Corsican language
Corsican (corsu, ; full name: lingua corsa , ) is a Romance language constituted by the continuum of the Italo-Romance dialects spoken on the Mediterranean island of Corsica (France) and on the northern end of the island of Sardinia (Italy). Corsican is related to the Tuscan varieties from the Italian peninsula, and therefore also to the Florentine-based standard Italian.
Under the long-standing sway of Tuscany's Pisa and Republic of Genoa over Corsica, Corsican used to play the role of a vernacular in combination with Italian functioning as the island's official language. In 1859, Italian was replaced by French, owing to the French acquisition from the Republic of Genoa in 1768. Over the next two centuries, the use of French in the place of Italian grew to the extent that, by the Liberation in 1945, all the islanders had a working knowledge of French. The 20th century saw a language shift, with the islanders changing their language practices to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65 percent of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a minority amounting to around 10 percent used Corsican as a first language.
As for Corsican, a bone of contention is whether it should be considered an Italian dialect or its own language, even while by French law it is a regional language. While there is near universal agreement that Corsican is typologically and traditionally Italo-Romance, its specific position therein is more controversial. Some scholars argue that Corsican belongs to the Centro-Southern Italian dialects, while others are of the opinion that it is closely related to Italy's Tuscan varieties, if not reputed to be part thereof. Mutual intelligibility between Italian and the dialects of Corsican is in fact very high, with particular reference to Northern Corsican. As for Southern Corsican, it has been noted that in spite of the geographical proximity its closest linguistic neighbour is not Sardinian, which constitutes a separate group and is not mutually intelligible at all, but rather the Extreme Southern Italian lects like Siculo-Calabrian. It has been theorised, on the other hand, that a Sardinian variety, or a variety very similar to Sardo-Romance, might have been originally spoken in Corsica prior to the island's Tuscanisation under Pisan and Genoese rule.
The matter is controversial in light of the historical, cultural and particularly strong linguistic bonds that Corsica had traditionally formed with the Italian Mainland from the Middle Ages until the 19th century: in contrast to the neighbouring Sardinia, Corsica's installment into a diglossic system with Italian as the island's prestige language ran so deep that both Corsican and Italian might be even, and in fact were, perceived as two sociolinguistic levels of a single language. Corsican and Italian traditionally existed on a spectrum, whose proximity line was blurred enough that the locals needed little else but a change of register to communicate in an official setting. "Tuscanising" their tongue, or as the Corsican elites would have once said, parlà in crusca ("speaking in crusca", from the name of the Academy dedicated to the standardisation of the Italian language), allowed for a practice not of code-switching, but rather of code-mixing which is quite typical of the Mainland Italian dialects. Italian was perceived as "other" from Corsican, but not more so than the two main isoglosses of Northern and Southern Corsican were between each other by their respective native speakers. When Pasquale Paoli found himself exiled in London, he replied to Samuel Johnson's query on the peculiar existence of a "rustic language" very different from Italian that such a language existed only in Sardinia; in fact, the existence of Corsican as the island's native vernacular did not take anything away from Paoli's claims that Corsica's official language was Italian.
Today's Corsican is the result of these historical vicissitudes, which have morphed the language to an idiom that bears a strong resemblance to the medieval Tuscan once spoken at the time of Dante and Boccaccio, and still existing in peripheral Tuscany (Lucca, Garfagnana, Elba, Capraia). The correspondence of modern Corsican to ancient Tuscan can be seen from almost any aspect of the language, ranging from the phonetics, morphology, lexicon to the syntax. One of the characteristics of standard Italian is the retention of the -re infinitive ending, as in Latin mittere "send"; such infinitival ending is lost in Tuscan as well as Corsican, resulting in the outcome mette / metta, "to put". Whereas the relative pronoun in Italian for "who" is chi and "what" is che/(che) cosa, it is an uninflected chì in Corsican. Perhaps the biggest difference between standard Italian and Corsican is that the latter uses the u termination, whereas standard Italian has switched to the o ending. For example, the Italian demonstrative pronouns questo "this" and quello "that" become in Corsican questu or quistu and quellu or quiddu: this feature was typical of the early Italian texts during the Middle Ages.
Even after the acquisition of Corsica by Louis XV, Italian continued to be the island's language of education, literature, religion and local affairs. The affluent youth, such as the future Emperor of the French, still went to Italy to pursue higher studies (it has been estimated that Corsican presence in Pisa amounted to a fourth of the University's total student body in 1830), and local civil registers would not stop being written in Italian until 1855; it was on May 9, 1859 that Italian was replaced by French as the island's official language, even though the latter would start to take root among the islanders from 1882 onwards, through the Jules Ferry's laws aimed at spreading literacy across the French provinces. Even so, a specifically homegrown Corsican rather than Italian literature in Corsica would not be born but belatedly and, in its earliest phase, would not carry autonomous cultural instances; Corsican writers, such as Salvatore Viale, even prided themselves on their affiliation to the broader Italian sphere, considering Corsican «one of the least impure dialects of Italy».
