[CHAPTER IV]
BORDERLANDS OF ITALIAN LANGUAGE
Italy’s early history is molded by the shape of the land and its natural divisions. In the beginning, each valley was a tribal seat. The basin of the Po was the home of Celtic-speaking Gauls. Etruscans, whose early language cannot fit into the Indo-European group, peopled Tuscany. Greeks settled in southern Italy in numbers sufficiently large to bestow the name of Magna Graecia on the districts they occupied. The welding of these territorial elements into the Roman state was attended by the spread of the Latin language within the land. Rome’s Latin eventually reached far beyond peninsular frontiers.
Modern Italian nationality did not, however, acquire concrete expression before the nineteenth century. For fully two hundred years prior to that time the Hapsburgs had steadily encroached on Italian territory. It remained for the democratic ideals of the French Revolution to become the moving force in the shaping of Italian nationality. Unity of language favored its rapid development. Beginning with Piedmont in the first half of the nineteenth century Italy grew to its present extent by the addition of territory to the south. Lombardy was added in 1859, Tuscany and the kingdom of Two Sicilies in 1860, Venetia in 1866 and the Papal States in 1870. Prior to these years Italian national aspirations had found solace in a Venetian saying, expressive of Austrian covetings, “Carta tua, montagna mia,” which may be rendered as “Yours is the map, but mine the land.” Since then, a people speaking the same language has become united into a single nation on the Italian peninsula. The land frontier of Italy, however, has remained to this day a zone of linguistic mingling.
Districts of non-Italian languages are occupied by populations made up of descendants of immigrants from beyond the Alps or from beyond the seas. Six foreign linguistic groups can be distinguished, to wit: (1) Franco-Provençal, (2) German, (3) Slovene, (4) Albanian, (5) Greek, (6) Catalan.[48] The political significance to be attached to these settlements is slight, as they contain a negligible proportion of the kingdom’s population. The foreign languages are used only in the home. Beyond the threshold Italian prevails everywhere.
Franco-Provençal dialects are in current use among the dwellers of the Stura, Orco and Doire Baltée valleys. In the province (circondario) of Aosta the foreign language was current in over 70 villages (communi) at the time of the census of 1901. The province of Pignerol boasted of the two communi of Praly and San Martino di Perrero in which the same French dialects prevailed. The names of the communi of Beaulard, Bousson, Champlas du Col, Clavières, Fenils, Mollières, Rochemolles, Salbertrand, Sauze d’Oulx, Solomiac and Thures, all in the circondario of Suse, likewise indicate the presence of French-speaking inhabitants. It was computed that the language was used in the daily life of 18,958 families out of the 30,401 recorded in the census of that year. The average number of individuals to a family being 4.22 in those districts, it follows that about 80,000 subjects of the king of Italy speak a French dialect. In 1862, French was spoken by 76,736 inhabitants of the valley of Aosta. The importance of the language has hardly changed since then, as it has remained the medium of church, school and general culture. Nevertheless the use of French dialects is on the wane in the circondarii of Pignerol and Suse since the reconstitution of Italy.
Planted between France and Italy, Piedmont became a connecting province in which the transition from one country to the other can be followed. Its rôle is analogous to that of Alsace-Lorraine on the confines of the French and the German languages. French taste and mode of living prevail in many sections of Piedmont. Turin strikes travelers proceeding from southern Italy as being in many respects a city of French customs. The French spoken in Italy also represents a transition speech between the langue d’oïl and the langue d’oc. It has close analogy with the patois spoken in French Switzerland, the Dauphiné, the Lyonnais and the valley of Aosta. All these regions once formed part of the kingdom of Burgundy.
Fig. 21—Map showing some of the important localities of French speech in Northwestern Italy.
The French vernacular of thousands of Piedmontese is furthermore related to the cause of Protestantism, which has taken solid root in this mountain land in spite of the persecutions to which it had been formerly subjected. As used by the natives of the region the local dialect consists, more properly, of a modern form of an old langue d’oc dialect similar to the patois of various districts in the French High Alps. To the Protestant inhabitants of these mountain communities French has served as the only medium of intercourse with their co-religionists in Switzerland and France.