Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 2,052 Location: South of the Dordogne
Dialect « Thread Started on Nov 11, 2009, 3:18pm »
Where we used to live in the Herault speaking occitan was not uncommon among the older generation. We had an English friend who was on the commune's council and if they didn't want him to know what they were discussing they would switch to occitan (which seems unfriendly).
Here in the Lot it is little spoken. But there are some words widely used such as patates (we had that it the Herault) for potatoes. And today I was told that in a village 5 kms from us they refer to potatoes as truffes - so we shouldn't get excited if we heard it.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 34,430 Location: Paris, France
Re: Dialect « Reply #1 on Nov 11, 2009, 3:39pm »
I could recognize quite a few vocabulary words of the Vosges dialect when my grandmother was alive. Even though she always spoke standard French in the family, whenever one of her sisters would visit, they would enjoy using some of the terms of their childhood.
Recently I was surprised when one of the nurses at my mother's nursing home came out with a few words of Vosgian dialect, even though she can't be more than about 40 years old.
One widely recognized regional word in Lorraine is brinbelle instead of myrtille (blueberry). This is one of the rare words that holds its ground in the modern world for some reason.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Female Posts: 25,286 Location: Mexico
Re: Dialect « Reply #2 on Nov 11, 2009, 5:29pm »
I got a chuckle out of imagining the Fazes all agitated and bothered from hearing an alternate word.
It is interesting is that Baz is living in an area where a dialect remains alive but is also withering to a few regionalisms. Baz, when you say "older generation", how much older is that? Does that mean that people 50 and younger don't speak Occitan at all?
Also, I believe that Occitan is considered a distinct language, not merely a dialect. There are always debates about that. Perhaps LaGatta can expand on this, but I believe Italian is mostly spoken in Sicily now, and that younger people view Sicilian as quaint and a dialect. On the other hand, there are scholars who say it's a language and who study and write in it.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 2,052 Location: South of the Dordogne
Re: Dialect « Reply #3 on Nov 11, 2009, 9:42pm »
Bixa, in the Herault it is very rare to hear anybody speak occitan. People in their 60s and above might know it but French is what they speak in public. Mrs Faz used to sing in a chorale there and they sang a number of occitan songs. But they also sang French, Italian, Latin and Negro spirituals (coached by someone who was born a few hundred kilometres from Kerouac).
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 34,430 Location: Paris, France
Re: Dialect « Reply #4 on Nov 11, 2009, 9:58pm »
It is interesting to note than in quite a few cities in southwest France, the sign with the name of the city that you see when you enter is both in French and Occitan or Catalan.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Female Posts: 25,286 Location: Mexico
Re: Dialect « Reply #6 on Nov 11, 2009, 10:40pm »
Interesting, Baz! Also interesting about repeating the names on signs. That would seem to indicate that there is a law demanding both names, yes?
I asked about the age range because it appears you're witnessing the decline of a language. When I went off to university in southwest Louisiana in the late '60s, it was quite common to walk into a store and hear the proprietors speaking Cajun French. However, almost no one in my generation who was from a town or city could speak it, although their parents commonly did.
I'd rate Sicilian and Neopolitan as dialects, being pretty comprehensible to Italian speakers once you get used to the changes. Modenese or Mòdna however could easily be classified as a distinct language.
Interesting, Baz! Also interesting about repeating the names on signs. That would seem to indicate that there is a law demanding both names, yes?
French is the only official language of metropolitan France, although there is a "tolerance" of regional languages in certain places. So there is no obligation to put town signs in Occitan or in Breton.
There are actually two reasons for double signage. One of course is regional pride, but the other reason is to stop the sign in French from being defaced by regionalist militant groups. If you give equal importance to both languages, there is less of a chance of being vandalized.
This also happens in Algeria, where the government tried to remove the signs in French at one time. Signs exclusively in Arabic were immediately vandalized.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Female Posts: 25,286 Location: Mexico
Re: Dialect « Reply #9 on Nov 12, 2009, 6:54am »
Lotsa links, but these articles in Absolute Astronomy are really interesting. They don't really help in strictly defining what is dialect and what is a language, though.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Female Posts: 3,980 Location: South-West France
Re: Dialect « Reply #10 on Nov 12, 2009, 12:40pm »
I see town name signs in French and Occitan in some places here in the southwest. In Toulouse a few years ago, they added Occitan signs to street names in the old downtown core. And when I took the subway recently, I discovered that sometime in the past two months, they changed the recordings of the "next stop xxx) from only French to the name both in French and Occitan. Of course, this mostly sounds rather odd -- more like it's being pronounced oddly, except for things like Palais de Justice which become Palàs de Justicio. And I would venture that very few people in Toulouse speak Occitan.
What is often spoken is small regional villages is patois, specific to a small area or village. But then again, mostly by older people. For so long French government policy was to forbid dialects -- I know people in their early 60s who told me that they were punished at school for speaking patois in the schoolyard when they were in primary school.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Female Posts: 25,286 Location: Mexico
Re: Dialect « Reply #11 on Nov 12, 2009, 4:03pm »
Interesting point about a dialect sounding like the standard language being pronounced oddly. That's why it's hard to figure what is dialect and what is officially language. At the risk of offending someone, I have to say that Portuguese sounds to me like Spanish spoken by someone with a speech impediment.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Female Posts: 3,548 Location: Montréal
Re: Dialect « Reply #16 on Nov 17, 2009, 1:06pm »
A speech impediment in French, or in Spanish? (it is fairly easy to understand if one speaks both).
