The most ancientlinguistic substratum that has left a mark on the Lombard language is that of the ancientLigures.[11][12] However, available information about the ancient language and its influence on modern Lombard is extremely vague and limited.[11][12] That is in sharp contrast to the influence left by theCelts, who settled inNorthern Italy and brought theirCeltic languages and culturally and linguistically Celticised the Ligures.[13] The Celtic substratum of modern Lombard and the neighbouring languages of Northern Italy is self-evident and so the Lombard language is classified as aGallo-Italic language (from the ancient Roman name for the Celts,Gauls).[11]
Roman domination shaped the dialects spoken in the area, which is calledCisalpine Gaul ("Gaul, this side of the mountains") by the Romans, and much of thelexicon andgrammar of the Lombard language have their origin inLatin.[13] However, that influence was not homogeneous[11] since idioms of different areas were influenced by previous linguistic substrata, and each area was marked by a stronger or weaker Latinisation or the preservation of ancient Celtic characteristics.[11]
The GermanicLombardic language also left strong traces in modern Lombard, as it was the variety ofGermanic that was spoken by the GermanicLombards (or Longobards), who settled in Northern Italy, which is calledGreater Lombardy after them, and in other parts of theItalian Peninsula after the fall of theWestern Roman Empire. Lombardic acted as alinguistic superstratum on Lombard and neighboring Gallo-Italic languages since the Germanic Lombards did not impose their language by law on the Gallo-Roman population, but they rather acquired the Gallo-Italic language from the local population. Lombardic left traces, mostly in lexicon and phonetics, without Germanicising the local language in its structure and so Lombard preserved its Romance structure.[14]
Giovanni Bressani, author of satirical poems in the Bergamo dialect
From the 15th century onwards, literary Tuscan began to supplant the use of northern vernaculars such as Lombard, even regardless of the fact that Lombard itself began to be heavily influenced by the Tuscan vernacular. Prior to that, the Lombard language was widely used in administrative spheres.[15] Among those who favoured the strengthening of Tuscan influences over Lombard culture was the Duke of Milan Ludovico il Moro; during his reign he brought numerous men of culture from the Republic of Florence to the Sforza court, the most famous of whom was certainly Leonardo da Vinci.[16] At the same time, however, Lancino Curzio still wrote some works in Milanese dialect at the Sforza court.[17]
Between the 15th and 16th centuries, the Lombard language was widely and actively discredited in Italian literary circles. Tuscan writers and humanists such asLuigi Pulci andBenedetto Dei recorded aspects of the language spoken in Milan in the form of parodies;[18] similarly, the Asti-born writer Giorgio Alione parodied Milanese in hisCommedia e farse carnovalesche nei dialetti astigiano, milanese e francese misti con latino barbaro (eng. "Comedy and carnival farces in the Asti, Milanese and French dialects mixed with barbaric Latin") composed at the end of the 15th century.[19] The Florentine humanistLeonardo Salviati, one of the founders of theAccademia della Crusca, an important Italian linguistic academy operating to this day, published a series of translations of a Boccaccian tale into various vernaculars (including Bergamo and Milanese) explicitly in order to demonstrate how ugly and awkward they were compared to Tuscan.[20]
At the same time, the 15th century saw the first signs of a true Lombard literature: in the eastern parts of Lombardy, the Bergamo-bornGiovanni Bressani composed numerous volumes of satirical poetry and the Brescia-born Galeazzo dagli Orzi wrote hisMassera da bé, a sort of theatrical dialogue;[21] in the west of the region area, the Mannerist painter Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo lead the composition of the "arabesques" in the Accademia dei Facchini della Val di Blenio, a Milaneseacademy founded in 1560.[22]
At the beginning of the 17th century, the Ossola native Giovanni Capis published theVaron milanes de la lengua de Milan (eng. "Varrone Milanese on the language of Milan"), a sort of etymological dictionary was published.[23]
Meneghino, a character from the Milanese theatre, who later became a mask of the commedia dell'arte
An example of a text in ancient Milanese dialect is this excerpt fromIl falso filosofo (1698), act III, scene XIV, whereMeneghino, a traditional Milanese character from thecommedia dell'arte, presents himself in court (Lombard on the left, Italian translation on the right):
«E mì interrogatus ghe responditt. Sont Meneghin Tandœuggia, Ciamæ par sora nomm el Tananan, Del condamm Marchionn ditt el Sginsgiva; Sont servitor del sior Pomponi Gonz, C'al è trent agn che'l servj»
E io interrogatus risposi: Sono Meneghino Babbeo chiamato per soprannome il Ciampichino del fu Marchionne detto il Gengiva; sono servitore del signor Pomponio Gonzo che servo da trent'anni
