Corsican Language Guide: Where It's Spoken, Script, Grammar & Etiquette

Where it's spoken

Article 2 of the French Constitution states that the language of the Republic is French, and Article 75-1 states that regional languages belong to the heritage of France. A Transcript editorial on the Corsican language says that Corsican has official status within the French Republic only to a certain degree: it is on an equal footing with the other languages traditionally spoken in French territories, none of which are official state languages, and the Deixonne Law, which provides for some teaching of regional languages, was extended to Corsican.

The same editorial says that most people of Corsican origin speak Corsican in their private lives, but that its use in public and in formal contexts is limited, especially in writing; in the Assembly of Corsica most debating is done in French. A sociolinguistic survey presented by the Corsican territorial authority reported that 58% of those questioned declared that they understand Corsican well or fairly well, that more than a quarter (28%) would speak it well, and, as the survey estimates, that the people who speak Corsican are mostly older.

Marcellesi and Marcellesi, writing in the early years of this century, say that no normative standard had been imposed on Corsican. In the last quarter of the twentieth century its plurality was accepted and theorised as a "polynomic language": each writer takes the common rules of writing and transcribes his or her own speech. For example, southern speech may be written with dd where other regions have a double l or a palatal l, which they present as a choice between marking or not marking the particularities of southern speech.

Sources

Script & pronunciation

Corsican is written in the Latin alphabet. Marcellesi and Marcellesi describe its writing as based on a transcriptive adaptation of the Italian graphic system: letters or groups of letters in principle correspond to the same sounds as in Italian, and other combinations are created for sounds that Italian does not have or does not write. A series of mid-palatal consonants, notably [tj] and [dj], is written chj and ghj, and j and h, which Italian uses little or not at all, are used in these combinations. This app's Chjucu ("Small") and Bonghjornu ("Hello / Good morning") show them. Words end in -u where Italian ends in -o, as in Chjucu.

Accents are used in Corsican to mark the stressed vowel, and this app's cards show them as grave accents, as in Nò ("No") and Pè piacè ("Please"). Marcellesi and Marcellesi also note that three different words are told apart in writing: e alone is the feminine plural article, è with a grave accent is the conjunction "and" and an approving adverb, and hè is the third person singular of the verb "to be". The affirmative adverb iè is felt to be a pan-Corsican identifying mark, and this app uses it for "Yes" (Iè).

Some features of speech are not written. Marcellesi and Marcellesi call one of them consonantal sandhi: a weakening of the initial consonant of a word, notably after the article, which spelling does not note. Their example is the word for "the wind": its initial consonant is v in absolute initial position, but after the article u it is a w, written v.

Sources

Marcellesi, Jean-Baptiste and Christiane Marcellesi. "Orthographe – Écriture – Transcription. Réflexions à partir du cas corse"

Grammar essentials

The definite article has no initial consonant of its own and is reduced to its vowel part, with an l appearing in elevated style or as a euphonic consonant, according to Marcellesi and Marcellesi. In this app's u cibu ("Food"), the masculine article is u; for a feminine noun that starts with a vowel, the article a is elided to l', as in l'acqua ("Water").

In the singular, Marcellesi and Marcellesi describe an alternation between masculine u and feminine a in the endings of nouns and adjectives. This app's Chjucu ("Small") is given with the feminine chjuca and the plurals chjuchi and chjuche.

The infinitive has lost the etymological final -re, as in this app's andà ("To go"). According to this app's card, a wish can be expressed with the first person form vogliu followed directly by the infinitive, as in Vogliu andà ("I want to go").

Giancarli says that negation in Corsican is in general binary, ùn + micca (word for word "ne + mie"), as in French (ne + pas). According to this app's card, it is ùn before the verb and micca after it: Ùn capiscu micca ("I don't understand"). The accent on ùn is kept.

Sources

Politeness & etiquette

ADECEC's Infcor dictionary defines voi as a second-person pronoun, masculine and feminine plural, often written vo or vo'. In a parallel French–Corsican corpus, Giancarli gives the example of a television journalist who asks one artist ("une artiste") whether she has plans; the Corsican version uses the plural forms vi and vo avete. According to this app's cards, the second-person plural is also used to address one person politely, and the cards mark the contrast: Cumu site? ("How are you? (polite)") uses site, the second-person plural of esse ("to be"), while Da duve sì? ("Where are you from?") uses the singular sì for a casual conversation. The card for Parlate inglese? ("Do you speak English?") describes parlate as the second-person plural of parlà that is also used to address one person politely.