Corsican language
Channel: 宇宙のすべての知識 プリンシピア
Date: 2019-02-01

Corsican language, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=7578 / CC BY SA 3.0

#Dialects_of_Italian
#Languages_of_France
#Languages_of_Sardinia
#Corsican_language
Corsican language

Corsican ("corsu" or "lingua corsa" ) is a Romance language within the Italo-Dalmatian subfamily. It is closely related to Tuscan, and thus to Tuscan-based Italian. In its nothern varieties especially, mutual intelligibility between Corsican and Italian is high. Varieties of Corsican are spoken, and to some extent written, on the islands of Corsica (France) and northern Sardinia (Italy). Corsican used to play the role of a vernacular, while Italian was the official language in Corsica until 1859; afterwards Italian was replaced by French, owing to the acquisition of the island by France from the Republic of Genoa in 1768. Over the next two centuries, the use of French grew to the extent that, by the Liberation in 1945, all islanders had a working knowledge of French. The 20th century saw a wholesale language shift, with islanders changing their language practices to the extent that there were no monolingual Corsican speakers left by the 1960s. By 1995, an estimated 65 percent of islanders had some degree of proficiency in Corsican, and a small minority, perhaps 10 percent, used Corsican as a first language.

As for Corsican, a bone of contention is whether it should be considered an Italian dialect or its own language. Usually, it is not possible to ascertain what an author means by these terms. For example, one might read from some scholars that Corsican either belongs to the "Centro-Southern Italian dialects" along with Tuscan and the Tuscan-based standard Italian, Neapolitan and others or that it is "closely related to the Tuscan dialect of Italian". 

The matter is controversial, as the island was historically and culturally bound to the Italian Mainland from the Middle Ages until the 19th century, and installed in a diglossic system where both Corsican and Italian were per...