What am I saying? Isn’t this column supposed to be about Italian? Well, yes, but it’s also about Italy’s famous dialects, and today we are going to learn about one that maybe is not so famous: the “language” that is spoken in the region Valle d’Aosta, at the very north-west of Italy. What is it? Well, it’s kind of a complicated answer so let’s take a look at it.

The dialect itself has many different names: the official one is Franco-Provençal language, but people commonly refer to it as the Valdôtèn dialect, and the locals called it patois, from a word that meant “paw,” which originally referred to the low, rural people who spoke it. However, patois has lost any negative connotation. Yeah, the premise seems kind of interesting already.

But what is it really? Those names sound nothing like Italian, right? Well, you are correct. This particular language spoken in this area is not as related to Italian as you may expect it to be for a lot of historical reasons. Maybe the easiest to think about is that the Valle d’Aosta area has always been part of those lands that both France and Italy have historically wanted, along with Savoy, for example.

But if Italy claimed it too, why don’t they sound like many other dialects nearby, like the Piedmonts’? The answer is that the people that inhabited the area were one of the people to resist the Roman conquest the longest and because of its geographical conformation of region insulated in the Alps, it boasts a certain separation from its Italian neighbors. So this language ended up taking some elements from both Occitant, also known as lenga d’Òc, a language that derived from Latin and could have become French, and the langue d’oïl, the language that actually became French, but it’s an independent language from them.

However the language has a very interesting shape: it is very much closer to the “original” French than modern French is. Especially in certain areas the patois has kept a lot of the words that French used at the beginning, when it started to be considered French and not Latin anymore. Moreover, patois has even preserved some Celtic words from the pre-Latin period of the region, like blètsì, in Italian mungere, meaning “to milk;” bren, in Italian crusca, meaning “bran;” or baou, in Italian stalla, meaning “barn.” And even some pre-Celtic words, like brenva, in Italian larice, meaning “larch,” or bèrio, in Italian grande roccia, meaning “big rock/stone.” Well, that’s re-dimensioning my idea of conservativism!

But there is some kind of flexibility in this language. First of all we have to divide the area where it’s spoken into two parts: the high valley and the low valley. Now, the high valley is more flexible – if that could be said about patois! – to what is modern French. Throughout the years, it was more open to accept at least some adaptations. The low valley dialect tried to get closer to its neighbor, the Piedmont’s dialect, but it really didn’t try that hard, and it preferred to remain way closer to the “original” French. The most common example that is reported on many websites and texts that talk about this Franco-Provençal language in the case of the “fox.” Yes, the fox is the animal, or to better say the word, that divides the valleys. In the old days, French used to call the fox goupil, but then after the 13^th century thanks to the fable’s character Roman de Renart, who was a very clever human-like fox, French started to use its name as a synonym of fox, and later adopted renard as the common name for fox. Can you guess what the high valley started to call the fox? Yes, renard. And the low valley? Do you think the low valley liked this change? Of course not, so, still to this day, the fox is called gorpeuil there, which is much closer to goupil.

However at the same time, patois has nothing to do with French or Occitant, or even Italian for what it matters. Both Italian and French – as English does – adopted from Latin the Mon-day kind of pattern, which is that the word “day” goes at the end of the word for Monday. Lundi, mardi, in French, or lunedì, martedì, in Italian, and so on. While patois did the exact opposite. It kept the Latin form in which the word for “day” stayed at the beginning of the word. So we have delunen and demartes and so on.

So, you see how the linguistic aspect of this language is very unique and interesting, but is it still spoken? Yes! It actually is the only region where this language is still alive. Actually people in Valle d’Aosta take the preservation of the language very serious, and each year they offer courses to learn the language, they have elementary school programs to keep the language alive and raise awareness among the young, and they have patois’s institutions. Patois’s literature can be found all throughout the 20^th century and there are singers who currently use the language.

It’s kind of incredible that this language managed to maintain its form for this long and its livelihood this long! This language, compared to most of the other Italian dialects, is still very much alive and, above all, kept alive by the Valle d’Aosta region. So I guess the short answer to the very first question – what is it? – is it’s not quite French. It’s patois.