User:Fnt7/Vivaro-Alpine dialect

Vivaro-Alpine (also provençal alpin, Northern Provençal, dauphinois alpin, gardiòl) is a UNESCO Atlas of World's languages in danger severely endangered dialect of the Occitan language found in the Occitan Valleys of northwestern Italy (Piedmont and Liguria), the Dauphiné region of France and further inland, and Guardia Piemontese in the south of Italy. The subdialects of Vivaro-Alpine include vivarodaufinenc (vivaro-dauphinois), aupenc (alpenc, Alpine), gavòt (gavot), cisalpenc (alpenc oriental). It is classified as an Indo-European, Italic, Romance, or Western-Romance language. The language is preserved through the Institut d'Estudis Occitans (Occitan Studies Institute), which was founded in 1945 by a group of Occitan and French writers. The name “Vivaro-Alpine” was coined by Pierre Bec in the 1970s. Though the language has 300 speakers total left, the culture around the language is rich and present in music and in festivals such as La Baìo Di Sampeyre. There are lasting records of music written in the dialect.

Naming and classification
Vivaro-Alpine had been considered as a sub-dialect of Provençal, and named provençal alpin (Alpine Provençal) or Northern Provençal. In the Italian Calabrian region, it is called gardiól. Its use in the Dauphiné area has also led to the use of dauphinois or dauphinois alpin to name it. Along with Ronjat and Bec, it is now clearly recognized as a dialect of its own. The UNESCO Atlas of World's languages in danger uses the Alpine Provençal name, and considers it to be seriously endangered.

History
Vivaro-Alpine is classified as an Indo-European, Italic, Romance, or Western-Romance language.

The Occitan language group as a whole developed a sort of lingua franca of verisimilitude between dialects around the Middle Ages, which is evident through lasting troubadour poetry from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. During this period, early attempts at standardizing Italian were being made, which caused many derivative languages to merge or die out. Occitan was legally marginalized through the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539, which prescribed the usage of official French in all legal documents, forcing Vivaro-Alpine speakers and those who spoke other Occitan languages to learn standard French instead, officially downgrading all other languages of France, including Occitan languages, to the status of dialects.

The Institut d'Estudis Occitans (Occitan Studies Institute) was founded in 1945, timed similarly with the end of World War II and the European push to eradicate Fascism, with the purpose of keeping the language alive. The Institute came together as a means of atoning for the general Occitan support of the Fascist regime during the second World War, so the people of the region could return to their cultural roots in a display of decentralized patriotism with the goal of focusing upon Occitan solidarity rather than a reunified France. The unification of subcultures such as that of the Vivaro-Alpine people has been referred to as "internal colonization" as a result of the sterilization of local culture in favor of the commercialized culture of the nation as a whole, whether that be French or Italian.

Geographic Distribution
The Vivaro-Alpine language is spoken primarily in the Occitan Valleys of northwestern Italy, which is found at the south of the Alps, the Dauphiné region of France and further inland, and Guardia Piemontese in the south of Italy. There are 300 native speakers, but most are found in Ardeche, Drome, Hautes-Alpes, Alpes de Haute-Provence, Isere (France); Piedmont, Val d'Esturo, Entraigas, Limoun, Vinai, Pignerol, Sestrino (Italy).

Dialects/derivations of Vivaro-Alpine

 * Western: vivarodaufinenc (native name) or vivaro-dauphinois (French name) near northern Vivarais (Annonay), northeastern Velay (Yssingeaux), a southern fringe of Forez (Saint-Bonnet-le-Château and around Saint-Étienne), Drôme department (Valence, Die, Montélimar) and a fringe in southern Isère department. There is a dialect called patois in the Valjouffrey Valley, which is spoken fluently by three men and one woman.
 * Eastern: Alpine (English name) or alpenc, aupenc (native name), in the Occitan Alps. Mentonasc (English name) or mentonnais, mentonasque (native name) in Menton. It is also called gavòt (native name) or gavot (French name) in the western Occitan Alps, which are located in France, around Digne, Sisteron, Gap, Barcelonnette and the upper County of Nice, and Cisalpine or Eastern Alpine (native names: cisalpenc or alpenc oriental) in the eastern Occitan Alps or the Occitan Valleys, which are located in Italy (Piedmont and Liguria).

Sound/phonology
Vivaro-Alpine shares the palatization of consonants k and g in front of a with the other varieties of North Occitan (Limosino, Alverniate), in particular with words such as chantar ("cantare," to sing) and jai ("ghiandaia," jay). Southern Occitan has, respectively, cantar and gai.