— Meneghino appears in court in "The False Philosopher" (1698), act III, scene XIV[24]
The 17th century also saw the rise of the figure of the playwright Carlo Maria Maggi, who normalised the spelling of the Milanese dialect and who created, among other things, the Milanese mask of Meneghino.[25] A friend and correspondent of Maggi was Francesco De Lemene, author of La sposa Francesca (the first literary work in modernLodi dialect)[26] and of a translation ofGerusalemme liberata. Moreover, the 17th century saw the emergence of the firstbosinade: popular poems written on loose sheets and posted in the squares or read (or even sung) in public; they were widely diffused until the first decades of the 20th century.[27]
Carlo Porta, the most important author of Lombard literature, also included among the greatest poets of Italian national literature
Milanese literature in the 18th century was quickly developing: some important names which emerged in that period includeDomenico Balestrieri, who was associated the famous poetGiuseppe Parini. The latter wrote some compositions in the Lombard language.[28][29] One of the most important writers of the period was the Bergamo-based abbotGiuseppe Rota, author of a substantial (unpublished) Bergamo-Italian-Latin vocabulary and of several poetic works in the Orobic idiom, which he always called "lingua".[30]
In this period the linguistic characteristics of Lombard were well recognizable and comparable to the modern ones, except for some phonetic peculiarities and the presence of a remote past tense, replaced almost fully by the past perfect tense by 1875.[31][32][33]
The beginning of the 19th century was dominated by the figure ofCarlo Porta, recognized by many as the most important author of Lombard literature, also included among the greatest poets of Italian national literature. With him some of the highest peaks of expressiveness in the Lombard language were reached, which clearly emerged in works such asLa Ninetta del Verzee, Desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee,La guerra di pret andLament del Marchionn de gamb avert.[34]
Milanese poetic production assumed such important dimensions that in 1815 the scholarFrancesco Cherubini published an anthology of Lombard literature in four volumes, which included texts written from the seventeenth century to his day.[35]
In the first part of the 20th century, the greatest exponent of Lombard literature was the Milanese lawyerDelio Tessa, who distanced himself from the Portian tradition by giving his texts a strong expressionist tone.[36] In Bergamo, the most prominent advocate of Lombard language wasBortolo Belotti, a lawyer, historian and minister in the liberal governments of the time.[37]
The Lombard language became known outside its linguistic borders thanks to I Legnanesi, a theatre company that performed comedies in theLegnanese dialect and which is the most famous example oftravesti theatre in Italy.[38] In their comic shows the actors propose to the public satirical figures of the typical Lombard court; founded inLegnano in 1949 by Felice Musazzi, Tony Barlocco and Luigi Cavalleri, it is among the most famous companies in the European dialect theatre scene.[38]
The 21st century has also seen the use of Lombard in contemporary music, such as in the musical pieces of Davide Van De Sfroos[39] and in the translations into Lombard of the works of Bob Dylan.[40] There is no shortage of translations of great literary classics; in fact, there are numerous versions in Lombard of works such as Pinocchio, The Betrothed, The Little Prince, the Divine Comedy and – in religious literature – of the Gospels.[41]
Lombard is considered aminority language that is structurally separate fromItalian by bothEthnologue and theUNESCORed Book on Endangered Languages. However,Italy andSwitzerland do not recognize Lombard-speakers as a linguistic minority. In Italy, that is the same as for most other minority languages,[42] which have been for a long time incorrectly classed as corruptedregional dialects of Italian. However, Lombard and Italian belong to different subgroups of the Romance language family, and Lombard's historical development is not related toStandard Italian, which is derived fromTuscan.[43]
Historically, the vast majority ofLombards spoke only Lombard, as "Italian" was merely a literary language, and most Italians were not able to read or write.[44] After theItalian economic miracle, Standard Italian arose throughout Italy and Lombard-speaking Switzerland, wholly-monolingual Lombard-speakers became a rarity as time went by, but a small minority may still be uncomfortable speaking Standard Italian. Surveys in Italy find that all Lombard-speakers also speak Italian, and their command of both two languages varies according to theirgeographical position as well as theirsocio-economic situation. The most reliable predictor was found to be the speaker's age. Studies have found that young people are much less likely to speak Lombard as proficiently as their grandparents.[45] In some areas, elderly people are more used to speaking Lombard than Italian even though they know both.
