Linguistic identity of an alloglot minority language in Apulia (southern Italy)

Faeto’s Francoprovençal

Abstract

Faetar is a Franco-Provençal language spoken in a small community near Foggia, in southern Italy (in Apulia region), which owes its origin to Franco-Provençal settlements dating back to the 13th century. Franco-Provençal, although it remains quite vital in Italy, is considered today an endangered language, which UNESCO has included in its Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Through an auditory and spectrographic analysis of different data, we will interpret many phonetic features of the Franco-Provençal spoken in Faeto, and we will compare them with Franco-Provençal acoustic data collected in France (which are close to the Faetar geographical area), as well as with French acoustic data.

The aim is to assess the synchronic variety of southern Italian Faetar, in relation to the Franco-Provençal variety of France, and to identify the phonetic features belonging to the two varieties in contact: the southern Italo-Romance varieties and the Franco-Provençal variety. This is to build a diachronic and synchronic grammar of this unique blend dialect shown by language contact.