Italian Irredentism in Nice - Language

Language

In Nice the language of Church, Municipality, Law, School, Theatre was always the Italian language....From 460 AD to the mid-19th century the County of Nice counted 269 writers, not including the still living. Of these 269 writers, 90 used Italian, 69 Latin, 45 Italian and Latin, 7 Italian and French, 6 Italian with Latin and French, 2 Italian with Nizzardo dialect and French, 2 Italian and Provençal.

Augustus conquered the Nice territory, populated by Ligures, and left a monument (Trophy of the Alps) with the names of the Ligurian tribes: these names are the first evidence of the Italic language spoken in the County of Nice. The Ligurians were fully Romanized in the following centuries and their Latin language became an Italic, Western Romance language during the Middle Ages.

Before the year 1000 the area of Nice was part of the Ligurian League, under the Republic of Genoa, and the population spoke the dialect common to western Liguria that today is called Intemelio . The medieval writer Dante Alighieri wrote, in his Divine Comedy, that the river Var, near Nice, was the western limit of the Italian Liguria.

Around the 12th century Nice came under the French House of Anjou, who favoured the immigration of peasants from Provence who brought their Occitan language. In those years, the people of the mountainous areas of the upper Var valley started to lose their Ligurian linguistic characteristics and began to adopt Provençal influences. From 1388 to 1860 the County of Nice was under the Savoyard rule and remained connected to the Italian dialects and peninsula. In those centuries the local dialect of Nice, known as Niçard, was similar to Monégasque (of the Principality of Monaco) but with more Occitan influences.

Most scholars today classify Niçard as a dialect of Occitan and Monégasque as a dialect of Ligurian, but Sue Wright wrote that, prior to when the Kingdom of Sardinia ceded the County of Nice to France, Nice was not French-speaking before the annexation but underwent a shift to French in a short space of time...and is surprising that the local Italian dialect, the Nissart, disappeared quickly from the private domain".

She also wrote that one of the main reasons of the disappearance of the Italian language in the County was because "(m)any of the administrative class under Piedmont-Savoy ruler, the soldiers, jurists, civil servants and professionals who used Italian in their working lives, moved after annexation to Piedmont. Their places and roles were taken by incomers from France".

Indeed, immediately after 1861, the French government closed all the newspapers in Italian and more than 11,000 Nizzardo Italians moved to the Kingdom of Italy. The dimension of the "exodus" can be deducted by the fact that in the Savoy census of 1858, Nice had only 44,000 inhabitants. In 1881 the New York Times wrote that before the French annexation the Nizzards were quite as much Italians as the Genoese, and their dialect was, if anything, nearer the Tuscan than is the harsh dialect of Genoa.

In twenty years the Nizzardo Italians were reduced to a small minority and even Niçard was increasingly assimilated by Occitan, with many French loanwords. (Modern-day linguists usually hold that Niçard is an Occitan dialect.)

Giuseppe Garibaldi defined his "Nizzardo" as an Italian dialect, albeit with strong similarities to Occitan and with some French influences, and for this reason promoted the union of Nice to the Kingdom of Italy.

Even today some scholars (like the German Werner Forner, the French Jean-Philippe Dalbera and the Italian Giulia Petracco Sicardi) agree that the Niçard has some characteristics (phonetical, lexical and morphological) that are typical of the western Ligurian language. The French scholar Bernard Cerquiglini pinpoints in his Les langues de France the actual existence of a Ligurian minority in Tende, Roquebrune and Menton, a remnant of a bigger mediaeval "Ligurian" area that included Nice and most of the coastal County of Nice.

Another reduction in the number of the Nizzardo Italians happened after World War II, when the defeated Italy was forced to surrender to France the small mountainous area of the County of Nice that had retained in 1860. From the Val di Roia, Tenda and Briga one quarter of the local population moved to Italy in 1947.

In the century of nationalism between 1850 and 1950, the Nizzardo Italians were reduced from the 70% majority of the 125,000 living in the County of Nice at the time of the French annexation to the actual minority of nearly two thousand (in the area of Tende and Menton) today.

Nowadays, Nizzardo Italians are fluent in French, but a few of them still speak the original Ligurian-influenced language of Nissa La Bella.