Lacking a standard language, authors in the 13th and 14th language createdFranco-Lombard, a mixed language includingOld French, for their literary works.The Lombard variety with the oldest literary tradition (from the 13th century) is that ofMilan, butMilanese, the native Lombard variety of the area, has now almost completely been superseded by Italian from the heavy influx of migrants from other parts of Italy (especially fromApulia,Sicily andCampania) during the rapid industrialization after theSecond World War.
Ticinese is a comprehensive denomination for the Lombard varieties that are spoken in Swiss cantonTicino (Tessin), and theTicinese koiné is the Western Lombardkoiné used by speakers of local dialects (particularly those diverging from thekoiné itself) when they communicate with speakers of other Lombard dialects ofTicino,Grigioni or ItalianLombardy. The koiné is similar to Milanese and the varieties of the neighbouring provinces on the Italian side of the border.
There is extant literature in other varieties of Lombard likeLa masséra da bé, a theatrical work in early Eastern Lombard, written by Galeazzo dagli Orzi (1492–?) presumably in 1554.[50][failed verification]
Standard Italian is widely used in Lombard-speaking areas. However, the status of Lombard is quite different in the Swiss and Italian areas and so the Swiss areas have now become the real strongholds of Lombard.
In the Swiss areas, the local Lombardvarieties are generally better preserved and more vital than in Italy. No negative feelings are associated with the use of Lombard in everyday life, even with complete strangers. Some radio and television programmes, particularly comedies, are occasionally broadcast by theSwiss Italian-speaking broadcasting company in Lombard. Moreover, it is common for people to answer in Lombard in spontaneous interviews. Even some television advertisements have been broadcast in Lombard. The major research institution working on Lombard dialects is inBellinzona,Switzerland (CDE – Centro di dialettologia e di etnografia, a governmental (cantonal) institution); there is no comparable institution in Italy. In December 2004, it released a dictionary in five volumes, covering all Lombard varieties spoken in the Swiss areas.[N 5]
Today, in most urban areas of Italian Lombardy, people under 40 years old speak almost exclusively Italian in their daily lives because of schooling andtelevision broadcasts in Italian. However, in rural areas, Lombard is still vital and used alongside Italian.
A certain revival of the use of Lombard has been observed in the last decade. The popularity of modern artists singing their lyrics in Lombard dialects (in Italianrock dialettale, the best known of such artists being Davide Van de Sfroos) is also a relatively-new but growing phenomenon involving the Swiss and the Italian areas.[citation needed]
There have been contemporary attempts to develop alternative spelling systems suitable for use by all variants of Lombard. Among these, there is the attempt to develop a unified spelling (lomb. urtugrafia ünificada), which has not taken root due to the excessive complexity and lack of intuitiveness (as well as the lack of adaptability to the Italian keyboard) of the system, which uses symbols such as ç for /z/ and /ʧ/, or ə for unstressed /a/, /ə/ and /e/, as well as the obligation to mark the vowel length, despite the elimination of the accents on the first grapheme of the digraph (aa and not àa).[55][56][57] Some examples are presented below:
^abMinahan, James (2000).One Europe, many nations: a historical dictionary of European national groups. Westport.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^abMoseley, Christopher (2007).Encyclopedia of the world's endangered languages. New York.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^abColuzzi, Paolo (2007).Minority language planning and micronationalism in Italy. Berne.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^Jones, Mary C.; Soria, Claudia (2015)."Assessing the effect of official recognition on the vitality of endangered languages: a case of study from Italy".Policy and Planning for Endangered Languages. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press. p. 130.ISBN9781316352410.Archived from the original on 21 April 2017 – viaGoogle Books.Lombard (Lumbard, ISO 639-9 lmo) is a cluster of essentially homogeneous varieties (Tamburelli 2014: 9) belonging to the Gallo-Italic group. It is spoken in the Italian region of Lombardy, in the Novara province of Piedmont and in Switzerland.Mutual intelligibility between Lombard and Italian has been reported as very low (Tamburelli 2014). Although some Lombard varieties, Milanese in particular, enjoy a rather long and prestigious literary tradition, Lombard is now used mostly in informal domains. According toEthnologue, Piedmontese and Lombard are respectively spoken by between 1,600,000 and 2,000,000 speakers and around 3,500,000 speakers. Those are very high figures for languages that have never been recognised officially or been systematically taught in schools.
