[From Peter K. Austin, Endangered Languages Academic Programme, SOAS]
I spent last week in Lyon working on plans for collaborative teaching and research with Colette Grinevald and her colleagues at Lyon-2 University and the CNRS DDL research laboratory. This will include a summer school on language documentation planned for June-July 2008 (we will announce more details soon), joint workshops and conferences, and development of a European Masters programme.
On Saturday (31st March) Michel Bert, who also teaches at Lyon-2 and is a researcher in the CNRS ICAR research laboratory, invited Colette and me to accompany him south from Lyon along the Rhône River to visit the field sites where he has been collecting data on the Franco-Provençal language over the past 10 years. Michel's PhD dissertation is a detailed study of this language based on data he collected from over 150 consultants.
Franco-Provençal is a Gallo-Romance language related to French and Occitan (Provençal) spoken in central France (it was the language of Lyon before French arrived), western Switzerland (including Geneva) and the Val D’Aosta region of north-west Italy – the name Franco-Provençal was invented by the linguist G.I. Ascoli in 1878 because he believed the language shares features with both French and Provençal. It is called “patois” or “romand” by locals; some people prefer “Arpitan” (meaning ‘alpine’) because they dislike the mixed connotation of the term Franco-Provençal. There is an informative Wikipedia entry (the %C3%A7 represents c-cedilla!) and Ethnologue has some rather inaccurate information.
The language has very low status throughout France and Switzerland and has been losing ground rapidly to French – only in Val D’Aosta in Italy does it have official status, including being taught in school. There is a lot of available dialectological information on the language, including video clips from the Valais region in Switzerland, and a Vuiquipèdia (Wikipedia) . Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is virtually no language documentation-type material, eg. genres others than wordlists and narratives, such as conversations.
Along the Rhône south of Lyon where we went on Saturday the language has virtually disappeared and become stratified according to altitude. In villages along the river it is now extinct (Michel recorded the last speakers who have since died), in villages on the plateau above the river the remaining speakers are in their 70’s and 80’s, and it is only in isolated villages above 1000 metres that speakers in their 60’s are found. Interestingly it is now essentially a men’s language, being spoken by older farmers to their sons, since women have switched to the more prestigious French.
When talking to Michel about his fieldwork experiences tons of similarities came up to ‘transient languages’ work that I have done in Australia and Colette in Latin America, eg. the “expert” everyone in the community recommends but who doesn’t know much, as against the “ignorant peasant” who is socially isolated but speaks the language fluently. There are also semi-speakers whose fluency has increased during the time Michel has been working with them and who now have become the “last speakers” as the older generation passes on (“long live the last speaker!” as Nick Evans wrote). Due to the political climate in France however there is little non-academic support for the language there.
It was interesting to me to see all this just an hour by car outside of greater Lyon, which claims itself to be the second largest city in France.