International Journal of the Sociology of Language

IJSL 2018; 249: 135–150

Silvia Dal Negro* and Marco Angster Francoprovençal in contact with Walser German

https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2017-0043

Abstract: This article focuses on Francoprovençal (FP) from the perspective of language contact, specifically the reciprocal effects between FP and two dialects of German (Alemannic) spoken in the Aosta region and belonging to the severely endangered Walser minority group located in Northwestern Italy. On the basis of lexical evidence we describe a complex dynamics of language contact among communities embedded in one another. We found bidirectional exchanges between FP and one Walser variety, but much less so with the other. As a result, lexical distance revealed a pattern of contact, isolation and asymmetries that contrasts with geographical distance or more general relations of sociolinguistic dominance.

Keywords: Walser German, Francoprovençal, lexical stratification, Aosta Valley

1 Sociolinguistic context and historical background

This article deals with a multilingual alpine valley (the Lys valley) in which Francoprovençal (FP) is in contact with two standard languages – Italian and French – and two non-standard varieties: Piedmontese and Walser German.1 The latter is a minority Alemannic dialect spoken by former colonizers coming from Western Switzerland (Wallis) who settled in a series of alpine villages in Northwestern Italy seven to eight centuries ago. Today, only six small communities of Walser-German speakers exist in Italy, in the regions of Aosta and Piedmont.2

1 Although both authors have conceived the general outline and the contents of this article and have undertaken the data analysis, Silvia Dal Negro wrote Sections 1 and 2 and Marco Angster Sections 3 and 4. 2 For an introduction to the topic of Walser migrations see Zinsli (1991). In particular on the two Walser communities dealt with here cf. Zürrer (2009).

*Corresponding author: Silvia Dal Negro, Libera Università di Bolzano, 39100 Bolzano, Italy, E-mail: [email protected] Marco Angster, Department of Linguistics, University of Zadar, 23000 Zadar, Croatia, E-mail: [email protected]

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The micro-region investigated here belongs to the historical border area between Germanic and Romance in the Alps: here, contact has been reciprocal for many centuries, and all language varieties are highly stratified in a complex way. Both Germanic and Romance varieties of the alpine region share parts of a common pre-Latin (mainly Celtic) and pre-Indo-European (so-called Mediterranean) substratum. The Latin influence on German has been much stronger in southern (and thus alpine) varieties than elsewhere. On the other hand, Gallo-Romance (such as French and FP) and Gallo-Italic varieties (such as Piedmontese) have been subject to Germanic influences since the early Middle Ages. This results in a certain amount of shared vocabulary, especially as regards alpine culture, which must have favored interethnic communication over the centuries, as well as a sense of common cultural background rein- forced by sharing similar living conditions. The case of the upper Lys valley is interesting from the perspectives of sociolinguistics and contact linguistics. In the Aosta region, Walser German is a minority enclave within the FP area, which is in turn a language minority on a (trans)national level, generally dominated by Italian and locally by a wide- spread Gallo-Italic koiné, Piedmontese. Moreover, the FP variety we discuss below (spoken in the village of Gaby) is itself an enclave within Walser German in the upper Lys valley. The tiny hamlet of Niel, within the municipality of Gaby, has long maintained a Walser German dialect, now extinct as a con- sistent variety apart from the lexical traces left in the FP idiolect of some speakers. This “Matrioshka effect” can be visualized as in Figure 1. The Lys valley is located at the northeastern border of the Aosta Region, in contact with both Northern Piedmont and Swiss Wallis (Figure 2). With the

Northwestern Italy: ITALIAN AND GALLO-ITALIC VARIETIES

Aosta Region: FRENCH AND FRANCOPROVEN

Upper Lys valley: ISSIME &GRESSONEY WALSER GERMAN

Gaby: GABY FRANCOPROVEN

Niel: WALSER GERMAN

Figure 1: Minority/majority relations in the upper Lys valley.

