This book describes the grammar of Faetar, attempting to
represent the variation found across the 80+ speakers recorded in preparation
for writing this book. I discuss some of the issues that arose through my
attempts to represent all observed forms in one grammar in:
Nagy, N. 2001. Writing a sociolinguistics grammar of
Faetar. Penn
Working Papers in Linguistics 7.3: Selected Papers from NWAV 29
(2001). 225-246.
Faetar is a Francoprovençal dialect spoken in two villages
in Apulia (Faeto and Celle di San Vito), in southern Italy. Faetar came to be
spoken in these villages due to a migration from southeastern France (département
of Ain) around the 14th century. An unwritten language, it has incorporated
aspects of Apulian Italian dialects during its 600 years of contact. It is a
doubly endangered language:
Francoprovençal has been virtually exterminated in France by aggressive
language planning; and it is spoken by fewer than 600 people in Apulia due to a
mass exodus from rural areas. It survives in emigrant pockets in Italy,
Switzerland, the U.S.A., and Canada.
Faetar phonology resembles that of neighboring dialects, but
is distinguished by the phonemic presence of schwa and
a process of variable deletion of post-tonic segments
and syllables leaving word-final consonant clusters. It differs from
Francoprovençal in having phonemic geminates
word-medially and (variably present) phonetic geminates at word boundaries. The
morphology is similar to southern French dialects, with post-verbal negation and
little agreement marking. It is distinct in that both null
and double subject pronouns are frequently present. Like French and Italian,
Faetar is SVO and left-branching.
Naomi Nagy is an associate professor in the English
Department and coordinator of the Linguistics
Program at the University of New Hampshire.
Her research on contact-induced language change (in Montreal,
New England, and Faeto)
includes publications in Belgian Journal of
Linguistics, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Journal of
English Linguistics and Language Variation and Change.
(ordering
information)