Its principal characteristic is the dropping of simple Latin dental intervocalics:


 * chantaa or chantaia for chantada ("cantata," sung),
 * monea for moneda ("moneta," coin),]
 * bastia or bastiá for bastida ("imbastitura, tack),
 * maür for madur ("maturo," mature).

The verbal ending of the first person is -o (like in Italian, Catalan, Castilian, and Portuguese, but also in Piemontese, which is neighboring): parlo for parli or parle ("io parlo"), parlavo for parlavi or parlave ("io parlavo"), parlèro for parlèri or parlère ("io ho parlato, io parlavo").

A common trait is the rotacismo of l (passage from l to r):


 * barma for balma or bauma ("grotta," cave),
 * escòra for escòla ("scuola," school),
 * saraa or sarai for salada ("insalata," salad).

In the dialects of the Alps, Vivaro-Alpine maintains the pronunciation of the r of the infinitive verbs (excepting modern Occitan).

The Languedocian dialect includes these changes:


 * b = [b] at the beginning of a word/[β] elsewhere,
 * c = [s] before i or e/but [k] elsewhere,
 * g = [ʤ] before i or e/but [g] elsewhere,
 * r is not pronounced at the ends of words,
 * m = [n] at the end of a word. [m] elsewhere, and
 * mp = [n] at the end of a word.

The stressed diphthong /aw/ ⟨au⟩ becomes the unstressed diphthong /ɔw/ ⟨au⟩. An example: sauta /ˈsawtɔ/ → sautar /sɔwˈta/.

The stressed diphthong /aj/ ⟨ai⟩ becomes the unstressed diphthong /ej/ ⟨ai⟩. An example: laissa /ˈlajsɔ/ → laissar /lejˈsa/. For more specifics, Occitan phonology lists details.

Grammar
An estimated 70% of languages have "interrogative intonation contours which end with rising pitch." However, Vivaro-Alpine follows the opposite pattern with yes/no questions—an initial high tone followed by a fall. Questions that end in a rising pitch are so common that they are often considered "natural." One reason that questions begin with a high tone in some languages is that the listener is immediately being alerted to the fact that they are being asked a question.

The conjugation of Vivaro-Alpine verbs depends upon the Occitan conjugation rules found at that link, which can be specifically traced through the "Aupenc" column.

Most verbs belong to the "first group" denomination which ends in -ar.

The "second group" includes verbs ending in -ir and includes the irregular verbs partir ("to leave"), fugir ("to flee") and morir ("to die"). Though the third person singular of the present indicative of the latter three seem to be part, fug and mòr, some regions of Occitania decline the verbs using the -iss- augment, thus giving partís, fugís and morís. Some verbs are in possession of two stems, for example bastir ("to build") which has a first stem (bast-) and an extended stem (bastiss-), -iss- augment derives from the Latin inchoative suffix -esc-.

The third consists of verbs ending in -re. These stems must end in a consonant, which in the case of b or g, the present indicative third person singular will be spelt with a p or a c instead. Thus, recebre and sègre will give recep and sèc.

Occitan syntax is not identical to that of the French—a point which has been staunchly argued by scholars historically, who initially thought them to be.

Syntax
Old Occitan, when studied, seems to be a V-2 system, meaning the verb comes second in the word order of the sentence. There is also evidence in old Occitan texts such as Douceline of verbs taking V-1 or V-3 position. The favor for V-2 position renders the language more similar to Italo-Romance dialects and languages than Later Old French.

Vocabulary/Lexis
Vivaro-Alpine borrows heavily from French and Italian and because of its status as a Romance language is therefore distinctly similar in vocabulary to the other Romance languages. Its morphology is dependent upon the range of the Occitan Alphabet.

For example, irregular verbs in the Occitan language include: Èsser ("to be"), Aver ("to have"), Anar ("to go"), Far ("to do"). Resemblance to the French and Italian synonyms is apparent:


 * The French: être, avoir, aller, faire
 * The Italian: essere, avere, andare, fare

Writing system
Vivaro-Alpine uses the Occitan Alphabet. Since the vocabulary is influenced largely by French and Italian, it makes liberal use of the five diacritics—the circumflex accent, acute accent, grave accent, diaeresis, and cedilla—and the two ligatures—æ, œ. The IPA specifics and changes specific to the Vivaro-Alpine dialect from the Occitan general alphabet can be found here, in the chart labeled "Consonants," under the Vivaro-Alpine distinction.

Examples
These are the lyrics to a traditional Occitan song, called "Se chanta."

