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In:Contested Languages: The hidden multilingualism of Europe
Edited by Marco Tamburelli and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in World Language Problems 8] 2021
► pp. 143–162

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Chapter 8
Contested orthographies

Taking a closer look at spontaneous writing in Piedmontese

 | University of Bologna
Published online: 21 January 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/wlp.8.08mio
Abstract
Piedmontese (today mainly spoken in Italy and Argentina) is one of the non-standardized languages of Italy with the most highly normalized orthographies. Nonetheless, new orthographic reforms and revisions were proposed in the early 2000s, allegedly in order to reflect the habitual choices of the speech community/ies, which are fully literate, but only in Italian or in Spanish.
This chapter examines the graphic choices of Piedmontese speakers with no command of the written language, when posting to Facebook groups in which the use of Piedmontese is possible and/or prescribed.
The data suggests that naïve writers of Piedmontese adhere closely to Standard Italian orthographic choices when writing Piedmontese, and use a highly restricted range of allographs to represent the more distinctive phonemes in the Piedmontese sound inventory. Interestingly, these allographs generally diverge from both a strictly phonemic orthography, and the various orthographies proposed from a ‘top-down’ perspective for Piedmontese. They seem rather to be consistent with the way in which writers of other non-standardised languages of Italy naïvely represent phonemes that are not part of the Italian inventory.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Piedmontese: A brief linguistic profile
  • 2.Orthographies for Piedmontese
  • 3.Spontaneous writings in Piedmontese
    • 3.1The corpus
      • 3.1.1Low vowels
      • 3.1.2Front unrounded vowels
      • 3.1.3[ø]
      • 3.1.4[ə]
      • 3.1.5[u] and [y]
  • 4.What we can learn from spontaneous Piedmontese spelling choices
    • 4.1Synchronic and diachronic consistencies
      • 4.1.1Synchrony
      • 4.1.2Diachrony
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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