[ from Peter K. Austin, Linguistics Department, SOAS]
Last week my wife, Patrizia Pacioni, and I were having lunch at Da Peppe, a seafood restaurant in the small fishing village of Sant'Angelo in southern Ischia, Italy. We were on two weeks holiday -- no computers, no internet, no work, no talking about linguistics (or linguists). After four days, so far so good.
There were only a few customers in the restaurant, a German couple (German is ubiquitous on Ischia, seen everywhere in signs and advertising and the unmarked language to use to foreigners), ourselves, and two middle-aged men on the table next to us. We could hear them speaking Italian with a northern accent to the serving staff -- Patrizia identified it as a north-western accent, possibly Lombardian. But they were speaking something entirely different with each other. It sounded Romance, and with uvular r and both nasalised and rounded front vowels it was not an Italian dialect. And it was also clearly not French, though the phonetics was somewhat similar. Patrizia took a guess: Franco-Provençal (which I had first encountered in March last year near Lyon and wrote my second ever blog post about). Curiosity got the best of us and so Patrizia asked where they were from -- "Val D'Aosta" came the reply. And the language? "Patois, or Franco-Provençal". Bingo!
We spent the next half hour or so chatting about intergenerational transmission (still strong in some families, though many are switching to being monolingual in Italian), inter-village differences (the two men came from villages 3 km apart and identified lexical differences between their local varieties), changes in the last 50 years, the impact of Italian, and the teaching of patois in schools (the niece of one of the men is a teacher of Franco-Provençal at primary school). Fascinating insights from two very metalinguistically aware native speakers.
After leaving Da Peppe the linguistics-free holiday resumed, but I was amazed at the coincidence of having encountered speakers of Franco-Provençal for only the second time in my life, roughly 950 km away from where I first learned about it.