Ligurian language (Romance).html |
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- Ligurian is also the name of an extinct language of Italy.
| Ligurian Lígustico, Ligure, Zeneize |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: |  Italy France Monaco |
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| Region: | Liguria | |
| Total speakers: | 2,000,000 | |
| Language family: | Indo-European Romance Italo-Western Western Gallo-Iberian Gallo-Romance Gallo-Italic Ligurian |
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| Official status | ||
| Official language in: | Officially recognized in Italy (Law 482/1999) | |
| Regulated by: | no official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | roa | |
| ISO 639-3: | lij | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Ligurian is a Gallo-Romance language, currently spoken in Liguria, northern Italy, and parts of the Mediterranean coastal zone of France, and Monaco. Genoese (Zeneize or Zeneise) is one of the most well-known dialects, spoken in Genoa, the capital of Liguria.
It belongs to the Northern Italian group within the Romance languages.
The language may be dying out, but is still widely spoken by many, especially the elderly, out of a population of 2,000,000.
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Geographic extent
Besides Liguria, the language is traditionally spoken in coastal, northern Tuscany, southern Piedmont (part of the province of Alessandria), western extremes of Emilia-Romagna (some areas in the province of Piacenza), in northern parts of Sardinia (Italy), the Alpes-Maritimes of France (Mostly the Côte d'Azur from the Italian border to and including Monaco), and parts of Corsica (France). It has been adopted formally in Monaco as the Monegasque language; or locally, Munegascu.
Niçard, of the County of Nice, is considered by some scholars to have been a Ligurian language before the annexation of the region to France in 1860.1 In any event, it is seen as a transitional Occitan language dialect very similar to Ligurian.
In Italy, the language has given way to Standard Italian and in France to French.
Linguistic structure
Ligurian exhibits distinct Italian features, while also having features of other Romance languages. No link between Romance Ligurian and the Ligurian language of the ancient Ligurian populations, in the form of a substrate or otherwise, can be demonstrated by linguistic evidence. There does exist, however, toponomastic derivations from ancient Ligurian.
Variants
Ligurian strains are:
- Zeneize, Genoa main ligurian variant
- Mentonasc
- Monegasco
- Intemelio
- Brigasc
- Tabarkino
- Bonifacino
- Calvino
Alphabet
The ligurian alphabet has:
- 6 vowels: a, e, i, o, u, y
- 18 consonants: b, c, ç, d, f, g, h, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, z.
Vocabulary
- a péia: pear (It. and Sp. pera, Pt. pêra)
- u méi: apple (It. mela)
- u setrun: orange (cf. Fr. citron; replacing Gen. limon--cf. It. limone)
- u fîgu: fig (It. fico Fr. figue)
- u pèrsegu: peach (Fr. pêche, Cat. préssec)
- u rîbes: currant
- u franbuâse: raspberry (Fr. framboise)
- a sêsgia: cherry (it. ciliegia, Fr. cerise)
- u mêlu: strawberry
- a nûsge: hazelnut (Fr. noisette)
- l'arbicòca: apricot (Cat. albercoc)
- l'üüga: grape (Sp. uva)
- u pinjöö: pine nut (It. pinolo)
- arvî: to open (It. aprire, Fr. ouvrir, Sp. abrir)
- serâ: to close (Sp. cerrar)
- u cèeu: light
- a cà: home, house (casa; Cat. and Ven: ca)
- l'öövu: egg (It. uovo)
- l'ögiu: eye (It. occhio, Fr. l'œil, Cat. ull)
- a buca: mouth (bocca)
- a tésta: head (It. testa)
- a schèn-a: back (Cat. esquena)
- u cüü: derrière, buttock (Fr. and Cat. cul)
- u brasu: arm (Fr. bras)
- a gamba: leg (It. gamba, Fr. jambe, Cat. cama)
- u cöö: heart (Fr. cœur)
References
External links
See also
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