|
 |
Romansh language | ||
Tags: Switzerland | Rare Languages | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5066 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes  Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 1 of 8 11 August 2011 at 4:20am | IP Logged | ||
|
I've heard that Romansh is a small Romance language spoken in south-eastern Switzerland. According to
wikipedia, there are only 35,000 speakers. I was wondering, which romance language is Romansch closer to, French or Italian? Romansh has been declining over the years but is there a chance for language revival? What about materials for learning the language? Is it taught as a primary language in Romansh-speaking areas? I'm curious to know more about this endangered language, if anyone here can enlighten me. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 8 11 August 2011 at 11:07am | IP Logged | ||
|
Try this as your first stop and remember, Google is your friend.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5066 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 3 of 8 11 August 2011 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | ||
|
If you read my post, you'd see that I did visit wikipedia but it didn't answer any of my
questions. I just thought that, maybe, with such a concentration of language learners and polyglots that this forum might be more useful for accurate first-hand language experience than an impersonal search engine. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 8 11 August 2011 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | ||
I did read your post, but I was unaware that you wanted a personal opinion, hence the Wikipedia and Google suggestions. In fact, I was going to edit my post to suggest looking at the references at the bottom of the Wikipedia page but it's not really relevant now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 8 11 August 2011 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||
|
If you look at the infobox on Wikipedia, you'll see that Romansch is in the "Gallo-Italic" family, which means that historically it's more related to French than Italian. However, historically it's probably had more contact with Italian than French (the orthography is inspired by Italian and German, not by French).
It's kind of in between the two, and it would be difficult to objectively describe it as being closer to one or the other. You could find evidence to argue it either way. As for revival, Romansch suffers a fairly modern problem: in the old days, you picked a language and imposed a standard; these days, wide variation is accepted. Dialectal differences in Romansch are quite strong, so it's difficult to build a critical mass in the media as books and songs are written in specific dialects. It's a problem that blights various other minority languages. Basque has a standard called "batua" -- literally "unified" -- but many Basque speakers consider this an "invented" language, and prefer to speak, write and sing in their own dialect. (Even though many dialects are difficult enough to cause problems in understanding.) Scottish Gaelic has fairly noticeable dialectal differences, but with a little bit of exposure, most Gaels quite quickly learn to understand each other. But there is an emerging standard form that's most commonly taught, even in Gaelic-medium schools. This means that variation is being lost unnecessarily. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 8 12 August 2011 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Actually there is a standard for the Swiss variants, but even that is rarely used. People who are stubborn enough to keep using Romantsch are also stubborn enough to ignore any kind of standard.
There is another claim that I find even more interesting. The number of speakers of Romatsch in Switzerland are given in Wikipedia as follows: As of the 2000 Swiss Census, it is spoken by 35,095[1] residents of the canton of Graubünden (Grisons) as the language of "best command", and 61,815 in the "best command" plus "most spoken" categories.[2] Spoken now by around 0.9% of Switzerland's 7.7 million inhabitants, it is Switzerland's least-used national language in terms of number of speakers. Around 0,9 % of around 7.7 mio. is roughly 700.000 persons. Somebody can't count. Which leads to the next preposterous claim in the article (and this time it can't the result of a simple typo): " ...and Friulian is spoken by between 550,000 and 595,000 people in northeastern Italy. In Wikipedia's article about Friulian you can read that Friulan has around 800,000 speakers, the vast majority of whom also speak Italian.. This estimate probably comes from the number given by the Ethnologue site: allegedly 794,000 speakers of Friulian. Combine the two sets of information and somewhere between 205.000 and 250.000 Friulian speakers should live outside the area. Actually the central area for this dialect or language is the Italian province of Udine which has 536,716 inhabitants (source Wikipedia). Add part of the province Gorizia with a total of 35,980 persons in 2009. Add tourists, visiting neighbours and speaking parrots, and you barely reach 600.000 living speaking souls in that area. By consequence when I visited Udine some years ago I should have heard Friulian all around me? I didn't, and my informed guess is that those 800.000 persons mostly speak Italian. And the same probably applies to the emigrants from area. So the real number of Friulian speakers is blowin in the wind.. Edited by Iversen on 12 August 2011 at 4:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yall Diglot Newbie Italy Joined 5961 days ago 22 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Latin, French | Message 7 of 8 12 August 2011 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
|
As a non-expert, but someone who speaks Italian and has studied French, I agree with Cainntear that it is difficult to say if Romansch is closer to Italian or French. After a cursory look over the language and listening to a phrasebook on youtube I would say that the grammar seems more similar to French. Romansch seems to require subject pronouns and it looks like they use the subject-verb inversion for asking questions. It also has two words for the negative like "non...pas" in French. In Romansch it is "na...betg."
As far as lexical similarity goes, it's hard to say if it is greater with French or Italian. To my ears, Romansch sounds like neither French nor Italian when I hear it spoken. If I just heard some people speaking it on the street, I don't think I would be able to identify what language they were speaking. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yall Diglot Newbie Italy Joined 5961 days ago 22 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Latin, French | Message 8 of 8 12 August 2011 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | ||
About this time last year I spent three weeks in the region of Friuli Venezia Giulia and I visited Udine. I never once heard any Friulian and only encountered the language on tourist signs in the center of Udine. 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
