hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5133 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 1 of 6 03 September 2014 at 11:40pm | IP Logged |
I was going through some old PDFs I had on a hard drive and came across this quite concise basic Piedmontese grammar that I'd generated from the wikibooks site:
http://it.wikibooks.org/wiki/Piemontese
It could use some additions for sure, but it's a decent primer for anyone interested in Piedmontese. Much easier than hunting all over the place for basic grammar rules.
R.
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Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 4093 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian
| Message 2 of 6 05 September 2014 at 3:57pm | IP Logged |
Hi!
just wondering...how come you're studying piemontese? I'm from Turin (biggest city there)
and really anyone under 40s (just heard it from grandparents or some people living in
small villages) actually speak it and the vast majority could not even understand this
dialect.
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5133 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 3 of 6 05 September 2014 at 5:28pm | IP Logged |
Donaldshimoda wrote:
Hi!
just wondering...how come you're studying piemontese? I'm from Turin (biggest city there)
and really anyone under 40s (just heard it from grandparents or some people living in
small villages) actually speak it and the vast majority could not even understand this
dialect. |
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It started as a 6WC here on HTLAL a couple years ago, and has kind of blossomed from there.
I have a few friends in Turin (although none under 40) and you're right - only one of them speaks Piedmontese. I have, however, made some friends since that live outside of Turin and speak the language. They are people in their late 40s/50s, speak it regularly with family and others willing to speak the language with them. They're quite happy when anyone (especially an outsider) takes an interest in it.
While younger people tend to see little value in keeping minority languages alive (and Italian youth are hardly alone in this - it happens all over the world), there's still a fair amount of people willing to work to keep these languages alive, if for no other reason than to preserve existing literature - Piedmontese has some good literature, old and new.
R.
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Donaldshimoda Diglot Groupie Italy Joined 4093 days ago 47 posts - 72 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Russian
| Message 4 of 6 05 September 2014 at 7:00pm | IP Logged |
that's cool!
glad you're enjoying my dialect...you're probably the first foreigner into it I've ever
heard, moreover because it seems in every region of italy people speaks dialect but in
piemonte (veneto,romano,siciliano,campano,pugliese,calabrese,sardo are languages that
almost 100% speak in their respective area)
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5133 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 5 of 6 05 September 2014 at 9:32pm | IP Logged |
Donaldshimoda wrote:
... it seems in every region of italy people speaks dialect but in piemonte (veneto,romano,siciliano,campano,pugliese,calabrese,sardo are languages that almost 100% speak in their respective area)
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My experience has been that once you're outside of Turin, you can actually hear quite a bit of it, if you're listening for it. I've seen a couple different figures for number of speakers - anywhere from a million or so to 2.5 million.
I will say... I like to go skiing up near the border of Italy/France, and the Piedmontese you hear in Bardonecchia, for instance, is quite different than what you might hear in Cuneo or Asti. I'd be inclined to say that what I've heard in Bardonecchia is closer to Occitan, if I knew more about it, even though it's still referred to as Piedmontese.
R.
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chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3711 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese
| Message 6 of 6 05 October 2014 at 9:57pm | IP Logged |
I cannot help but applaud you for your interest in Piedmontese, I think it’s quite sad how neglected Italian regional
languages are.
Sadly I didn’t learn any Lombard while growing up in Milan, although a few months ago I studied it for a while and I
learnt some. I used a wikibooks guide too (http://it.wikibooks.org/wiki/Insubre/Copertina).
I’m quite delighted when I manage to exchange a few sentences in Lombard with my friend, unfortunately I can’t
speak it with my mother as she’s too got a terrible attitude and would always put me down when I tried.
Tücc i léngh se mériten rispett, anca quij minur.
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