Figure 2: The upper Lys Valley. The whole white area corresponds to the domain of Romance varieties.

latter, however, no direct communication is possible, since the head of the valley is closed by the Monte Rosa massif and glacier. This valley (in particular its middle and upper sections) is characterized by two large Walser German settlements that have maintained their ethnic and linguistic identity for eight centuries, despite living in intense and continuous contact with their Romance- speaking environment. The largest settlement, Gressoney, lies at the top end of the valley and is organized in two administrative municipalities (today 1200 inhabitants overall), with two main villages (Gressoney Saint Jean and Gressoney La Trinité) and a variety of rural hamlets. The fate of Gressoney has long been linked with trade, commerce and migration – especially in connection with German speaking areas north of the Alps – a fact that has contributed to maintaining linguistic and cultural continuity over time. In the last two centuries, because of its stunning location, overlooking the Monte Rosa glacier, Gressoney has developed elite tourism and become a popular ski resort. The other Walser German community in the area, Issime (today 420 inhabitants), independently settled in the middle of the valley, is in very close contact with the neighboring (and to some extent preexistent) FP population. Up to 1952, when two officially separate municipalities were created, the German speaking community of Issime and the FP community of Gaby (today 475 inhabitants) lived side by side in the same territory, nonetheless maintaining different languages, traditions and ways of using and inhabiting the land: The Germans exploiting high lands and pastures, the Romance more active in the valley.3 When the two municipalities were created in 1952, the Walser and the FP communities started to drift apart. Gaby became an enclave in a Walser German area, with the exception of the remote Walser hamlet of Niel which remained within the domain of Gaby. When the village of Niel was abandoned in the late 1960s the local German dialect had already given way to the local FP variety, save for some of the lexicon that had maintained German stems. Multilingual practices are ubiquitous in minority-language settings where minority-language speakers are always at least bilingual and the directionality of bilingualism is asymmetrical (Matras 2009: 47). In this case, however, the situation is more complex because one minority language (Walser German) is nested into another (characterized by both French and FP) and both are subsumed

3 Place names dating back at least to the early seventeenth century such as Pratum teotoni- corum ‘Germans’ meadow’,orrue des Allemands ‘road of/to the Germans’, demonstrate the existence of a well-identified allochthone group sharing space with an autochthonous Gallo- Romance population. Not surprisingly, the same places were named differently in Walser German (cf. Bodo and Musso 1994; Dal Negro 2002).

under the Italian sociolinguistic “roof”4 and are in contact with Piedmontese, a regional non-standard language functioning as a koiné in most of Piedmont and the Aosta Region. All of these languages are used within this micro region in a variety of individual and collective repertoires, within and across speech communities (for details cf. Dal Negro 2002; Zürrer 2009). This sociolinguistic and historical profile of the upper Lys valley has to be considered in the analysis and evaluation of language contact in this area, especially with respect to directionality of borrowing. We must consider that both in the case of Walser German and of FP the sociolinguistic context is that of language maintenance (Thomason and Kaufman 1988) in which, however, a superstratum relation between the two is difficult (or impossible) to detect. As the discussion of lexical data will show, a majority-minority construct cannot be conceived a priori in this case but is one possible outcome of the research.

2 Lexical stratification in the Francoprovençal variety of Gaby

If we consider any oral or written text produced in the variety of Gaby, it is, on all levels of analysis, a FP variety, albeit of a marginal kind within the Aosta valley linguistic area, the so called basse vallée variety, characterized by both archaic features and influences from the neighboring Piedmontese dialects (Keller 1958). A different picture emerges if we instead explore lexical stratification in terms of vocabulary composition5 rather than language use, as, for example, in recent comparative typological projects (e.g., Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009). For this research project (which constitutes a pilot study) we took a casual sample of 100 lexemes in the FP variety of Gaby, extracted randomly from a larger corpus (330 lexemes, mainly nouns, from the traditional agricultural domain)6

