Reconstruction of the phonological system of a 16th-century Piedmontese dialect

This article aims to reconstruct some aspects of the phonological system of the 16th-century Piedmontese dialect of Asti on the basis of the textual corpus provided by Giovan Giorgio Alione’s Opera Jocunda (1521). Its relations with contemporary dialects are examined through internal and comparative reconstruction. If, in many cases, some important continuities have been found, many discontinuities are present as well. At that time, this dialect had a richer phonemic inventory compared to mainstream contemporary Piedmontese dialects, at least as far as consonant phonemes are concerned. In terms of general diachronic evolution, the reconstruction shows that Piedmontese behaved like a Western-Romance language because it shared several historical phonological evolutions with Gallo-Romance and Ibero-Romance, but not with Italian. In this context, it underwent several mergers common to other Gallo-Italian dialects (e.g., the deaffrication of the alveolar affricates). From a language contact point of view, the phonology of the old dialect of Asti shows significant interferences with Middle French (mainly via lexical borrowing), but also with some «high» Northern Italian vernacular, therefore sharing a contact dynamic with Lombard dialects of that time.