It was the Italian Fascist aggressive claims to the island in the 20th century, followed by their invasion, that provoked a popular backlash estranging the native islanders from standard Italian and, if anything, only accelerated their shifting to the French national language even further. By the Liberation, any previously existing link between the two linguistic varieties and with Italy altogether had been severed; any promotion of Corsican, which had been politicized by the local collaborators with the regime, would be met with popular criticism and even suspicion of potentially harboring irredentist sentiments. From then on, Corsican would grow autonomously from Italian to become later in the 1970s a centerpiece of the Riacquistu ("reacquisition") movement for the rediscovery of Corsican culture. Nationalist calls for Corsican to be put on the same footing as French led the French National Assembly to extend the 1951 Deixonne Law, which initially recognized only a few languages (Breton, Basque, Catalan and Occitan), to including Corsican as well, among others, not as a dialect of Italian, but as one of France's full-fledged regional languages in 1974 (see governmental support).
Under the long-standing sway of Tuscany's Pisa and Republic of Genoa over Corsica, Corsican used to play the role of a vernacular in combination with Italian functioning as the island's official language. In 1859, Italian was replaced by French, owing to the French acquisition from the Republic of Genoa in 1768. Over the next two centuries, the use of French in the place of Italian grew to the extent that, by the Liberation in 1945, all the islanders had a working knowledge of French. The 20th century saw a language shift, with the islanders changing their language practices to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65 percent of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a minority amounting to around 10 percent used Corsican as a first language.
As for Corsican, a bone of contention is whether it should be considered an Italian dialect or its own language, even while by French law it is a regional language. While there is near universal agreement that Corsican is typologically and traditionally Italo-Romance, its specific position therein is more controversial. Some scholars argue that Corsican belongs to the Centro-Southern Italian dialects, while others are of the opinion that it is closely related to Italy's Tuscan varieties, if not reputed to be part thereof. Mutual intelligibility between Italian and the dialects of Corsican is in fact very high, with particular reference to Northern Corsican. As for Southern Corsican, it has been noted that in spite of the geographical proximity its closest linguistic neighbour is not Sardinian, which constitutes a separate group and is not mutually intelligible at all, but rather the Extreme Southern Italian lects like Siculo-Calabrian. It has been theorised, on the other hand, that a Sardinian variety, or a variety very similar to Sardo-Romance, might have been originally spoken in Corsica prior to the island's Tuscanisation under Pisan and Genoese rule.
The matter is controversial in light of the historical, cultural and particularly strong linguistic bonds that Corsica had traditionally formed with the Italian Mainland from the Middle Ages until the 19th century: in contrast to the neighbouring Sardinia, Corsica's installment into a diglossic system with Italian as the island's prestige language ran so deep that both Corsican and Italian might be even, and in fact were, perceived as two sociolinguistic levels of a single language. Corsican and Italian traditionally existed on a spectrum, whose proximity line was blurred enough that the locals needed little else but a change of register to communicate in an official setting. "Tuscanising" their tongue, or as the Corsican elites would have once said, parlà in crusca ("speaking in crusca", from the name of the Academy dedicated to the standardisation of the Italian language), allowed for a practice not of code-switching, but rather of code-mixing which is quite typical of the Mainland Italian dialects. Italian was perceived as "other" from Corsican, but not more so than the two main isoglosses of Northern and Southern Corsican were between each other by their respective native speakers. When Pasquale Paoli found himself exiled in London, he replied to Samuel Johnson's query on the peculiar existence of a "rustic language" very different from Italian that such a language existed only in Sardinia; in fact, the existence of Corsican as the island's native vernacular did not take anything away from Paoli's claims that Corsica's official language was Italian.
Today's Corsican is the result of these historical vicissitudes, which have morphed the language to an idiom that bears a strong resemblance to the medieval Tuscan once spoken at the time of Dante and Boccaccio, and still existing in peripheral Tuscany (Lucca, Garfagnana, Elba, Capraia). The correspondence of modern Corsican to ancient Tuscan can be seen from almost any aspect of the language, ranging from the phonetics, morphology, lexicon to the syntax. One of the characteristics of standard Italian is the retention of the -re infinitive ending, as in Latin mittere "send"; such infinitival ending is lost in Tuscan as well as Corsican, resulting in the outcome mette / metta, "to put". Whereas the relative pronoun in Italian for "who" is chi and "what" is che/(che) cosa, it is an uninflected chì in Corsican. Perhaps the biggest difference between standard Italian and Corsican is that the latter uses the u termination, whereas standard Italian has switched to the o ending. For example, the Italian demonstrative pronouns questo "this" and quello "that" become in Corsican questu or quistu and quellu or quiddu: this feature was typical of the early Italian texts during the Middle Ages.