4 On the ambiguous notion of Dachsprache ‘roof language’ in sociolinguistics cf. Berruto (2012). In particular one should keep apart the linguistic “roof” (in the sense of linguistic relatedness) from the sociolinguistic “roof” (in the sense of sociolinguistic dominance). 5 As can be elicited by explicitly activating lexical competence in speakers, in a way similar to that of traditional linguistic atlases. 6 The domain “agriculture and vegetation” scores relatively high (6th out of 22 categories) on the borrowing scale in Haspelmath and Tadmor’s (2009) loanword database: this might be due to the fact that farming and agricultural techniques tend to be frequently borrowed (together with their lexicon) between cultures. In addition, the high number of nouns in our corpus provides a bias in terms of higher borrowing probability. See again the results of Haspelmath and Tadmor’s (2009) loanword database and Matras (2009: 166) for a recent discussion of this phenomenon.

provided by a local cultural association currently working on a dictionary of the FP variety of Gaby.7 On this sample we performed a two-layer classification of the etymological origin of words with the aim of reconstructing the reciprocal dominance relationships in this area of language contact. A clear-cut classification of words as belonging to the Germanic (Upper German) or the Romance stratum is not an easy task.8 Since our aim is to find lexical correspondences between FP and Walser German, besides the usual instru- ments for historical linguistic research in these varieties, namely the Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (REW) for Romance, the Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (FEW) for French, and Grimm and Grimm’s Deutsches Worterbuch (DWB) for German, we also considered local dictionaries of Issime and Gressoney (Walser Kulturzentrum 1988–1998a,b), the Schweizerdeutsches Idiotikon (ID), and the online dictionary for FP varieties of the Aosta Valley.9 We wanted to distinguish lexical influences into the FP variety of Gaby that could derive directly from contact with (Walser) German dialects, as opposed to that from the inherited Romance lexicon. In order to do so, we decided not to regard as relevant whether a word attributed to the Romance stratum may in fact be of Pre-Roman or Pre-Indo- European, or even Germanic (but not directly derived from Walser German) origin. Accordingly, for example, Gaby lexemes such as brèn ‘bran’, rahtél ‘rake’, raya ‘steep path in the peaks’, trifoula ‘potato’ are classified as Romance. However, a clear Latin etymology can be found only for rahtél (

7 The group “Tsèi de la móda dou Gòbi” is working under the supervision of Andrea Rolando. A sketch of the project can be found in Tsei dei la móda dou Gòbi (2015). The 330 word list in the domain of farming and agriculture is the first that was made available to us by the group. We thank Michele Musso of the cultural association “Augusta” from Issime for linking us with the project. 8 See Haspelmath (2009: 43–45) for a discussion of similar methodological problems concern- ing Wanderwörter and “areal roots”. 9 Available here: http://www.patoisvda.org/it/index.cfm/dizionario-francoprovenzale-parole- patois.html.

Table 1: Romance and Germanic strata in the lexicon of Gaby.

Stratum Number of lexemes %

Romance  . Germanic  . unclear  .

We also sought correspondences between the lexical types in the dialect of Gaby (and, when available in our database, in the FP variety of Niel) and those in Gressoney and Issime Walser German varieties as documented in the local dictionaries (Walser Kulturzentrum 1988–1998a,b), when a comparable meaning could be found. When the same lexical type is shared across the language border, it may logically belong to either the German or the Romance stratum, although proportions are expected to differ, because of the asymmetrical sociolinguistic relations. In any case, the presence of shared lexemes of either German or Romance origin shows that contact influence has long been bidirectional, at least in the semantic domain of agriculture and farming. In a context of asymmetrical sociolinguistic dominance one would expect shared lexicon to come from the same etymological source (either Germanic or Romance), but not from both. Table 2 summarizes these first findings.

Table 2: Lexical correspondences between Gaby and Issime/Gressoney.

Lexical similarities to Gaby Germanic Romance

Issime and Gressoney   Issime  Gressoney 

Table 2 shows that when a lexical type is shared by all dialects in this micro- region it has good chances to be of Germanic origin, which probably means that it has spread from one of the two Walser dialects to the FP enclave of Gaby. On the other hand, if one considers Issime and Gaby with the exclusion of Gressoney, the Romance component is much stronger in the resulting shared vocabulary. In this case it is more likely that the direction of loanwords is from FP to the Issime variety of Walser German. However the amount of data in this first sample is too small to provide enough cases of lexical overlap across varieties in order to test hypotheses of directionality of change or relative distance among varieties. To verify such hypotheses we need a larger sample of correspondences (i.e., of shared vocabulary) which will be discussed in Section 3.

