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In France dialects are pretty much extinct as an everyday means of communication unfortunately, yet they are being taught in the areas where they are very different from standard French, but it's a bit late. It's more like keeping someone alive artificially.
I call that keeping up with traditions. Like Christmas. Even if it means "nothing" or not much.
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Originally Posted by forgotten username
Italy is fascinating for its dialects and accents. I wish France hadn't destroyed hers.
Why are people always making it sound so dramatic? The dialects aren't dead nor destroyed, they're still here and maybe one day people will feel the need to make them 'fashion' again.
I have been in Barcelona several times over recent years for medical reasons, and I am usually shepherded by the doctor's female assistant. She is Catalan. Once when we were talking about the Catalan language she mentioned that she had a friend in southern France who was teaching Occitan.
I am glad to see that the French are taking steps to save the language and to pass it on. I once watched a You Tube video where three men from the Bealric Islands were speaking in Catalan. I speak Spanish, so I thought I would be able to understand about 50%. Instead, I could only catch maybe 25% of the words and even fewer phrases and sentences.
I call that keeping up with traditions. Like Christmas. Even if it means "nothing" or not much.
Why are people always making it sound so dramatic? The dialects aren't dead nor destroyed, they're still here and maybe one day people will feel the need to make them 'fashion' again.
Well it's not like you encounter people on the bus or in the streets using their dialects that often anymore. Here i've witnessed many times people speaking in various dialects. At least when I hear people here I always try to find out the area of Italy they come from.
Bologna is the Capital of the Emilia-Romagna region so chances are they are probably speaking a form of Romagnolo. You might ask her what her local language is. Romagnolo can vary from area to area some being only a few miles apart. For example in Pesaro-Urbino area although in the Marche region now, speak a version of Romagnolo called Pesarese which is a little different than that spoken only about 30 miles away in Rimini. Historically, Pesaro and Urbino were part of Romagna. I have a map of the Romagna region dating back from the 1400s showing Pesaro and Urbino included.
I think Romagnolo is a little different although obviously there are similarities. I have several friends from Romagna (Forli, Imola, Lugo, Cesena mostly) and I could not make much difference between their accent and the one from the people I know here. This has actually become the standard Italian for me even if there is not such a thing. Usually when I think someone has no accent, I find out they're from here or Romagna. I don't know anyone from Rimini though.
I also have two friends from Marche area, and their accent is a bit different, but I like it.
Ferrarese is a bit weirder, like a mix of Romagnolo and southern Veneto.
Urania, the words you wrote in Franco-provençal are similar to "nos gens" in french (nostra gente). This is actually the language which was spoken in my area of France, and it still reflects in the way people speak there (from Savoie to Saint-Etienne, mostly, Lyon being more Standard-French sounding because it is a bigger city), but I don't think it's been actively spoken by real people since at least pre-WWII.
Here instead it is still spoken by the elders, and in Aosta Valley I also met people that now are probably not older than 30 years old that still speak it.
Another aspect that I haven't underlined is that, at least here on the Italian side, the Franco-provençal language is not well defined at all. It changes a lot also among near villages. Actually we are used to distinguish among the "patois" spoken in any village, because they all have something particular in the phonetic or in the derivation of the words. For example I live in Val Susa, and we have 5 or 6 villages in which Franco-provençal is spoken. The differences among the variants spoken in the villages is already enough to cause some problems at understanding the patois spoken in another village. For example my dad's parents where from two neighbor villages in which Franco-provençal was spoken. But when they were together they never spoke the patois from their villages because every few sentences one of them said a word that the other didn't know, and so their conversation were full of "what have you just said?". In practice they preferred to switch to a common language, that in their case was Piemontese.
If someone is curious to listen to the language, this is a site made by the Aosta Valley region. It is a dictionary that contains Italian, French and the variants of Franco-provençal spoken in their region. There are also some recording of the pronunciation of the different words (the green symbol next to some words) and a map that shows where are those variants from. Unfortunately the site works only in Italian or French and the only the patois from the Aosta Valley considered.
also if the research is limited to the Aosta Valley, there are already 3 different groups of nouns for saying "fox", and for each one there are some small variation according to the village you are looking at.
On the southern and western coasts of Finland Swedish is a regional language. It's not going anywhere.
In the northernmost part Sami languages are a small minority. Skolt Sami and Inari Sami are quite vulnerable, Northern Sami is doing well.
Don't forget carelian...
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