a type of semi-phonetic spelling). The other group, informal, is composed of the new speakers, whose most represented group is that of the arpitans. Most of these are intellectuals and have learned the language only late, voluntarily[8]. Unlike the patoisants, they use the term patois only with native speakers, because they believe that for the general public, the term patois has a derogatory connotation, and only moderately use the word Franco-Provencal which is of a confused nature, they prefer the Arpitan neologism.
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Some words
Several subdialects of Savoyard exist that exhibit unique features in terms of phonetics and vocabulary. This includes many words that have to do with the weather: bacan (French: temps mauvais); coussie (French: tempête); royé (French: averse); ni[v]ole (French: nuage); ...and, the environment: clapia, perrier (French: éboulis); égra (French: sorte d'escalier de pierre); balme (French: grotte); tova (French: tourbière); and lanche (French: champ en pente).
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Linguistic studies
Savoyard has been the subject of detailed study at the Centre de dialectologie of the Stendhal University, Grenoble, currently under the direction of Michel Contini.
See also
References
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