Let’s continue our tour of Italy through its dialects! Next stop Piedmont! We are in the north-west of Italy, not too far from France and Switzerland in the north and next to Valle d’Aosta to the west, Lombardy to the east, and Liguria to the south. And today we are going to talk about Piemontéis, or Piedmontese! The dialect people speak here. First of all – like for all the dialects -  we must say there are many variations of the Piemontéis, but there is one common to all the koine Piemontéis. “Koine” comes from Ancient Greek and indeed means “common language.”

Due to its geographical position, this dialect is similar to French, Occitan, and Lombard, since it has Latin and Gaelic-Italian origins like them, but it has traits of its own that differentiate it from those other languages as well as Celtic and Celtic-Ligurian influences. From 1981, it is officially a regional or minoritarian language according to the European Charter of the Regional or Minority Languages, and it is CENSIRE by the UNESCO in the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. As we were saying before, there are different variations of the Piemontéis that we can divide into three major categories: the Western Piemontéis, also called High-Piedmontese, that includes the variations spoken in Turin and Cuneo; the Eastern Piedmontese, or Low-Piedmontese, that includes the variations spoken in Asti, ROERINO, in the Langhe region, in the ALTO MONFERRATO AND BASSO MONFERRATO; and the Canavesano. High and Low Piedmontese do not have anything to do with its prestige, but they refer to their position in referment to the Po river.

Historically, there were 8 Piedmontese languages. During the Middle Age, the codification of the language was a little incomplete, but from the XII century on, it already has a coherent written form. This is very particular, became many other dialects in Italy will never take a written form, but will remain oral.  We can see the first evidence of a koine only around the 1700s, and the standardization of its writing in 1900s. The Piedmontese used to create this common language was the elevated Piemontéis spoken by the Savoy aristocracy in Turin, not the one spoken buy the large population. This made this language fit for literature and in the 1800s soon became the “golden age” of this language. The Piemontéis literature of that period was flourishing with plays, novels, and even newspapers. During the 1900s, the Italian Dialectology imposed to the dialects a more “Italian” way of writing them out, but Piedmontese kept on using its traditional writing, remaining in this way closer to the Genoese and Milanese, even if this prevented it to have an actual universal way of writing. A very important person we need to remember when talking about the Piedmontese’s history is Giuseppe Pacotto. Throughout his life he deeply researched the language, digging out centuries of writings and documents and created the modern spelling. His major improvement is probably the elimination of the [ö] and the replacement of it with [ò] for an open /o/. His spelling is used still today, and it was adopted by the Ca dë Studi Piemontèis – the Center of the Piedmontese studies – in Turin. But among all the neo-Latin languages Piedmontese is probably the language that got simplified the most: some past tenses vanished completely, leaving room for more simple tenses, and the articles fell in front of possessive pronouns. However, you cannot speak Piemontèis without the subjunctive! Then the diffusion of Italian did not help the preservation of this language at all, because Italian vocabulary deeply penetrated Piemontèis so that words like ancreus, fres, seure, barba, and magna – deep, brother, sister, uncle, aunt – were substituted with a Pidmontized version of the Italian words as profond, fratel, sorela, zio, zia (in Italian: profondo, fratello, sorella, zio, zia.)

Now that we know a little history on this regional language let’s take a look at some of its major features. First of all there are barely any doubles. Yes, you heard me right, no doubles to confuse your comprehension. You can use the prosthetic ë as you wish as in words like ëscritor, writer, and ëstèile, stars. Like the French es-que, you can find an enclitical interrogative particle veus-to deje, and, again like in French, to indicate the continuity of the action they use an expression: ‘n camin che. While unlike Italian, there is a negative imperative, and the personal pronoun is often doubled. Then there are untranslatable vocabs, those that make each dialect unique and extremely useful, like baleng or balengu, that is probably one of the most known and used expression of this regional language and a very simplified translation of it will be something like “silly.” But for historical regions, as we said, there are a lot of similarities with French and Lombard. The similarities with French are recognizable in words like alman (Piemontèis) and allemad (French) which is tedesco in Italian and means German; or regret (Piemontèis) and regret (French) which is dispiacere in Italian and, well, can you guess in English? Yes, it means regret in English. But also the famous cadrega in Lombard which means sedia in Italian – chair in English – is also cadrega in Piemontèis and arm, braccio in Italian, is brass in Piemontèis and brasch in Lombard. It seams like it is a language that sort of mediates between Italian, French, and Lombard. Well, nothing weird if we look at the history. But did you know that Piemontèis is spoken in Argentina as well? Argentina? Yes! Due to a massive immigration from the Piedmont region to Argentina in the late 1800s and early 1900s – and Pope Francis is the result of it tracing back his origins to this Italian region – people kept speaking that language more than Italian as a way to communicate within their community and thus preserved it. It is a sort of historical memory from Piedmont. It is still spoken today, and still has a certain importance, in Buenos Aires, La Pampa, Entre Rios, soprattutto Santa Fe, and Cordoma!

But if you want to know more, the fist grammar book entirely in Piemontèis was printed as early as the XVII and today you can even find a Piemontèis-Italian-English grammar book! And other online resources like the gioventurapiemonteisa and the piemunteis website where you can go and learn more about this language and vocabulary. Well, it looks like this simple dialect is actually an international language!

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