Bureau régional d'ethnologie et de de linguistique

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The Bureau régional d'ethnologie et de linguistique BREL (officially BREL) is a cultural institution in the Aosta Valley in Italy .

It was founded in 1985 and is based in Aosta . The first director until 1997 was Alexis Bétemps . The Bureau supports the maintenance of the regional form of the Franco-Provençal language , initiated by the Center d'études francoprovençales “René Willien” CEFP in Saint-Nicolas in 1967 , which is still used today as a colloquial language in the Aosta Valley by a significant part of the population (in addition to Italian) but is dying out in the other regions of the original range in France and Switzerland . The Valdostan dialects are called patois in the region itself .

The bureau collects linguistic and other evidence of regional culture as well as folklore knowledge about the old words, which is also disappearing due to the current economic change, for example in agriculture. It works with other institutions, in particular with the Valais media library , which performs a similar documentation task for the Swiss canton of Valais , and the Institut de langue savoyarde in Habère-Lullin, south of Geneva .

In order to promote the expression in dialect, the BREL organizes language courses in patois for the population in the Aosta Valley and also at the University of Neuchâtel , with whose Center for Dialectology it cooperates. For patoisants, as the speakers are also called, an obstacle in dealing with the language is that there is no general writing tradition for Franco-Provençal and the writers, due to the lack of a standard language, have written their works in their local or regional dialect. That is why the BREL has developed an orthographic system for the uniform spelling, which, under the name Orthographe de référence (ORB), is one of the widespread language norms of Franco-Provençal, alongside the Graphie de Conflans from Savoy .

The Center d'études francoprovençales “René Willien” has started the project Association valdôtaine des archives sonores AVAS , in which sound recordings of the Valdostan language are stored and which is being continued today by the BREL.

The BREL recently launched the Gnalèi - Le Guichet project for a trilingual French-Patois-Italian Internet portal.

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