3 Lexical correspondences in the micro-region

We next analyze a second list of 130 lexemes (again extracted from the “Tsei dei la móda dou Gòbi” database) which constitutes a biased sample of those lexical items in the vocabulary of the FP variety of Gaby (and Niel) sharing similarities with at least one of the two Walser German varieties in contact (i.e. Issime and Gressoney). Apart from the bias of horizontal commonalities across linguistic varieties, we can consider the list a random sample of the lexicon covering different word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, some multi-word expressions) and a wider sample of semantic fields compared to the first list examined in Section 2 (objects of everyday life, feelings, foods, etc., as well as farming and agriculture terms). Again, the lexical types of Gaby and Niel dialects belonging to this second list have been tagged according to their etymological stratum – once more following the rough distinction of “Germanic” and “Romance” strata outlined in Section 2. Given that we are examining the lexicon of four varieties spoken in the same micro-region at the Romance-Germanic language border, one would expect bidirectional borrowing between the Romance varieties and Walser German.10 Our objective in examining the lexemes in the list is to provide quantitative support to this hypothesis. We first exemplify the lexical types found in the list and the most frequent patterns of similarity. As we have seen in Section 2, the German stratum in the lexicon of Gaby is rare, the Romance/FP stratum is dominant. The situation is different in the second list (selected on the basis of shared vocabulary between Gaby and the Walser communities), where the German stratum isthesourceof52/130items,while45/130 items belong to the Romance stratum.10/130maybecognatesfoundinboth language traditions. The remaining 23/130 are of unclear origins. As anticipated in Section 1, we encountered some difficulties in tagging the sample, both in attributing the stratum to each item and in recognizing a pattern of similarity across the varieties. First, difficulties derive from loanwords having often undergone remarkable phonological changes in the borrowing language, obfuscating their relation to the source item. For example, we recognized as deriving from the same item, cognate to German ertrinken ‘to drown’, a verb meaning ‘to suffocate’ or ‘to drown’ in Gaby/Niel ahtégner, in Issime artrénghien, and in Gressoney ertrénge. A similar case may be that of Gaby/Niel cheiquia ‘hairstyle, combing’ connected to Issime scheitju and Gressoney scheitiò, both meaning ‘parting of the hair’.

10 Despite the fact that language contact theories often assume that “borrowing is typically an asymmetrical process – like other language-contact processes” (Myers-Scotton 2002: 238). See also Weinreich (2011: 61).

Further difficulties derive from the semantic drift of lexical items once they are borrowed, but sometimes also because their meaning has already changed in Walser German, especially in the Issime variety. For example Niel jméc ‘snuff, powdered tobacco’ may be connected to Issime schméckhjen ‘smell’, schméckhu ‘sense of smell’, and Gressoney schmecke ‘smell’, but clearly they do not share the same meaning. Thus the semantic drift in FP must have occurred after the borrowing. On the other hand, in the case of Gaby reura and Niel ruara ‘dandelion’, we can recognize a relation to Gressoney rérò ‘cane’ (connected to ròr ‘pipe’, cf. German Rohr), but its cognate in Issime Walser German, rüaru – which is closer to the forms found in Gaby and Niel – means “dandelion” like the borrowed forms, thus suggesting that the change in meaning occurred in Issime Walser German prior to borrowing into FP. The semantic level has important consequences in identifying similarity patterns. Judging semantic similarity of two terms is a problematic task that is difficult to operationalize. The aforementioned examples of jméc and reura are quite clear cases in which we have decided that, despite phonological resem- blance, different terms across the varieties should not be considered similar enough to connect them: for example the different meaning of Gressoney rérò compared to Issime rüaru forced us to consider that the best translational correspondents of Gaby reura in the variety of Gressoney were instead schwi- bliemo, schwimejò (both meaning literally ‘pig flower’)ortschikoriò (a loan from Romance, cf. Italian cicoria), all meaning ‘dandelion’. The sample also comprises some examples of loan integration from a morphological point of view (cf. Zürrer 2009: 129–139). A first noteworthy example concerns verbal borrowing: loan verbs are integrated in the productive verb classes of each variety in both directions – Germanic verbs in FP, Romance verbs in Walser German. Only infinitive forms are available in the present sample, but they show the relevant endings: – from Germanic: Issime hückhjen, Gressoney hocke > Gaby houccòr-se, Niel houccòr-se ‘to squat’; besides integration in the verb class, this verb acquires the middle marking se, cognate to reflexive marking, which is typically used in Romance with verbs belonging to the class of non-translational motion verbs (cf. German sitzen vs. Italian sedersi ‘to sit’). – from Romance: Gaby cracòr, Niel cracoar > Issime kreckun ‘to creak’; it has a correspondent in French craquer, but being imitative it could also be independently coined. Nonetheless, in Gressoney we find a different lexical type: rätschkò/rétschkò ‘creaking of a floor/of shoes’.

