LWM 299: Faetar

Faetar

Naomi Nagy
University of New Hampshire

Faetar is a Francoprovençal dialect spoken in two villages in Apulia (Faeto and Celle di San Vito), in southern Italy. Faetar came to be spoken in these villages due to a migration from southeastern France (département of Ain) around the 14th century. An unwritten language, it has incorporated aspects of Apulian Italian dialects during its 600 years of contact. It is a doubly endangered language:
Francoprovençal has been virtually exterminated in France by agressive language planning; and it is spoken by fewer than 800 people in Apulia due to a mass exodus from rural areas. It survives in emigrant pockets in Italy, Switzerland, the U.S.A., and Canada.

Faetar phonology resembles that of neighboring dialects, but is distinguished by the phonemic presence of schwa and a process of variable deletion of post-tonic segments and syllables. It differs from Francoprovençal in having phonemic geminates word-medially and phonetic geminates at word boundaries. The morphology is similar to southern French dialects, with post-verbal negation, little agreement marking, and obligatory subject pronouns. It is distinct in that double subject pronouns are frequently present and reduplication is used for emphasis. Like both French and Italian, Faetar is SVO and left-branching.

ISBN 9783895865480. Languages of the World/Materials 299. 150 pp. 2000.