Language
While most Corsicans spoke a Corsican dialect at home, until the first half of the 19th-century Italian was the language most publicly spoken and written on the island.
The first Corsican Constitution, for the short-lived Corsican Republic established in 1755, was written in Italian and Paoli proclaimed Italian as the official language of Corsica. Italian was the 'language of culture' in Corsica until the end of the 19th century. Even Paoli's second Corsican Constitution, for the Anglo-Corsican Kingdom in 1794, was in Italian. In the second half of the 19th century French replaced Italian, mainly because of Napoleon III. The Corsican dialect started to be used by Corsican intellectuals.
The actual Corsican language is directly related to the Tuscan dialect of Pisa, an Italian city that dominated the island before Genoa. In the north of the island (Calvi), there is a local dialect very similar to the medieval Genoese. In the mountainous interior of Corsica there is a significant number of villages where nearly all the inhabitants speak Corso, a medieval Pisan dialect mixed with Sardinian words.
The extreme similarity of the Corso to Italian can be seen in an example phrase:
Corso: Sò natu in Corsica è g'aghju passatu i megli anni di a mio ghjuventù
Italian: Sono nato in Corsica e ci ho passato i migliori anni della mia gioventù
English: I was born in Corsica and spent the best years of my youth there
Nearly 12% of Corsicans speak Italian, while three-quarters understand it thanks to the television programmes from Italy.
The irredentist Marco Angeli di Sartèna wrote the first book in "Corso" (titled Terra còrsa) in 1924 and many lyrics (titled Malincunie) in Ajaccio. He created and wrote the newspaper «Gioventù» of the "Partito Corso d'azione", partially in Italian and Corsican.
Today Italian Corsicans speak French fluently, but most of them are second-language speakers.
Read more about this topic: Italian Irredentism In Corsica
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
“Translate a book a dozen times from one language to another, and what becomes of its style? Most books would be worn out and disappear in this ordeal. The pen which wrote it is soon destroyed, but the poem survives.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is ... in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)