A similar phenomenon is observed for nouns: feminine nouns (belonging to the -u/-ò class in Issime and Gressoney varieties) are integrated in Gaby and Niel

FP varieties in the noun class ending in –a (preserving gender). The same holds in the opposite direction: – from Germanic: Issime lutzu, Gressoney lòtzò > Gaby loutsa, Niel loutsa ‘sewage’; – from Romance: Gaby djèra, Niel djéara > Issime dscheeru, Gressoney dŝchärò ‘gravel’.

The example of verbs shows that all varieties considered can use a loan verb as if it were part of the inherited vocabulary, simply adding to the borrowed root non-borrowed morphological endings without the need of special syntactic or morphological strategies. The case of feminine nouns goes further and shows the depth of knowledge of the language of the neighboring linguistic group. A superficial loan would have led a Romance speaker to more likely interpret nouns of the Walser German -u/-ò class as masculine (Gaby asou ‘donkey’, prò ‘lawn’). A fairly similar ending is available in some FP lexemes of feminine gender, which are, however, derived nouns with final stress – for example Gaby tsartounò ‘content of a basket’ from tsahton ‘conical basket’. Thus, the process of borrowing Walser German feminine nouns into the varieties of Gaby and Niel is not superficial. It entails at least two stages, the first of which requires good knowledge of the Walser language system. First, Walser German nouns ending in -u/-ò are recognized as belonging to a class of feminine nouns. Second, a connection is made between that class of nouns in Walser varieties and the productive native Romance class of feminine nouns ending in -a. These briefly-sketched processes have made it possible to identify patterns of similarity between the varieties spoken in the upper Lys Valley. In some cases a lexical type is shared by all four varieties and may be of either Germanic (31 items) or Romance origin (15 items). Five residual cases are of unclear origin and eight are attested in both linguistic traditions. An additional example of lexemes of German stratum is Gaby gròbou, Niel groabo, Issime groabe, Gressoney groabe, ‘trench in the cowshed’, connected to German Graben ‘ditch’. We have already mentioned Gaby djèra, a Romance lexical type also found in Niel and, more importantly, in Issime and Gressoney. Further examples of lexemes of Romance stratum may be the adjectives of Romance origin meaning ‘insipid, without salt’–Gaby/Niel fat, Issime/Gressoney fatt – and ‘limp’–Gaby/Niel fiap, Issime fiep, Gressoney flap. Another group of items encompasses cases in which the Gressoney variety shows a different lexical type from all other varieties: we may find in this group lexemes of either Germanic (7 items) or Romance stratum (18 items). We have already mentioned the case of Gaby reura ‘dandelion’, a Germanic word also attested in Gressoney, but with a clearly different referent (Gressoney rérò

