| Also Known As: Piedmontese,Piemontese,Piemontèis
Description:
Piedmontese (in Italian: Piemontese), (in Piedmontese: Piemontèis) is a Romance language spoken by over 2 million people in Piedmont, northwest Italy. It is geographically and linguistically included in the Northern Italian group (with Lombard, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Ligurian, and Venetian). It is part of the wider western group of Romance languages, including French, Occitan, and Catalan.
Many European and North American linguists (e. g., Einar Haugen, Gianrenzo P. Clivio, Hans Göbl, Helmut Lüdtke, George Bossong, Klaus Bochmann, Karl Gebhardt, and Guiu Sobiela Caanitz) acknowledge Piedmontese as an independent language, though in Italy it is often still considered a dialect. Today it has a certain official status in the Piedmont region of Italy.
Piedmontese was the first language of emigrants who, in the period from 1850 to 1950, left Piedmont for countries such as France, Argentina, and Uruguay.
The first documents in the Piedmontese language were written in the 12th century, the sermones subalpini, when it was extremely close to Occitan. Literary Piedmontese developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, but it did not gain literary esteem comparable to that of French or Italian, other..... full article at Wikipedia |
