Corsican language

• 1. Introduction

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  Corsican, known to its speakers as corsu or lingua corsa, sits at an unusual crossroads. It is a Romance language spoken on a Mediterranean island that belongs to France, yet its grammar, sounds, and vocabulary trace directly to medieval Tuscan. When the scholar Pasquale Paoli was living in exile in London, the English writer Samuel Johnson asked him about a "rustic language" that seemed very different from Italian. Paoli replied that such a language existed only in Sardinia. He was not being evasive. He was describing how Corsicans themselves understood the situation: Corsican and Italian were so close, so interwoven, that most islanders did not experience them as separate tongues at all.

  That intimacy would not last. France acquired the island from the Republic of Genoa in 1768, and within a century the language of official life had shifted. By the 9th of May 1859, French had formally replaced Italian as the island's official language. By the Liberation of France in 1945, nearly every Corsican had at least a working knowledge of French. By the 1960s, no monolingual Corsican speakers remained. A language that had once served as the informal register of a bilingual world had become, by the late twentieth century, classified by UNESCO as definitely endangered.

  How a language that was never truly separate from its neighbors came to fight for its own survival, and what it means for a language to be lost without ever quite existing on its own terms, are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. Roots in Tuscany

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  The common thread between Corsica and central Italy stretches back at least to the Etruscans, who established a presence on the island as early as 500 BC. When the Roman exile Seneca the Younger was sent to Corsica, he reported that neither the coast nor the interior was inhabited by Latin speakers he could understand. He described the population as a layering of different ethnic groups, Greeks, Ligures, and Iberians, whose languages had blended into something that no longer resembled any of its sources.

  The island's Tuscanisation began in earnest under two medieval Italian powers. The Republic of Pisa took control in 1077, followed by the Republic of Genoa in 1282, and both brought continental Italian culture with them. A migration of Tuscans during the lower Middle Ages proved decisive: it made the northern half of the island linguistically very close to central Italian varieties, while the south, more sheltered, kept older features that made it more similar to Sicilian.

  By the time Dante and Boccaccio were writing in medieval Tuscan, the Corsican vernacular was developing in near-parallel. Modern Corsican still reflects that medieval moment in specific ways. Where standard Italian keeps the Latin infinitive ending -re, as in mittere meaning "to send", both Tuscan and Corsican dropped it, producing mette or metta for "to put." Where Italian uses chi for "who" and che for "what," Corsican uses an uninflected chi for both. The one feature that most cleanly separates Corsican from mainland Tuscan dialects is the retention of a word-final o-u sound, so that the Italian questo and quello become questu or quistu and quellu or quiddu in Corsican. That same ending appeared in early Italian texts during the Middle Ages.

• 3. Italian, Then French

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  Even after France acquired Corsica in 1768 under Louis XV, the island's educated classes continued to look toward Italy. The children of the affluent still crossed the sea to pursue higher studies on the peninsula. It has been estimated that Corsicans made up a fourth of the total student body at the University of Pisa in 1830. Civil registers were kept in Italian until 1855.

  Corsican elites of that era did not think of their local speech and Italian as competing languages. They thought of them as registers of a single continuum. The practice they described, parlà in crusca, meaning "speaking in crusca" after the Florentine Academy dedicated to standardising Italian, was not code-switching between two different languages. It was more like adjusting the formality of a single voice. Italian was felt to be different from Corsican, but not as different as the gap between northern and southern Corsican dialects spoken by their own neighbors.

  The Jules Ferry education laws of 1882 began to spread French literacy across the French provinces, including Corsica, and from that point French started to take root. Then came a rupture that no law could have engineered. Italy's Fascist government made aggressive territorial claims to Corsica and eventually invaded. The backlash among islanders was swift and lasting. The association of Corsican language promotion with collaborators of the Fascist regime meant that advocating for Corsican after the Liberation was received with popular suspicion, as a potential cover for irredentist politics. Any remaining link between the islanders and standard Italian was severed. By the 1960s the last monolingual Corsican speakers had gone.

• 4. A Language Divided

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  Northern and southern Corsican are separated by a line running roughly from Girolata to Porto-Vecchio, and the two macro-varieties differ from each other more than either differs from its closest continental relatives. The northern variety, spoken around Bastia and Corte, is so close to central Italian that the dialects of Bastia and Cap Corse rank, after Florentine itself, among the varieties nearest to standard Italian. The southern variety, spoken around Sartène and Porto-Vecchio, preserves features that link it to Sicilian and, to a lesser extent, to Sardinian.

  The southern group is the more archaic of the two. It retains the distinction between the Latin short vowels i and u, preserving forms like pilu and bucca rather than merging them. It also carries a voiced retroflex stop, the same sound found in Sicilian dialects, heard in words like aceddu, beddu, and ziteddu. The conditional mood in the south is built on -ia, so that "she would love" becomes idda amarìa, while in the north the same construction uses -ebbe, yielding ella amarebbe.