‘cane’). Another example is that of Gaby zétsi,Nielzétsie and Issime setzi: these lexemes are all connected to German setzen ‘to sit’, and refer to the same object, i.e., a special kind of children’s chair. A loan from Romance is used in Gressoney to name a similar object: the lexeme kariélé which is the diminutive form of kariò ‘chair’. In another set of items a Romance loan does not spread into the Walser variety of Gressoney. We mention a few examples: the words for ‘cellar’–Gaby crota, Niel crouata, Issime kruatu, but Gressoney chär – and the words for ‘potato’–Gaby/Niel trìffoula, Issime trüffulu (but also heerdöpfil), while in Gressoney we find héerfél (originally from a compound meaning literally “earth-apple”). The most frequent patterns encountered, covering 96/130 items of the second list are the cases in which either all four varieties share the same lexical type – either Germanic or Romance – (60/130 items), or Gaby, Niel and Issime varieties share a lexical type different from that found in Gressoney (36/130 items); to this second group we must add 10 items for which we could not find a clear corresponding lexeme for Gressoney. As far as the stratum is concerned, 52 items have a Germanic source while 45 items have a Romance origin. In 10 further items (8 of which are attested with the same meaning in all three varieties) the corresponding lexeme in Gaby can be attributed to both a Romance and a Germanic stratum (for which a clear inheritance path cannot be traced – pre-Roman Alpine vocabulary and onomatopoeia). Finally, it was hard to agree upon a clear affinity to the Romance or Germanic stratum for 23 remaining items. Table 3 cross-tabulates these variables.

Table 3: Similarity patterns and strata.

Germanic ¬Germanic n

Gaby = Niel = Issime = Gressoney    Gaby = Niel = Issime≠Gressoney    TOTAL   

¬Germanic includes items of Romance stratum and unclear source. We excluded from Table 3 24 residual patterns in which either we find no term for the Gaby variety (but available for Niel) or it is of Germanic origin but is different from what is attested in Walser German varieties.

Since we are dealing with a dataset of lexemes shared by all four dialects, or by three out of four (excluding Gressoney Walser German), if due to chance, the four possible cases would have yielded four sets of 26 items. Instead, we

observed frequencies significantly higher than expected in two cases (χ2 = 14.9;

df =3;ptwo-tailed < 0.001). One is the crossing of Germanic items with the uniform pattern (32/106 items), the second is the crossing of non-Germanic items with the pattern which excludes Gressoney (36/106 items). The first case indicates that if a lexical type is shared by all varieties, then in significantly more than half of the cases it goes back to a Germanic stratum. In contrast, the second case shows that, when Gressoney is the excluded variety, Germanic is the stratum of the lexical type shared in less than one case out of four. Beyond the three most frequent patterns of similarity, all showing a close affinity of Gaby, Niel and Issime – in which Gressoney is included only in a subset of cases – 24 further patterns emerge. These patterns show the absence of one or more varieties from the horizontal comparison of lexical types, but the similarities (or differences) among the lexical types of the remaining varieties may reinforce or weaken the general trend. Therefore a different method should be used to evaluate the whole list of patterns, a method that can plot the relative distance among varieties based on the considered sample: we used Hamming distance.11 The similarity patterns that we have defined by tagging the biased sample of Gaby lexicon can straightforwardly be classified in this method by attributing to the lexical types of each community a 1 if a lexical type is similar to that of Gaby (or of Niel if the datum for Gaby is lacking) or a 0 if it is different. For example, taking Gaby as reference point, the pattern “Gaby = Niel = Issime = Gressoney” can be represented as a sequence of four 1s (in the sense that all dialects share the same lexotype), while the pattern “Gaby = Niel = Issime≠Gressoney” becomes a sequence of three 1s and one 0; further, the pattern where the datum for Gressoney is lacking corresponds to a sequence of three 1s and one dash, meaning a lack of information, which will be ignored by the algorithm. An excerpt of this matrix, in which Gaby is always the reference variety, is showninTable4. Given our biased sample, which highlights similarities between Gaby/Niel varieties and Issime or Gressoney varieties, or both, the distance matrix – which

11 Hamming distance is used to build distance matrices which are the starting point of several methods used in biology for representing the genetic or phenetic similarity of species. We used SplitsTree4 (Huson and Bryant 2006) to calculate the distance matrix from our data. Calculating Hamming distance is part of the procedure for drawing net-like graphs representing the relation of zoological taxa (cf. Bryant and Moulton 2004). This kind of representation has been used in linguistics to show greater or lesser similarity of languages in a linguistic family and is preferred over the traditional genealogical trees when working with varieties exposed to a high amount of contact with one another (McMahon and McMahon 2006: 139–140). A recent example of use of Hamming distance and of net-like graphs is found in von Waldenfels (2012).

