Genevois Dialect - History

History

Franco-Provençal emerged as a Gallo-Roman variety of Latin. The linguistic region comprises east-central France, western portions of Switzerland, and the Aosta Valley of Italy with the adjacent alpine valleys of the Piedmont. This area covers territories once occupied by pre-Roman Celtic peoples, including the Allobroges, Sequani, Helvetii, Ceutrones, and Salassi. By the 5th century, the region was controlled by Burgundian tribes.

Franco-Provençal is first attested in manuscripts from the 12th century, possibly diverging from Langue d'Oïl as early as the 8th-9th centuries (Bec, 1971). One writer has detected the influence of Basque by analyzing "fossil words" ("mots fossiles") from toponyms and the dialect in the Aosta Valley. However, Franco-Provençal is consistently typified by a strict, myopic comparison to French, and for that reason, is characterized as "conservative". Thus, commentators, like Désormaux, consider "medieval" the terms for many nouns and verbs, including e.g., pâta "rag", bayâ "to give", moussâ "to lie down", all of which are conservative only relative to French. As an example, Désormaux, writing on this pont in the foreword of his Savoyard dictionary states:

The antiquated character of the Savoyard patois is striking. One can note it not only in phonetics and morphology, but also in the vocabulary, where one finds numerous words and directions that clearly disappeared from French.

Franco-Provençal failed to garner the cultural prestige of its three more widely spoken neighbors: French, Occitan, and Italian. Communities where speakers lived were generally mountainous and isolated from one another. The internal boundaries of the entire speech area were divided by wars and religious conflicts. France, Switzerland, the Franche-Comté (protected by Habsburg Spain), and the duchy — later kingdom — ruled by the House of Savoy politically divided the region. The strongest possibility for any dialect of Franco-Provençal to establish itself as a major language died when an edict, dated 6 January 1539, was confirmed in the parliament of the Duchy of Savoy on 4 March 1540. The edict explicitly replaced Latin (and by implication, any other language) with French as the language of law and the courts (Grillet, 1807, p. 65).

Franco-Provençal dialects were widely spoken in their speech areas until the 20th century. As French political power expanded and the "single-national-language" doctrine was spread through French-only education, Franco-Provençal speakers abandoned their language, which had numerous spoken variations and no standard spelling system, in favor of culturally prestigious French.