Le français en Vallée d'Aoste: état des lieux et perspectives

This article deals with the French of Aosta Valley, the smallest Italian Region, where this language has official status along with Italian. Several languages, dialects or patois cohabit here, but, undoubtedly, Italian largely dominates the Valdostan linguistic scene at the expense of French, a language that once enjoyed of a very strong position. For a better understanding of the reasons for the present situation of French in the Aosta Valley, we will try to delineate the most important stages, which have marked its linguistic history in that region. We will try to conduct a kind of assessment of the present status of French in the Aosta Valley and to observe, in particular, the influences that it been submitted to from other languages with which it coexists as a regional variation, drawing upon the recent data of the linguistic survey conducted by the Foundation Émile Chanoux and the outcomes of the survey carried out by D. Puolato, which will enable us to gauge the real uses of this language and of Valdostan people's attitudes towards French. In the face of the threat of a progressive disappearance of French, the Aosta Valley has to make its linguistic choice. Whereas, till now, it seems to have passively accepted the death of this language, during the last few decades, the European Union has paid particular attention to European Languages at risk of extinction, based on the recognition of a collective, multilingual and multicultural European identity. The Aosta Valley has just made some progress in this sense and European multilingualism may undoubtedly present a prospect for this language.