Lyrics:

Status
Vivaro-Alpine is an endangered language. There are approximately 300 native speakers of the language worldwide. Transmission of the language is very low, as horizontal language diffusion, where hegemonic languages such as French or Italian are spoken rather than the dialect, is more common within the community of Vivaro-Alpine speakers than vertical intergenerational transmission, where parents hand their language down to their children ; the language culture of Vivaro-Alpine is thus lost to time, with each generation less fluent than the one before. As a result of this, the speakers of Vivaro-Alpine as well as their progeny typically also speak either French or Italian. The Vivaro-Alpine culture is kept alive through written documents and especially the characteristic features of the cultural identity shared by the speakers.

Culture
One of the most enduring examples of Vivaro-Alpine culture, tied intrinsically to the language, is the celebration of La Baìo de Sampeyre, baìo referring to the Italian term "abbazia, abbadia, badia," which is the community of a monastery as well as the buildings themselves; in the context of the carnival, the people are "abbadie dei folli," or "abbots" to the celebration, brothers with their co-celebrators. In the Sampeyre comune in the Piedmont region of Italy, a carnivale-esque display of crowds wearing masks and listening to traditional music from the Occitan Valley area. The festival takes place between the Epiphany and Fat Thursday—the last Thursday before Ash Wednesday—and today is held in celebration and commemoration of the quickly-fading Alpine identity, but is often claimed to be in memoriam of the Alpine population coming together to drive away the collection of Saracens in control the alpine passages in the late tenth century. The organizers of the festival to this day insist it is not a carnival, but rather a way for the people to come together to preserve the Vivaro-Alpine identity.

The festival today has a second meaning to the Alpine people: it is a metaphor for the eradication of Fascism from their countries during the mid-twentieth-century, and a way to rejoice in their reclaimed identity. Thus, though it seems at face-value to be a carnival, it carries a much more significant weight to the people of the Vivaro-Alpine community, especially as their culture is lost to the more commercialized and over-arching cultures of Italy and France; it is, to the participants, a sort of revolutionary action where they unflinchingly claim what is being taken from them.

According to the head of the ethnographic museum of Sampeyre, Fabrizio Dovo, "The Jacobin period has made a very deep impression [upon the celebrations]. Military-style uniforms that we see parading date back to that time. There is no written documentation, but it is a fact that, starting from a certain point, The Baìo had the connotation of a military parade." It it, therefore, a celebration of a unified Italy and the coming together of the Alpine peoples that allowed Italy to unify in the first place. The Baìo, which originated in the late nine-hundreds C.E., has Pagan roots. The oldest written mention of the Baìo on a document dates to 1698 and is a request from the Municipal Council of Sampeyre addressed to the Marquis Cardinal to work to fix issues with the local Abbey, specifically disrespectful passes made upon brides during the festival by the head of the Abbey. Relatedly, there is a history of marriages taking place during the celebration, thus the costumes are sometimes suitable for a bridegroom to wear, though this tradition has ties to the institution of prima nocta and therefore it not often relevant in modern times. It is also likely that mentions of the festival were limited following the Council of Trent during the Counter-Reformation, when the church imposed strict rules regarding traditions and celebrations that were not religious in nature. The symbolism of expelling the Saracens—or Muslims—from the land as the purpose of the celebration can therefore be understood as a later rectification so that the Baìo fit these rules as a crusade against religious infidels.

The event commences upon the evening of the Epiphany with crowds of the youth of the community shouting "Baìo, Baìo!" while beating instruments, but the festivities take place through means of a historical reenactment: crowds in masks parade like armies from the capital of Sampeyre, wearing costumes symbolizing different army generals, flag-bearers, commanders, and other positions, and are understood to represent an army of the dead, of those who died protecting their land. Those dressed in costumes of higher rank individuals, the Abà Major, direct the Baìo, organize the routes of the parade, and even contribute money to put toward the celebrations. At the end of the celebration, these Abà Majori, who are honored by their high rank position and who have held a priestly progression of lesser positions leading up to their position as Abà Major, make way for the election of two new tenants to take their roles.

It is of note that the tradition has, in the past, relied on brown-face or black-face, where makeup or coal is used to paint faces brown and black to represent the opposing Turkish armies.

Traditionally, only men take part in the procession, while women do work behind the scenes: cooking and taking up the enormous task of putting together the costumes for the event, especially the masks, none of which are identical and all of which are decorated to have specific meanings with different ribbon patterns for different purposes, for example herringbone patterns symbolizing spring rains to come. Women do, however, join the ceremony in its final stage, during which they act out robberies of the clothing of the extras in the performance, who will then forgive them by giving them a glass of wine. This gender rift is an example of the Vivaro-Alpine cultural stricture of Männerbund, which is like machismo in nature.