Table 4: Similarity patterns converted to a matrix for use in SplitsTree4.

Gaby Niel Issime Gressoney

Gaby = Niel = Issime = Gressoney    Gaby≠Issime = Gressoney  –  Gaby = Issime = Gressoney≠Niel    Gaby = Issime≠Niel≠Gressoney    Gaby = Niel = Gressoney  –  Gaby = Niel = Gressoney≠Issime    Gaby≠Niel = Issime = Gressoney    Gaby≠Niel = Issime≠Gressoney    Niel = Issime≠Gressoney –   Gaby = Niel = Issime≠Gressoney    …

does not take into account stratal aspects – must be interpreted carefully. While it can be used to evaluate the similarity of Gaby (and Niel) to either Issime or Gressoney, it cannot be used to infer the degree of similarity between the two Walser German varieties, because the sample does not take into account the wealth of their shared inherited vocabulary. Conversely the distance matrix cannot be used to compare the affinity of Gaby and Niel. Table 5 shows the Hamming distance values between the two FP and the two Walser German varieties.

Table 5: Hamming distances calculated between FP and Walser German varieties.

Issime Gressoney

Gaby . . Niel . .

Table 5 shows that Gressoney is very distant from both Gaby (0.434) and Niel (0.374): around five and seven times respectively more than Issime. This result is in line with what we have observed by jointly interpreting the data about patterns of similarity in the sample and strata of the relevant lexical types. The data of Gressoney situate the Walser variety at one end in the horizontal comparison, while the other three varieties pattern together in this sample despite their different genealogical membership. Issime, which appears closer than Gressoney to the Francoprovençal varieties in this sample, is even closer to Niel (0.056) than to Gaby (0.091).

4 Conclusions

This analysis, though limited to a section of the lexicon, has confirmed the composite nature of the FP varieties of Gaby and Niel in the micro-region of the upper Lys valley. On the one hand, the “Matrioshka” model that characterizes the upper Lys valley has proven to be valid as far as the diffusion of Germanic lexical types in Gaby and Niel varieties is concerned. As expected, since Gaby is surrounded by a Walser German area, it undergoes pressure from that linguistic community, adopting many lexical items from the Germanic stratum. That said, the analysis also suggests limitations of the “Matrioshka” model. In fact, the distances between varieties calculated on the basis of similarity patterns in the lexicon have shown that Issime is far closer to both Niel and Gaby than is Gressoney. This should not be the case in a model in which all surrounding Walser German varieties are supposed to be equally distant from the FP enclave. This closeness can be explained by the fact that during the same time span Issime and Gaby have shared the same territory, while that of Gressoney has been culturally and linguistically homogeneous. This has produced an adstra- tum relationship between Issime and Gaby which is the cause of many bidirectional influences. The Romance influence on Gressoney and its similarities with Gaby may thus be the effect of superstratum phenomena due to the surrounding Romance-speaking area, and not of direct borrowing from Gaby FP. Therefore the model proposed in Figure 1 can be revised as in Figure 3. The last traces of the Walser German variety of Niel, inherited in the FP idiolect of a few speakers, is likely the reason why Issime and Niel varieties emerged closer than Issime and Gaby varieties.

Northwestern Italy: ITALIAN AND GALLO-ITALIC VARIETIES

Aosta Region: FRENCH AND FRANCOPROVEN

Upper Lys valley: WALSER GERMAN

Issime: WALSER Gaby: GABY GERMAN FRANCOPROVEN

Figure 3: Minority/majority relations in the upper Lys valley (revised).

The analysis of the upper Lys Valley lexical systems has shown how complex contact relationships can be in a bordering area characterized by linguistically and culturally interwoven speech communities. The reciprocal embedding of these communities, all subordinate to a broader Italo-Romance influence, calls for careful approaches when dealing with minority languages as regards dominance relations (and thus directionality of contact and change): areal diffusion of linguistic features, albeit on a micro-regional level, can play a meaningful role.

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