#arpitan

The reason for this oddity takes us back to 1822, when Russian Czar Alexander I had a lot Swiss people settle in Bessarabia (Western Ukraine, Moldova, Northeastern Romania) to cultivate vineyards

Ten years earlier, Russia had conquered these lands from the Ottoman empire. Alexander I's private tutor was Swiss himself and encouraged the emperor to bring over Swiss expertise to make wine and populate a newly-acquired territory

The article highlights a crucial fact regarding the transmission of language; because these settlers enjoyed a relatively broad degree of autonomy, they were not under immediate pressure to abandon their language and assimilate into Ukraine

A Swiss swan hunter in 1913 on the shores of the Black Sea heard what he identified as "patois vaudois" - meaning Francoprovençal. He expected to see a fellow Swiss but these Francoprovençal words were uttered by a mujik (Russian мужи́к "peasant"). The man worked as a domestic for one of the settlers family

Franco-Provençal (patouès)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 332,000

Recognized minority language: Aosta Valley (Italy)

Language of diaspora: Canada, France, Switzerland

Script: Latin, 25 letters

Grammatical cases: 0

Linguistic typology: fusional, SOV

Language family: Indo-European, Italic, Romance, Western Romance, Gallo-Romance

Number of dialects: 8 main dialects

History

12th century - first attestation in manuscripts

1878 - coinage of the name “Franco-Provençal”

1967-1982 - first grammar and dictionary

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v y z.

Franco-Provençal does not have a standard orthography, and the alphabet above is the one used in Italy. In France, it includes two additional letters, -w- and -x-.

Words can have the stress on the last or the penultimate syllable.

Grammar

Nouns have two genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers (singular and plural), and no cases. However, inflection by number is not distinguished in masculine nouns, as pronunciation is the same.

Articles have three forms: definite, indefinite, and partitive, and precede women’s given names.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood (indicative, subjunctive, conditional, and imperative), person, and number.

Dialects

An anonymous person asked me about this and I recently found the modules for learning these two Romance languages on Chambra d’Òc’s website, and they’re very good! This is the site, choose the language in the upper part.

The courses aim to teach you to read, write and speak the language and their method is immersion (so you need to more or less understand the language to follow it, if you speak another Romance language you’ll be fine).

First of all, courses are made by Chambra d’Òc, the association that works for the preservation and promotion of the Occitan and Francoprovençal languages and cultures in Valladas Occitanas (the Occitan areas that are under Italian administration). This means that the variety of Occitan they teach is their local one (the Alpine Occitan dialect), and for Francoprovençal you can choose the variety from Mizinì or from Graviére.

The courses are structured in 20 modules, each one with a different topic.

Each module starts with a little text that introduces what it will teach you. The text is written and there is a recording of a native speaker reading it, so you can read along. This is followed by an image which shows you the meaning of some words in the text, and in the next page you have a “little dictionary” that translates the words used to Italian (this is useful even if you don’t speak Italian because you can look up a dictionary of Italian-Your Language, while it can be very hard to find online Occitan dictionaries to your language that have all the words in all the dialects).

The other pages in each module teach you a bit of grammar that appeared in that text.

Then you have different kinds of exercises to fill in, and when you’re done you click the arrow that says “risposta” and it corrects you. It also gives you some help for you to write your own text (vocabulary not included which you might need to talk about yourself).

In the end of each module you have part with literary texts (again, you have it written down and can play a voice recoding) in the language and its translation to Italian, and finally some videos of people talking about the module’s subject.

Arpitan or Francoprovençal