Corsican language

Corsican
Corsu
Pronunciation	[ˈkɔrsu]
Region	Corsica, northern Sardinia
Native speakers	Estimated 140,000 on only Corsica
Language family	Indo-European Romance Corsican
Writing system	Latin
Sources	Non-official speech and publications of Corsicans at will
Official status
Official language in	None
Regulated by	None
Language codes
ISO 639-1	co
ISO 639-2	cos
ISO 639-3	cos
ELP	Corsican
Corsican dialects

Public sentiment in favor of Corsu.

Corsican (Corsu or Lingua Corsa) is a Romance language spoken and written on the island of Corsica (France), alongside French, which is the official language. Historically Corsu is the native language of Corsica, once spoken as a first and only language by the nearly all the population. After over 200 years of being an integral part of France, nearly the entire population is fluent in French, their first language, an estimated 50% of those also have some degree of proficiency in Corsu, and a small minority, perhaps 10%, use Corsu as a first language.

Population of speakers

The January 1, 2007 estimated population of the island being about 281,000 persons, the figure for the March 8, 1999 census, when most of the studies - though not the linguistic survey work referenced in this article - were performed, was about 261,000 (see under Corsica). Only a certain percentage of the population at either time spoke Corsu with any fluency. The 2001 population of 341,000 speakers on the island given by Ethnologue is thus quite impossible, erring by at least 23% on the high side. Their figure of 402,000 speakers worldwide must be over-sanguine by at least the same percentage, probably more.

The use of Corsican over French had been declining. In 1980 about 70% of the population "had some command of the Corsican language." In 1990 out of a total population of about 254,000 the percentage had declined to 50%, with only 10% using it as a first language. The language was clearly on the way out when the French government reversed its non-supportive stand and began some strong measures to save it.

Whether these measures will succeed remains to be discovered. No recent statistics on Corsu are available. If 50% of the population had some measure of proficiency in 1990, assuming that the measures were effective in at least halting the decline, an estimated 140,000 persons are proficient in Corsican today.

UNESCO classifies the Corsican language as a potentially endangered language, which has "a large number of children speakers" but is "without an official or prestigious status." The classification does not state that the language is currently endangered, only that it is potentially so. In fact it is being vigorously affirmed by a population that, from the university professors to the agricultural workers, insists on speaking and writing in Corsu. Often acting according to the current long-standing sentiment unknown Corsicans cross out French roadway signs and paint in the Corsu names. The Corsican language is a key vehicle for Corsican culture, which is notably rich in proverbs and in polyphonic song.

Government encouragement

The 1991 "Joxe Statute", which takes its name from the then French Interior Minister, Pierre Joxe, in setting up the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse, also provided for the Assemblée de Corse, and charged it with developing a plan for the optional teaching of Corsu. The University of Corsica Pascal Paoli at Corte took a central role in the planning. These measures amount to support of the Corsican language by the French government through Corsican intermediaries.

At the primary school level Corsu can be taught up to a fixed number of hours per week (three in the year 2000) and is a voluntary subject at the secondary school level, but is required at the University of Corsica. It is available through adult education. It can be spoken in court or in the conduct of other government business if the officials concerned speak it. The Cultural Council of the Corsican Assembly advocates for its use; for example, on public signs.

Sources

According to the anthropologist, Dumenica Verdoni, writing new literature in modern Corsican is an integral part of affirming Corsican identity. Part of the affirmation is the conscious creation of a modern literature in it, the Riacquistu. Persons who had a notable career in France returned to Corsica to write in Corsican, such as the musical producers, Dumenicu Togniotti, director of the Teatru Paisanu, which produced polyphonic musicals, 1973-1982, followed in 1980 by Michel Raffaelli's Teatru di a Testa Mora, and Saveriu Valentini's Teatru Cupabbia in 1984.

The descent of Corsican

The Corsican language has been influenced by the languages of the major powers taking an interest in Corsican affairs; earlier by those of the Medieval Italian powers: Tuscany, Pisa and Genoa, more recently by France, which, since 1789, has promulgated the official Parisian French. Whereas there is a "pure French" defined by a French academy, there is no "pure Corsican." The term gallicised Corsican refers to Corsu up to about the year 1950. The term distanciated Corsican refers to an idealized Corsu from which various agents have succeeded in removing French or other elements. The question remains, what classification shall be assigned to the purified core language?