Mutual intelligibility is one thing defining "dialects" as oppose to "languages", but the presence of a literature is another, as is, er, state power. There is an old Yiddish saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
This, as to all the debates about whether Yiddish is a language or a German dialect. Yiddishists will definitely affirm that it is a language, but that is also because they don't particularly like Germans - not just Nazis (duh) but also German-Jewish culture, in the German-speaking countries but also in other parts of Mitteleuropa - think Kafka, Celan and many others.
But even with my fairly rudimentary German, I can understand the daily-life talk of Chassidim who live in a neighbourhood not far from mine, and deliberately isolate themselves. A lot of the words and expressions that aren't standard German sound a lot like what I've heard among Austrians, but it is also true that the main Chassidic community in the aforementioned neighbourhood hail from Hungary, so there is probably more Austrian German and less Slavic in their dialect than among Yiddish speakers from the old Russian empire. I sure as hell wouldn't understand any Hungarian words in what they are saying.
bixa, it is true that even if co-operants from Québec and the Acadian parts of the Maritime provinces go down to Louisiana to revive French, they will be teaching fairly standard French (with a Québécois or Acadian accent of course, but not teaching our patois), not the historic Cajun language.
bixa, it is true that even if co-operants from Québec and the Acadian parts of the Maritime provinces go down to Louisiana to revive French, they will be teaching fairly standard French (with a Québécois or Acadian accent of course, but not teaching our patois), not the historic Cajun language.
This has already happened, LaGatta. My grandmother (b.1899) was born in a town on the French side of central Louisiana. She said when she started school, the children weren't allowed to speak French, even though it was the only language some of them knew. Flash forward to the mid-70s, when my son started school in New Orleans. It had been decided that a great cultural heritage was being lost, and a program was started to bring teachers from France to reinstate the language. My son could say "bonjour" and his teacher's name (Claude) in a delightfully accurate accent, but the program pretty much fizzled as there was nothing in daily culture to reinforce it.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 34,430 Location: Paris, France
Re: Dialect « Reply #19 on Aug 26, 2011, 6:50am »
In Luxembourg last weekend, I was wondering how much of a "dialect" Lëtzebuergesch is. It is reputedly spoken by 300,000 people -- which means about 60% of the population of Luxembourg, but it was only elevated to the rank of national language (alongside French and German) in 1984. But, for example, none of the newspapers of Luxembourg is written in Lëtzebuergesch -- they are all either in German or French. How can you have a national language when practically nothing is written in it?
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Female Posts: 3,224 Location: Greenest UK
Re: Dialect « Reply #20 on Aug 26, 2011, 10:54am »
Patate is an occitan word? I didn't know I speak occitan!
Never saw that thread before. I would think Lëtzebuergesch is very much like a dialect and I bet very near any of the neighbouring swiss german dialects at that, K!
There has been a movement in the last 20 years or so determined to write dialect down. it feels silly, but what happened to your grandmother, bixa, happened to my grandparents (born 1901,1902 ...) who were punished if they weren't speaking french at school when they only spoke dialect at home. So, obviously most people in my parents' generation can understand patois, but many don't speak it... and then they were trying to revive it when I reached adulthood. I think that apart from a few small pockets, it is irremediably lost and anyway, the young speak their own dialect, a mixture as described in the multicultural english language thread, compounded by textspeak. I think that's a difference of French language. One official language viewed as competing with local patois. Whereas German and maybe Italian are made of and nurtured by all the different local dialects. Well, that's my view of these two languages.
I have a theory that languages and dialects are influenced by the physical surroundings it is spoken in.
Like we briefly mentioned Portuguese earlier, the Portuguese from Portugal has lots of "tch" tch" sounds in it. I can almost see the cliffs battered by the winds of the North Atlantic when a Portuguese from the coast speaks. Whereas the Brazilian Portuguese is more like a palm tree undulating or like the girl from Ipanema. I live in Southwest England, a fertile land of hills and hillocks, very genteel. Local people speak slowly, and slightly up and down as if they were walking onto the next hill and back down the other side. Or the malayalam spoken by people from Kerala. To my ear, it sometimes sounds like someone making bubbles in water. But maybe that's regional for people living near the backwaters area?
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 34,430 Location: Paris, France
Re: Dialect « Reply #21 on Aug 26, 2011, 11:26am »
My grandmother didn't learn to speak French until she started school -- but the children were immediately punished if they spoke Vosgian, so she learned fast. I don't think the people of the Vosges mountains were actually trying to cling to a separate language, but they were isolated in all of those hills and valleys with difficult access, and it just took French longer to penetrate there than in the plains. Kind of like the Ozarks in the United States.
Joined: Feb 2009 Gender: Male Posts: 34,430 Location: Paris, France
Re: Dialect « Reply #23 on Aug 27, 2011, 5:35am »
No, actually it is a Roman based dialect rather than Germanic, but there were some Germanic influences since it was a border area -- the H sound is pronounced more in Vosgian than in French.
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