Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

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Writing systems for Italian regional languages

Paolo Coluzzi, Lissander Brasca & Emanuele Miola

To cite this article: Paolo Coluzzi, Lissander Brasca & Emanuele Miola (2018): Writing systems
for Italian regional languages, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, DOI:
10.1080/01434632.2018.1531875

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2018.1531875

Published online: 11 Oct 2018.

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JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2018.1531875

Writing systems for Italian regional languages*

Paolo Coluzzia, Lissander Brascab and Emanuele Miolac
a
Department of Asian and European Languages, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; bDepartment of
Linguistics, Bangor University, Bangor, UK; cDipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica, University of Bologna,
Bologna, Italy

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Devising a writing system, or graphisation, is a fundamental aspect of Received 11 January 2018
corpus planning that no language can take too lightly. This paper Accepted 26 September 2018
begins with a general introduction to graphisation and to Italian
KEYWORDS
regional languages, followed by an analysis of the different Digraphia; graphisation;
orthographies in use so far or proposed for the main regional languages Lombard; orthography;
in Italy, with reference also to the three Romance languages already Piedmontese; polynomy
accorded official recognition as minority languages: Sardinian, Friulian
and Ladin. The practical aspect and the symbolic aspect of graphisation
are discussed and the problems and difficulties that are being
encountered in this process are highlighted, especially with regard to
two Northern varieties that are presented as case studies: Lombard and
Piedmontese. The paper closes with some general considerations and
recommendations, particularly on the adoption of a polynomic
approach to graphisation if at all possible, and of a digraphic regime as
a transitional strategy for cases where a common orthography cannot
be decided upon, or to help the spread of the language among new
speakers.

Introduction
Italy is a multiethnic and multilingual country. On top of Italian (in its standard and regional
varieties) and the 12 minority languages that have been recognised and are now protected by
State Law 482/1999, a number of non-recognised regional languages are spoken and, as we
will see, sometimes written. Lacking official status and standardisation, these languages elude pre-
cise figures but number in the region of 15, excluding Sardinian, Ladin and Friulian, which are
already protected by Law 482 (see Lepschy 1994, 9). They are normally grouped into five families
(Maiden and Parry 1997, 3): Gallo-Italic, Venetan, middle Italian, upper southern and extreme
southern. If there is a fair degree of intelligibility between most upper southern and extreme
southern varieties on the one hand, and among Gallo-Italic varieties on the other, intelligibility
between northern and central-southern varieties is very low, lower than between Italian and
Spanish, for example (for intelligibility between Lombard and Italian, see Pellegrini 1973, 64–
65; Tamburelli 2014).
Apart from the lack of recognition at the State level, Italian regional languages are still termed
‘dialects’ by Italian institutions, including academia, which obviously does not help their status.
Even though Italian regional languages are in fact closely related to Italian (which derives from
XIV century Florentine, a Tuscan variety), they are not its local varieties, as the term ‘dialect’

CONTACT Paolo Coluzzi pcoluzzi@yahoo.com

*This paper is the result of joint work by the three authors. Paolo Coluzzi is mostly responsible for Sections 1, 2 and 3, Lissander
Brasca for Section 5 and Emanuele Miola for Section 6, whereas Sections 4 and 7 are rather the result of collaborative efforts.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 P. COLUZZI ET AL.