The only foreign nations ever to exercise a profound influence over the entire island are the Roman Republic with the subsequent Roman Empire and the French Republic, in whose revolutionary foundation some Corsicans played a key role. Rome converted the unknown prehistoric language(s) of Corsica to the Latin language throughout the island so pervasively that at its political fall not a trace of the former language, as far as is known, remained.

Many other civilizations held some or all of the coastal cities for a time by means of castles and fleets but never with the assent of the entire population and never with complete control over the uplands or distribution over them. Corsu therefore evolved from the Latin of the island and was not a branch of Tuscan or Genoese. By the time the forces of Tuscany arrived in the 8th century, they were already speaking early Italian and the Corsicans Corsu. These historical circumstances lead to some fundamental facts about the language: it was certainly Indo-European, certainly Romance and certainly derived from a Corsican, not an Italian, line of descent.

Classification by subjective analysis

Compelling as those circumstances are, they do not suffice to determine the exact relationships between Corsican, the various dialects past and present of Italian and Sardinian. One of the main sources of confusion in popular classifications is the difference between a dialect and a language. Typically it is not possible to ascertain what an author means by these terms. For example, one might read that Corsican is a "central southern Italian dialect" along with Tuscan, Campanian, Sicilian and others or that it is "closely related to the Tuscan dialect of Italian," where it is generally understood that modern Italian came from Tuscan. It is impossible to discern from these statements whether Corsican is or is not Italian, is or is not Tuscan and did or did not come from the ancient Tuscan dialect.

Turning to the professional comparatists it is possible to definitely say, Corsican is not Tuscan and is not Italian. For example one of the characteristics of Tuscan and Italian is that Latin -u- in -us becomes -o: annus "year" but Italian anno. Corsican has annu, retaining the -u. Or, the -re infinitive ending as in Latin mittere, "send", is retained in Tuscan but lost in Corsican, which has mette/metta, "to put." The Latin relative pronoun, qui, "who, what", is inflected in Latin and Italian but in Corsican is the uninflectable chì. The number and profundity of differences is large and preclude the idea that they came from Tuscan rather than from Latin. It is perhaps best to believe the professional linguists when they say "the Corsican language is not the same as Tuscan" and "Corsican has preserved certain Latin forms which have disappeared elsewhere." If Corsican is not Italian it cannot be a dialect of Italian whether north or central or be Tuscan either or one of a group of related Tuscan dialects.

The classification of Corsu as an independent Romance language depends on the Romance classifications available. Typically feature-by-feature phonetic and morphological comparisons establish a subjective degree of similarity between languages, it being assumed that, taking loans and influences into consideration, the most similar have the nearest common ancestor. For the Romance languages the comparisons are voluminous and considerable variation of classification exists.

Classification by statistical analysis

After the year 2000 a new approach to language classification made its debut. Given n graphemes (an alphabet of n letters) the frequency of any digraph (two letters) n_in_j in writing samples of a language approaches a fixed value. Using an alphabet of 26 letters plus a space it is possible to set up a matrix of 27x27 frequencies unique to that language and therefore called its Statistical Language Signature (SLS).

The SLS is an abstract summary of all the lexical items and morphological features that distinguish the language and therefore determine the overall order of its digraphs. The statistical distance of one SLS from another measures the similarity of the two languages in a totally objective manner; that is, it does not depend on a subjective analysis of features or value decisions as to which should be considered. There is some variability of the signature depending on the selection of samples and the mathematical methods of conceiving and computing distance.

The ability to characterize languages by numbers creates a sample space for them in which the clustering of points reveals groups of similar languages, or if samples are taken from the history of the language, graphs that trace the divergence of languages from each other. These methods are limited only by the comprehensiveness of the sample texts.

An initial effort to develop a language classification tree having turned out unsatisfactorily in 2002 because of insufficient data a second effort in 2003 utilized the text of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 52 languages as sample texts to develop two trees by two different statistical methods with results that confirmed the traditional grouping with some startling exceptions. English, for example, signs as a Romance language, which is understandable, as Middle English was a Gallicized version of Old English. By one method Sardinian and Corsican are very close but by the other rather distant, with neither being close to Italian.

