16 Facts About Corsican language

Corsican is a Romance language constituted by the continuum of the Italo-Romance dialects spoken on the Mediterranean island of Corsica and on the northern end of the island of Sardinia .

Corsican language is related to the Tuscan varieties from the Italian peninsula, and therefore to the Florentine-based standard Italian.

Under the long-standing sway of Tuscany's Pisa and Republic of Genoa over Corsica, Corsican used to play the role of a vernacular in combination with Italian functioning as the island's official language.

Some scholars argue that Corsican language belongs to the Centro-Southern Italian dialects, while others are of the opinion that it is closely related to Italy's Tuscan varieties, if not reputed to be part thereof.

Mutual intelligibility between Italian and the dialects of Corsican language is in fact very high, with particular reference to Northern Corsican language.

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Today's Corsican is the result of these historical vicissitudes, which have morphed the language to an idiom that bears a strong resemblance to the medieval Tuscan once spoken at the time of Dante and Boccaccio, and still existing in peripheral Tuscany .

Nationalist calls for Corsican to be put on the same footing as French led the French National Assembly to extend the 1951 Deixonne Law, which initially recognized only a few languages, to including Corsican as well, among others, not as a dialect of Italian, but as one of France's full-fledged regional languages in 1974 .

Two most widely spoken forms of the Corsican language are the groups spoken in the Bastia and Corte area, and the groups spoken around Sartene and Porto-Vecchio .

The Corsican language appeared to be in serious decline when the French government reversed its unsupportive stand and initiated some strong measures to save it.

At the primary school level Corsican language is taught up to a fixed number of hours per week and is a voluntary subject at the secondary school level, but is required at the University of Corsica.

Ferdinand Gregorovius, a 19th-century traveller and enthusiast of Corsican language culture, reported that the preferred form of the literary tradition of his time was the vocero, a type of polyphonic ballad originating from funeral obsequies.

However, the trail of written popular literature of known date in Corsican language currently goes no further back than the 17th century.

Corsican language has left a trail of legal documents ending in the late 12th century.

The first known surviving document containing some Corsican language is a bill of sale from Patrimonio dated to 1220.

Corsican language is written in the standard Latin script, using 21 of the letters for native words.

Corsican language has been regarded as a dialect of Italian historically, similar to the Romance lects developed on the Italian peninsula, and in writing, it resembles Italian .