Línguas ameaçadas: o francoprovençal

Abstract

In this thesis one studies the Francoprovençal, a Romance minority language threatened of extinction. Its domain comprises the southeast of France, part of Switzerland and the Valle d’Aosta in Italy. In France, the language situation is the result of the long and gradual historical process of the expansion of French, which becomes a literary, national and prestigious language, leading local populations to abandon their native language. The study of the factors by UNESCO (2003) for the evaluation of the vitality of languages allowed us to prove the delicate situation of this language today, mainly due to the rupture of intergenerational transmission, the lack of institutionalized teaching and effective legislation to protect and promote languages in France. To develop this research, we carried out fieldwork, participant observation and collection of linguistic and sociolinguistic data together with a group that works to maintain the francoprovençal in the village of Saint-Étienne-du-Bois, department of Ain in France. This research is based on the assumptions of Labov’s sociolinguistics (1972) and the social dialectology of Milroy (1992). We also dealt with the field of studies of language contact and endangered language or language obsolescence, from where we could extract parameters for data analysis and understanding of observed phenomena. Through the analysis of the data, we have been able to trace the profile of the francoprovençal speaker in the studied community and to establish a typology of the speakers, for which we have proposed three categories: the quasi-native speaker, the older ones who had acquired the language in childhood and showed more competence about the language; the semi-speaker, who has been less exposed to language in childhood, but partially managed to recover it in adulthood; the passive speaker, who had contact with the language in childhood but has developed only a passive competence. The analysis of the linguistic data proper took into account the typology of the speakers and the historical, political, socioeconomic and cultural factors involved in the process of abandoning the francoprovençal in France. It has been verified that the semi-speakers use a version of the language strongly marked by the contact with French, however, the distinctive features of the language within the Gallo-Romance group are maintained, as well as some elements typical of the linguistic variant spoken in the studied village. These elements survive mainly due to the symbolic and identity function they have within the group. Although the language undergoes losses, especially lexical and morphological, speakers still manage to fill these gaps by preserving the distinctive features of the language through alignment processes or adaptations via analogy, revealing the speaker’s creativity and his ability to recreate pieces of the language that is not longer fully used in the community. The main obstacles to maintaining the language are the rupture of transmission, the continuing loss of its contexts of use and its restriction to activities related to local traditions and cultures, that do not interest the younger generations, which leads us to see the survival of this language mainly a symbol of culture and identity and not as a vehicle of communication.