A recent attempt to bring the tree into sharper focus on the Romance languages diminished the number of languages to 34 and the statistical parameters to the Frobenius Distance and the Kalin (1-norm) Distance. It expanded the data set to include also other documents reflecting spoken language, such as newspapers, and made it diachronic, going back 22 centuries. Sardinian was not included but the results for Corsican are precise. There are no early documents for it, of course, but there are for Latin, Italian and others, which are sufficient to establish the points in sample space.

Corsican diverged from Italian, Corsican-Italian from Friulian and that group from a larger that includes Latin on the one hand and almost all the others on the other. In other words, there was a common ancestor on Italian soil and Corsica. The ancestor was not Latin and was to be distinguished from ancestors on other soils, in Iberia and Gaul. However, Romanian signs with the Balto-Slavic languages.

The "Italian" from which Corsican diverged in mutual dissimilation was not modern Italian, still far in the future, but its ancestor, Tuscan, and that was not during the Tuscan period on Corsica, when it already existed. The common ancestor was a language about which little is known: spoken or vulgar Latin, often considered to be Proto-Romance. Some Latin literature, such as the plays of Plautus (featuring people who speak) give evidence to its existence. Written Latin was a literary language, hence it does not appear as an ancestor in the tree. The ancestors in Iberia and Gaul came form soldiers' Latin. They were mainly foreign troops learning the vulgate, evidently with their own stamps.

The ancestor of Corsican, Tuscan and Friulian - which was spoken on the soil of the earlier Rhaetia - draws the attention as being on formerly Etruscan soil. Evidently when they assimilated they did so with an Etruscan-derived signature unperceived until this century. Rome certainly contained strong Etruscan elements if in fact it was not originally entirely Etruscan.

The study does discover the date of the first projected Corsican signature. It is about 1400 years ago, 600 AD more or less, well before Tuscan rule, in the early Christian period.

Dialects

The language has several dialects including Northern Corsican, spoken in the Bastia and Corte area, and Southern Corsican, spoken around Sartene and Porto-Vecchio. The dialect of Ajaccio has been described as in transition. The dialects spoken at Calvi and Bonifacio are closer to the Genoa dialect, also known as Ligurian.

Languages related to Corsican in Sardinia

Main articles: Gallurese and Sassarese language

Gallurese is spoken in the Sardinian region of Gallura, including the archipelago of La Maddalena. Sassarese, is spoken in Sassari and in its neighbourhood, in the north-west of Sardinia. Whether these two languages should be included in the Corsican language as dialects, included in Sardinian as dialects, or considered as independent languages, is debatable.

For example, Article 2 Item 4 of Law Number 26, October 15, 1997, of the Autnomous Region of Sardinia grants "al dialetto sassarese e a quello gallurese" equal legal status with the other languages on Sardinia (which Corsica does not do). They are being legally defined as different languages from Sardinian.

Alphabet

Main article: Corsican alphabet

Corsican uses the Latin alphabet with some changes. Although the words written in it are close enough to Italian and Latin for the non-Corsican speaker with a language background to follow, the pronounciation of those letters in English, French or Italian is not a guide to the pronounciation of Corsican, which follows complex rules that must be known by the speaker.

Phonology

Vowel inventory

Description	Grapheme (Miniscule)	Phoneme	Phone or Allophones	Usage	Example
Open front unrounded vowel      Near open	a	/a/	[a] [æ]	Occasional northern	casa [k'aza] carta [k'ærta]
Open back unrounded vowel	a	/â/	[ɑ]

Bibliography

• Jaffe, Alexandra (1999). Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 3110164450.

See also

• Languages of France
• List of ISO 639-1 codes
• List of ISO 639-2 codes
• Gallurese
• Sassarese language

External links

Quotations related to Corsican proverbs at Wikiquote

• "INFCOR: Banca di dati di a lingua corsa" (html). L'ADECEC (Association pour le Développement des Etudes Archéologiques, Historiques, linguistiques et Naturalistes du Centre-Est de la Corse). Retrieved 2008-06-13.
• "Traduction Corse - Latin" (html). A lingua corsa. Retrieved 2008-06-13.