Il francese in Valle d’Aosta (Italia) nel XIX e XX secolo: un caso di linguistic suicide?
French in Valle d’Aosta (Italy) in 19th and 20th Centuries: A Case of “Linguistic Suicide”?

Summary/Abstract: The contribution opens with an overview about the position of French in the repertory of Valle d’Aosta, a small bilingual region of Italy, where, despite of its historical grounding as heritage language, this language appears nowadays in a very critical situation, in particular at the level of spoken use. Against this background stands the focus of the contribution, that is to discuss the process of language shift occurred in Valle d’Aosta between the 19th and the 20th centuries. This process led to the substitution of French with Italian as “roofing language” and it tends to be regarded as a typical case of “language murder”, in literature but namely in the regional inner perspective, that identifies its starting point in the national unification of Italy (1861).A re-reading of some evidences, both from historical sources and sociolinguistic more recent inquiries, permits although to shed new light on this process, on both plans of the role played in it by sectors of the local speech community and of the parallel construction of an internal identitary story-telling that assumes the Valle d’Aosta community’s integral francophonie of the past as an unquestionable matter of fact.The discussion of a series of issues (i.e. the correct interpretation of the instances of written French in Valle d’Aosta since the Middle Ages; the consideration of the results of the sociolinguistic survey conducted by the Fondation Chanoux in 2001, with particular regard to the spoken use of languages in the generation born at the end of 19th century; the historiographical testimony, for the same century, about the early presence of Italian within the region) thus lead to depict on one side the historical linguistic repertory of Valle d’Aosta as a typical situation of “diglossia” and, on the other, the process of penetration of Italian as a gradual and long-lasting phenomenon, which begins several decades before 1861.On this bases, new considerations about the active role of Valle d’Aosta 19th century speech community in the above mentioned process of language shift are finally proposed, which may lead to consider it rather an instance of “linguistic suicide” (Denison 1977) than an actual “language murder”.

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