South-Eastern Gallo-Romance: Francoprovençal

Francoprovençal is on UNESCO’s red list of the world’s most endangered languages. It is in danger of disappearing within one to two generations. Historically spoken in a large region of south-eastern France, northern Italy and French-speaking Switzerland, and lacking political unity, it is not ‘a’ language, but a set of dialects with common characteristics. Lacking any standardisation, its dialects show many of the evolutionary possibilities of Western Romance languages. Long regarded as a late separation from the Oïl area, it was traditionally described as a conservative Gallo-Romance language, rejecting Oïl innovations from about the eighth century onwards. More recent research has shown that its earliest linguistic features date back to the very beginning of the linguistic fragmentation of Galloromania (6th century at the latest); it is therefore just as ‘old’ as the other Gallo-romance languages. It thus has its own characteristic mixture of conservative and innovative phenomena among the Gallo-romance languages.