  Between these two poles lies a transitional area where the dialects pick up features from both sides. Ajaccio's dialect, for instance, uses the retroflex sound but also borrows northern vocabulary. The dialect of Calvi and the Bonifacino spoken at Bonifacio belong not to Corsican at all but to the Ligurian language, a reminder that the island's linguistic map has never been a simple picture. The Alta Rocca region in the south is considered the most conservative corner of Corsica, close enough to the varieties spoken in northern Sardinia that scholars trace a direct line of migration.

• 5. Corsican Across the Water

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  Sardinia carries its own traces of Corsican settlement, concentrated in the island's north. Gallurese is spoken in the extreme north of Sardinia, in the region called Gallura, while Sassarese is spoken in Sassari and its surroundings in the northwest. Both are thought to derive from waves of migration by already-Tuscanised Corsicans and Tuscans who displaced the original Logudorese Sardinian varieties. Today the town of Luras sits as the only holdout in the middle of Gallura still speaking the original Sardinian variety.

  The Maddalena archipelago has a particular story. Culturally Corsican but annexed to the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia shortly before Corsica was ceded by Genoa to France in 1767, its dialect, called isulanu or maddaleninu, was brought over by fishermen and shepherds from Bonifacio during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Though it absorbed influences from Gallurese, it kept the core traits of southern Corsican, and its vocabulary also carries words from Genoese and from the island of Ponza.

  On the 14th of October 1997, Article 2, Item 4 of Law Number 26 of the Autonomous Region of Sardinia granted Sassarese and Gallurese equal legal status with the other indigenous languages of Sardinia. That recognition matters because the national framework for historical linguistic minorities in Italy does not technically cover them. Whether Gallurese and Sassarese should be classified as dialects of Corsican, dialects of Sardinian, or languages in their own right remains a live debate among linguists, and a proposal to group them all under the umbrella category of Southern Romance has not won universal support.

• 6. The Riacquistu and Revival

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  By 1974, the French National Assembly extended the 1951 Deixonne Law, which had initially recognised only Breton, Basque, Catalan, and Occitan, to include Corsican as well. The 1951 law had excluded Corsican on the grounds that it was a dialect of Italian, a foreign language. The 1974 recognition marked a shift: Corsican was now classed as one of France's full-fledged regional languages, not a foreign dialect.

  The cultural movement called the Riacquistu, meaning "reacquisition," had been growing since the 1970s. According to the anthropologist Dumenica Verdoni, writing new literature in modern Corsican is an integral part of affirming Corsican identity. Dumenicu Togniotti, director of the Teatru Paisanu, produced polyphonic musicals between 1973 and 1982. Michel Raffaelli launched the Teatru di a Testa Mora in 1980, and Saveriu Valentini followed with the Teatru Cupabbia in 1984. Modern prose writers identified with the movement include Alanu di Meglio, Ghjacumu Fusina, Lucia Santucci, and Marcu Biancarelli.

  The 1991 Joxe Statute set up the Collectivité Territoriale de Corse and assigned the Corsican Assembly the task of developing a plan for optional Corsican teaching. The University of Corsica Pasquale Paoli at Corte, Haute-Corse became the institutional centre of that effort. At the primary school level, three hours per week of Corsican instruction were offered in the year 2000. The language became mandatory at the university level, and it can be used in court proceedings or other government business when the officials involved speak it.

• 7. Who Still Speaks It

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  By 1995, an estimated 65 percent of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and around 10 percent used it as a first language. A decade and a half earlier, in 1980, about 70 percent of the island's population had some command of it. The trend pointed steadily downward.

  The April 2013 survey run on behalf of the Territorial Collectivity of Corsica gave more precise figures. Out of a total population of 309,693, between 86,800 and 130,200 people spoke Corsican. Twenty-eight percent of the overall population could speak it well; a further 14 percent could speak it quite well. The willingness to use it varied sharply with age. In the over-65 age group, 65 percent had solid oral understanding; in the 25-34 age group, the floor dropped to 25 percent, and nearly a quarter of that younger group reported they could not understand Corsican at all. Northern Corsica showed higher usage: 32 percent there spoke it quite well, compared with 22 percent in the south. Only 8 percent of Corsicans could write correctly in the language, while about 60 percent could not write it at all.

  One figure in the survey stands out against the backdrop of decline. Ninety percent of the Corsican population said they were in favour of a French-Corsican bilingualism. Only 10 percent wanted one language alone, and that minority split between those preferring only Corsican and those preferring only French. The literary tradition the language carries, particularly its proverbs and its tradition of polyphonic song, is described by UNESCO in its listing as a key vehicle for Corsican culture, and the first known surviving document containing Corsican, a bill of sale from Patrimonio, dates to 1220.