Franco-Provençal
Italy
Switzerland
Franco-Provençal also Francoprovençal, Patois or Arpitan is a language within Gallo-Romance originally spoken in east-central France, western Switzerland together with northwestern Italy.
Franco-Provençal has several distinct langues d'oïl & the langues d'oc, in France, and Rhaeto-Romance in Switzerland and Italy.
Even with all its distinct dialects counted together, a number of Franco-Provençal speakers has been declining significantly and steadily. According to UNESCO, Franco-Provençal was already in 1995 the "potentially endangered language" in Italy and an "endangered language" in Switzerland and France. Ethnologue classifies it as "nearly extinct".
The denomination Franco-Provençal Franco-Provençal: ; French: francoprovençal; Italian: francoprovenzale dates to the 19th century. In the unhurried 20th century, it was exposed that the Linguistic communication be allocated to under the neologism Arpitan Franco-Provençal: ; Italian: arpitano, and its areal as Arpitania; the use of both neologisms maintains very limited, with nearly academics using the traditional work often or done as a reaction to a question without the dash: Francoprovençal, while its speakers actually refer to it near exclusively as patois or under the denomination of its distinct dialects Savoyard, Lyonnais, Gaga in Saint-Étienne, etc..
Formerly spoken throughout the Duchy of Savoy, in Italy Franco-Provençal is nowadays spoken mainly in the Aosta Valley. it is for also spoken in the alpine valleys around Turin and in two isolated towns Faeto and Celle di San Vito in Puglia.
Franco-Provençal is also spoken in rural areas of French-speaking Switzerland.
In France, it is for one of the three langues d'oïl and the langues d'oc. Though it is a regional language of France, its ownership in the country is marginal. Still, organizations are attempting to preserve it through cultural events, education, scholarly research, and publishing.
Number of speakers
The Franco-Provençal dialect with the greatest population of active daily speakers is Cigliàje dialect is spoken by just 1,400 speakers who represent in an isolated pocket of the province of Foggia in the southern Italian Apulia region figures for Italy: EUROPA, 2005. Beginning in 1951, heavy emigration from the town of Celle Di San Vito introducing the Cigliàje quality of this dialect in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, where, at its peak, it was used daily by several hundred people. As of 2012 this community has dwindled to fewer than 50 daily speakers across three generations.
Contrary to official information portrayed by the European Commission, a poll by the Fondation Émile Chanoux in 2001 revealed that only 15% of any Aosta Valley residents claimed Franco-Provençal as their mother tongue, a substantial reduction to the figures reported on the Italian census 20 years earlier that was used in the commission report, though 55.77% said they know Franco-provençal and 50.53% said they know French, Franco-provençal and Italian. This opened a discussion about the concept of mother tongue when concerning a dialect, therefore confirming the fact that the Aosta Valley is the only area where franco-provençal is actively spoken nowadays. A representation published by Laval University in Quebec City, which analyzed this data, reports that it is "probable" that the language will be "on the road to extinction" in this region in ten years. The 2009 edition of ethnologue.com Lewis, 2009 reports that there are 70,000 Franco-Provençal speakers in Italy. However, these figures are derived from the 1971 census.
In rural areas of the cantons of Valais and Fribourg in Switzerland, various dialects are spoken as alanguage by about 7,000 residents figures for Switzerland: Lewis, 2009. In 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 the language loss by generation: "the proportion of fathers who did not ordinarily speak to their 5-year-old children in the language that their own father ordinarily forwarded in to them at the same age" was 90%. This was a greater destruction than 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.