Corsican (, , or , ) is a Romance language of the Italo-Romance group, spoken on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, a territory of France, and in the northern part of the island of Sardinia, an autonomous region of Italy. Its northern varieties result from an intense medieval Tuscanisation and are closely related to, and largely mutually intelligible with, Standard Italian, whereas its southern varieties preserve features of an older stratum shared with Sardinian and show affinities with the Extreme Southern Italian dialects.
On the sociolinguistic level, since the 1970s Corsican has increasingly been treated as an autonomous language in its own right rather than an Italian dialect, a status captured by the notion of polynomic language developed by Jean-Baptiste Marcellesi.
Under the long-standing influence of Tuscany's Pisa, and the historic Republic of Genoa, over Corsica, the Corsican language once filled the role of a vernacular, with Italian functioning as the island's official language until France acquired the island from the Republic of Genoa (1768); by 1859, French had replaced Italian as Corsica's first language so much so that, by the time of the Liberation of France (1945), nearly every islander had at least a working-knowledge of French. The 20th century saw a vast language shift, with the islanders adapting and changing their communications to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican-speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65% of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a minority of around 10% used Corsican as a first language. To access the data, click on List by languages, Corsican, Corsican in France, then scroll to Geographical and language background.
Classification
Corsican is classed as a regional language under French law. It is almost universally agreed that Corsican is typologically and traditionally Italo-Romance, but 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, or as part of, Italy's Tuscan dialect varieties.Multiple sources:
Italian and the dialects of Corsican (especially Northern Corsican) are in fact very mutually intelligible. Southern Corsican, in spite of the geographical proximity, has as its closest linguistic neighbour not Sardinian (a separate group with which it is not mutually intelligible), but rather the Extreme Southern Italian dialects like Siculo-Calabrian.: "Au sud, on sera peut-être surpris de constater que la plus proche parenté n'est pas avec le sarde, pourtant si proche dans l'espace, mais avec les dialectes de l'Italie méridionale, notamment le calabrais. Un Corse du Sud parlant corse en toscane sera identifié comme calabrais; un corse du nord parlant corse en Sardaigne centrale sera identifié comme italien; quand à un sarde parlant sarde dans la péninsule, il ne sera pas compris." ["To the South, it may come as a surprise that the closest [linguistic] neighbor is not Sardinian, even if it is so close geographically. The closest neighbor is to be found in the Southern Italian dialects, especially in Calabrian. A Southern Corsican who speaks Corsican in Tuscany will be identified as Calabrian; a Northern Corsican who speaks Corsican in inner Sardinia will be identified as Italian; and, finally, a Sardinian-speaking Sardinian in the [Italian] peninsula will not be understood at all."] 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.: "Evidence from early manuscripts suggests that the language spoken throughout Sardinia, and indeed Corsica, at the end of the Dark Ages was fairly uniform and not very different from the dialects spoken today in the central (Nuorese) areas.": "Originariamente le varietà corse presentavano numerose affinità col sardo, ma hanno subito l'influenza toscana nel corso dei secoli a causa della forte penetrazione pisana soprattutto nel centro-nord dell'isola.": "Malgrado la maggior durata della dominazione ligure, prolungatasi fino al XVIII secolo, le varietà romanze locali (specie quelle settentrionali) sono state influenzate soprattutto dalle parlate toscane, a tal punto che i dialetti còrsi, originariamente non dissimili dal sardo, costituiscono oggi il gruppo romanzo linguisticamente più affine al sistema dei dialetti toscani."
Corsican's affinities with the central and centro-southern Italian dialects had already been noted in earlier scholarship: Diez (1874) and Meyer-Lübke (1941) grouped Corsican with the central Italian dialects (the centro-southern macro-group, as opposed to the northern one), and Clemente Merlo, in his study "Concordanze corse-italiane-centromeridionali" (1925), pointed to phonetic and morphosyntactic features shared by Corsican and the dialects spoken "from the southern Marche and Umbria down to Apulia, Calabria and Sicily".
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,: "Il rapporto di diglossia che si instaura tra corso e toscano, soprattutto a partire dal Cinquecento, non pare sostanzialmente diverso da quello che normalmente prevale nelle altre regioni italiane e che vede nella vicina Sardegna il livello alto occupato piuttosto dal catalano o dal castigliano." 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.: "Pendant des siècles, toscan et corse ont formé un couple perçu par les locuteurs comme deux niveaux de la même langue.": "C'est une province de langue italienne qui rejoint l'ensemble français en 1768. De langue italienne aux deux sens du mot langue : langue véhiculaire – officielle – et langue vernaculaire. Le lien génétique qui unit les deux systèmes linguistiques est en effet très étroit si bien que les deux variétés peuvent fonctionner comme les deux niveaux d'une même langue. Encore convient-il de regarder de plus près en quoi consiste l'italianité dialectale de la Corse : plus complexe, mais sans doute aussi plus fondamentale et plus ancienne que l'italianité " officielle ", c'est elle qui inscrit véritablement notre île au cœur de l'espace italo-roman." Corsican and Italian traditionally existed on a spectrum, and the dividing lines between them were 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 different from Corsican, but not as much as the differences between the two main isoglosses of Northern and Southern Corsican, as spoken by their respective native speakers.: "L'italien, bien sûr, c'est différent du corse, mais guère plus que le corse du nord pour les gens du sud et inversement : l'italien, on l'a vu, c'est toujours l'autre, mais l'autre si proche." 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. The only unifying, as well as distinctive, feature which separates the Corsican dialects from the mainland Tuscan ones, with the exception of Amiatino, Pitiglianese, and Capraiese, is the retention of word-final o-u. For example, the Italian demonstrative pronouns questo "this" and quello "that" become in Corsican questu or quistu and quellu or quiddu: this feature was also 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 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.) Local civil registers continued to be written in Italian until 1855; it was on 9 May 1859, that Italian was replaced by French as the island's official language, although the latter would start to take root among the islanders from 1882 onwards, through the Jules Ferry laws aimed at spreading literacy across the French provinces. Even so, a specifically homegrown Corsican (rather than Italian) literature in Corsica only developed belatedly and, in its earliest phase, there were no autonomous cultural instances;: "A differenza che in altre regioni d'Italia non nasce quindi in Corsica, se non tardivamente, una letteratura dialettale riflessa secondo la nota categorizzazione crociana, ne tanto meno una letteratura regionale portatrice di autonome istanze ideologiche e culturali, come avviene invece in Liguria o in Sardegna." Corsican writers, such as Salvatore Viale, even prided themselves on their affiliation to the broader Italian sphere, considering Corsican "one of the lowest, 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 even further. By the Liberation of France, 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 independently of 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, in 1974, 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. (See governmental support.)
Origins