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] Brought to you by | Biblioteca della Libera Università di Bolzano Library of the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano Bibliothek der Freien Universität Bozen Authenticated Download Date | 10/19/18 2:45 PM 136 Silvia Dal Negro and Marco Angster 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. Brought to you by | Biblioteca della Libera Università di Bolzano Library of the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano Bibliothek der Freien Universität Bozen Authenticated Download Date | 10/19/18 2:45 PM Francoprovençal in contact with Walser German 137 Figure 2: The upper Lys Valley. The whole white area corresponds to the domain of Romance varieties. Brought to you by | Biblioteca della Libera Università di Bolzano Library of the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano Bibliothek der Freien Universität Bozen Authenticated Download Date | 10/19/18 2:45 PM 138 Silvia Dal Negro and Marco Angster 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). Brought to you by | Biblioteca della Libera Università di Bolzano Library of the Free University of Bozen/Bolzano Bibliothek der Freien Universität Bozen Authenticated Download Date | 10/19/18 2:45 PM Francoprovençal in contact with Walser German 139 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.

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