Even after the acquisition of Corsica by Louis XV, Italian continued to be the island's language of education, literature, religion and local affairs. The affluent youth, such as the future Emperor of the French, still went to Italy to pursue higher studies (it has been estimated that Corsican presence in Pisa amounted to a fourth of the University's total student body in 1830), and local civil registers would not stop being written in Italian until 1855; it was on May 9, 1859 that Italian was replaced by French as the island's official language, even though the latter would start to take root among the islanders from 1882 onwards, through the Jules Ferry's laws aimed at spreading literacy across the French provinces. Even so, a specifically homegrown Corsican rather than Italian literature in Corsica would not be born but belatedly and, in its earliest phase, would not carry autonomous cultural instances; Corsican writers, such as Salvatore Viale, even prided themselves on their affiliation to the broader Italian sphere, considering Corsican «one of the least impure dialects of Italy».
It was the Italian Fascist aggressive claims to the island in the 20th century, followed by their invasion, that provoked a popular backlash estranging the native islanders from standard Italian and, if anything, only accelerated their shifting to the French national language even further. By the Liberation, any previously existing link between the two linguistic varieties and with Italy altogether had been severed; any promotion of Corsican, which had been politicized by the local collaborators with the regime, would be met with popular criticism and even suspicion of potentially harboring irredentist sentiments. From then on, Corsican would grow autonomously from Italian to become later in the 1970s a centerpiece of the Riacquistu ("reacquisition") movement for the rediscovery of Corsican culture. Nationalist calls for Corsican to be put on the same footing as French led the French National Assembly to extend the 1951 Deixonne Law, which initially recognized only a few languages (Breton, Basque, Catalan and Occitan), to including Corsican as well, among others, not as a dialect of Italian, but as one of France's full-fledged regional languages in 1974 (see governmental support).
Country
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France
France, officially the French Republic (République française ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also includes overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea; overseas territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean. Due to its several coastal territories, France has the largest exclusive economic zone in the world. France borders Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, Andorra, and Spain in continental Europe, as well as the Netherlands, Suriname, and Brazil in the Americas via its overseas territories in French Guiana and Saint Martin. Its eighteen integral regions (five of which are overseas) span a combined area of 643801 km2 and contain close to 68 million people. France is a unitary semi-presidential republic with its capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre; other major urban areas include Marseille, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Bordeaux, and Nice.
Inhabited since the Palaeolithic era, the territory of Metropolitan France was settled by Celtic tribes known as Gauls during the Iron Age. Rome annexed the area in 51 BC, leading to a distinct Gallo-Roman culture that laid the foundation of the French language. The Germanic Franks formed the Kingdom of Francia, which became the heartland of the Carolingian Empire. The Treaty of Verdun of 843 partitioned the empire, with West Francia becoming the Kingdom of France in 987. In the High Middle Ages, France was a powerful but highly decentralised feudal kingdom. Philip II successfully strengthened royal power and defeated his rivals to double the size of the crown lands; by the end of his reign, France had emerged as the most powerful state in Europe. From the mid-14th to the mid-15th century, France was plunged into a series of dynastic conflicts involving England, collectively known as the Hundred Years' War, and a distinct French identity emerged as a result. The French Renaissance saw art and culture flourish, conflict with the House of Habsburg, and the establishment of a global colonial empire, which by the 20th century would become the second-largest in the world. The second half of the 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Catholics and Huguenots that severely weakened the country. France again emerged as Europe's dominant power in the 17th century under Louis XIV following the Thirty Years' War. Inadequate economic policies, inequitable taxes and frequent wars (notably a defeat in the Seven Years' War and costly involvement in the American War of Independence) left the kingdom in a precarious economic situation by the end of the 18th century. This precipitated the French Revolution of 1789, which overthrew the Ancien Régime and produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. -
Italy
Italy (Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern and Western Europe. Located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, it consists of a peninsula delimited by the Alps and surrounded by several islands; its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region. Italy shares land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. It has a territorial exclave in Switzerland, Campione. Italy covers an area of 301230 km2, with a population of about 60 million. It is the third-most populous member state of the European Union, the sixth-most populous country in Europe, and the tenth-largest country in the continent by land area. Italy's capital and largest city is Rome.
Italy was the native place of many civilizations such as the Italic peoples and the Etruscans, while due to its central geographic location in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, the country has also historically been home to myriad peoples and cultures, who immigrated to the peninsula throughout history. The Latins, native of central Italy, formed the Roman Kingdom in the 8th century BC, which eventually became a republic with a government of the Senate and the People. The Roman Republic initially conquered and assimilated its neighbours on the Italian peninsula, eventually expanding and conquering a large part of Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. By the first century BC, the Roman Empire emerged as the dominant power in the Mediterranean Basin and became a leading cultural, political and religious centre, inaugurating the Pax Romana, a period of more than 200 years during which Italy's law, technology, economy, art, and literature developed.