^Biondelli reports that the Milanese dialect was the first Lombard variant to lose this verb tense. Biondelli, Bernardino:Saggio sui dialetti Gallo-italici, 1853.
^Sanga, Glauco (1984).Dialettologia Lombarda [Lombard dialectology] (in Italian).University of Pavia. pp. 283–285.
^Sanga, Glauco (1984).Dialettologia Lombarda (in Italian).University of Pavia. pp. 283–285.
^[œ] occurs in most areas of the language but may overlap in usage with [ø], as they both share the same trigram (oeu).
^abSanga, Glauco (1984).Dialettologia Lombarda (in Italian).University of Pavia. pp. 283–285.
^Claudio Beretta e Cesare Comoletti,Grafia lombarda semplificata, 2003. In: Claudio Beretta (a c. di),Parlate e dialetti della Lombardia: lessico comparato, Milano, Mondadori: pp. 23-24.
^Jørgen Giorgio Bosoni,Una proposta di grafia unificata per le varietà linguistiche lombarde: regole per la trascrizione, 2003.Bollettino Storico dell'Alta Valtellina 6: 195-298.
^Claudio Meneghin,Rebuilding the Rhaeto-Cisalpine written language: Guidelines and criteria, 2007-2010.Part I: ORS-Orthography.Part II: Morphology, I: noun, article and personal pronoun.Part III. Morphology, II: adjectives, pronouns, invariables.Part IV. Morphology, III: the verb.Ianua 7 (2007): 37-72; 8 (2008): 113-152; 9 (2009): 37-94; 10 (2010): 33-72
Bernard Comrie, Stephen Matthews, Maria Polinsky (eds.), The Atlas of languages: the origin and development of languages throughout the world. New York 2003, Facts On File. p. 40.
Brevini, Franco - Lo stile lombardo: la tradizione letteraria da Bonvesin da la Riva a Franco Loi / Franco Brevini - Pantarei, Lugan - 1984 (Lombard style: literary tradition from Bonvesin da la Riva to Franco Loi )
Glauco Sanga: La lingua Lombarda, in Koiné in Italia, dalle origini al 500 (Koinés in Italy, from the origin to 1500), Lubrina publisher, Bèrghem.
Claudio Beretta:Letteratura dialettale milanese. Itinerario antologico-critico dalle origini ai nostri giorni - Hoepli, 2003.
G. Hull: "The linguistic Unity of NorthernItaly andRhaetia,PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1982; published asThe Linguistic Unity of Northern Italy and Rhaetia: Historical Grammar of the Padanian Language, 2 vols. Sydney: Beta Crucis Editions, 2017.
Jørgen G. Bosoni:«Una proposta di grafia unificata per le varietà linguistiche lombarde: regole per la trascrizione», inBollettino della Società Storica dell’Alta Valtellina 6/2003, p. 195-298 (Società Storica Alta Valtellina: Bormio, 2003). A comprehensive description of a unified set of writing rules for all the Lombard varieties of Switzerland and Italy, withIPA transcriptions and examples.
Tamburelli, M. (2014). Uncovering the 'hidden' multilingualism of Europe: an Italian case study. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 35(3), 252-270.
NED Editori:I quatter Vangeli de Mattee, March, Luca E Gioann - 2002.
Stephen A. Wurm: Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing. Paris 2001,UNESCO Publishing, p. 29.
Studi di lingua e letteratura lombarda offerti a Maurizio Vitale, (Studies in Lombard language and literature) Pisa: Giardini, 1983
A cura di Pierluigi Beltrami, Bruno Ferrari, Luciano Tibiletti, Giorgio D'Ilario:Canzoniere Lombardo - Varesina Grafica Editrice, 1970.
Sanga, Glauco. 1984. Dialettologia Lombarda. University of Pavia. 346pp.
RTSI: Acquarelli popolari, some video and audio documents (interviews, recordings, etc. of writers fromTicino) inTicinese varieties (themetalanguage of this site is Italian, and some of the interviews are in Italian rather than in Ticinese Lombard).
^Venetian is either grouped with the rest of the Italo-Dalmatian or the Gallo-Italic languages, depending on the linguist, but the major consensus among linguists is that in the dialectal landscape of northern Italy, Veneto dialects are clearly distinguished from Gallo-Italic dialects.
