| Ligurian | ||
|---|---|---|
| Lìgure, Zeneize | ||
| Spoken in |  Italy (Liguria, Piedmont, Tuscany, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Sardinia) France (Alpes Maritimes and Corsica) Monaco Argentina (in the neighborhood of La Boca in Buenos Aires). |
|
| Total speakers | 2,000,000 | |
| Language family | Indo-European
|
|
| Official status | ||
| Official language in | Officially recognized in Italy (Law 482/1999) and Monaco. | |
| Regulated by | No official regulation | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | roa | |
| ISO 639-3 | lij | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Ligurian is a Gallo-Romance language, currently spoken in Liguria, northern Italy, and parts of the Mediterranean coastal zone of France, and Monaco. Genoese (Zeneize) is one of the most well-known languages, spoken in Genoa, the capital of Liguria.
It belongs to the Northern Italian group within the Romance languages.
The language may be dying out, but is still widely spoken by many, especially the elderly, out of a population of 2,000,000 (two millions).
The highest artistic expression of this language is probably the album Crêuza de mä by the Genoese singer and songwriter Fabrizio de Andrè. The whole album is written and sung in Ligurian, and is considered one of the best of the World music during the Eighties.[citation needed] There is, however, an uninterrupted literary tradition of Ligurian poets and writers that goes from the 13th century to our days, such as Luchetto (the Genoese Anonym), Martin Piaggio and Gian Giacomo Cavalli.
Notable native speakers:
Contents |
Besides Liguria, the language is traditionally spoken in coastal, northern Tuscany, southern Piedmont (part of the province of Alessandria), western extremes of Emilia-Romagna (some areas in the province of Piacenza), in northern parts of Sardinia (Italy), the Alpes-Maritimes of France (Mostly the Côte d'Azur from the Italian border to and including Monaco), and parts of Corsica (France). It has been adopted formally in Monaco as the Monegasque language; or locally, Munegascu.
The Mentonasc dialect, spoken in the East of the County of Nice, is considered to be a transitional Occitan dialect to Ligurian; conversely, the Roiasc and Pignasc spoken further North in the Eastern margin of the County are ligurian dialects showing occitanic influences.
In Italy, the language has given way to Standard Italian and in France to French.
Ligurian exhibits distinct Italian features, while also having features of other Romance languages. No link between Romance Ligurian and the Ligurian language of the ancient Ligurian populations, in the form of a substrate or otherwise, can be demonstrated by linguistic evidence. There do exist, however, toponomastic derivations from ancient Ligurian.
Variants of the Ligurian language are:
The Ligurian alphabet has:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
   | Ethnologue report - Ethnologue report for language code:lij |
|
|
Top topics
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