suggests. They all evolved from Latin in parallel with but independently from Tuscan, apart from the
historical contact which has taken place among all European languages and particularly among
neighbouring Romance varieties.
The topic of this paper is how these regional languages are written down, not only in social
media and text messages, but also, and increasingly, on websites and all sort of publications, even
though these are still limited, partly because of lack of funds and literacy in the local language on
the part of the speakers. Devising an orthography, the process called ‘graphisation’, is a funda-
mental aspect of corpus planning that no language can take too lightly. The way a language is
written is in fact its visual aspect, which gives it a public image and an identity. Similar or iden-
tical writing systems can even unite speech communities, whereas different writing systems can
divide them (see Coluzzi 2007). This paper will begin with a general introduction to graphisation
and then will analyse the different orthographies that are in use or are being proposed for some
of the regional languages in Italy, with reference also to three of the Romance languages that have
been recognised as minority languages: Sardinian, Ladin and Friulian.1 We will discuss both the
practical aspect and the symbolic aspect of graphisation and will highlight the problems and
difficulties that are being encountered in this process, using Lombard and Piedmontese as case
studies, respectively the heritage language of the Lombardy region and the surrounding areas
(including Canton Ticino in Switzerland) and the heritage language of most of the Piedmont
region, both lying in the northern part of Italy (see Figure 1).
We will discuss the main features of the orthographies used or proposed for these two regions,
their advantages and disadvantages, and put forward some suggestions for those regional languages
that still lack an accepted orthography for the whole region or sub-region where they are spoken. In
addition, considering the different needs of first language speakers and second language speakers and
other factors of a historical and social nature, we will highlight the advantages of adopting a
digraphic (or ‘bigraphic’ as Lüpke (2011, 316) suggests) system, at least at the initial stages of
language planning.

Figure 1. Areas in Northern Italy where Lombard and Piedmontese are spoken (map kindly provided by Fulvio Baravalle).
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 3

Graphisation
Graphisation is part of corpus planning, one of the three main phases language planning is normally
divided into, the other two being status planning and acquisition planning. It refers to the elabor-
ation of a written code, an orthography for the language that is the object of language planning.
Sometimes this orthography has been in existence for a long time, as a result of a consensus achieved
formally and directly or informally and indirectly among political leaders, linguists, prestigious wri-
ters and men of culture; in other cases the choice is to be made between different orthographies in use
or, if the language has never or hardly ever been written, an outright new system needs to be devel-
oped. Particularly in the last two cases mentioned above, the task of the planners is not an easy one as
the written code to be promoted has to suit the phonetic/phonemic and/or morphosyntactic charac-
teristics of the language (coherence) and be as simple as possible (functionality), also as far as the use
of word processing is concerned. In addition, its design has to find a balance between two sets of
opposite/contrasting needs:

(1) The need for simplicity on the one hand and the need for inclusiveness (polynomy)2 on the
other.
(2) The need for familiarity on the one hand and the need for autonomy and differentiation from
the majority language on the other. The orthography has to appeal to the people who are going
to use it ‒ it has to be relatively close to the system used for the majority language or the
languages that people are familiar with, so that they will not find it too difficult to learn or
too strange. On the other hand, an orthography which is different from the one used for the
dominant language can highlight the peculiarities of a culture and in some cases give status
to the language as something which is autonomous and special, rather than a kind of ‘deviation’
or ‘derivation’ from the dominant language (Coluzzi 2007).

Orthographies for Italian regional languages

To start with, we should highlight the fact that most speakers of local languages in Italy do not write
their languages: even for those who do not speak Italian fluently the diglossia found all over the
country has tended historically to make Italian the default choice when the need to write something
down arises (see Testa 2014). This situation has also been defined as ‘exographia’ (Lüpke 2011, 318).
Apart from a few exceptions which only involve recognised minority languages, literacy at school is
exclusively in Italian, if we exclude the few hours of foreign language teaching per week. In addition,
many regional languages either lack an accepted orthography altogether, or an orthography is avail-
able only for some varieties of the language, those we could call ‘dialects’. Just to give one example,
there is no orthography for Emilian, but there are at least three specifically applied to Bolognese, the
Emilian variety spoken in Bologna, the administrative centre of Emilia-Romagna. One of them, the
OLM, proposed by Luciano Canepari and Daniele Vitali in 1995 (see Vitali 2004) seems to have
gained in popularity in recent years (see also Miola 2017, 61‒63). On the other hand many writers,
particularly poets, writing in their local variety, do so using an idiosyncratic (or intuitive) orthogra-
phy which in some cases may include some features of a more prestigious related variety, for example
Neapolitan for many writers of Southern Italian ‘dialects’.3 We could say that at the regional level
only Piedmontese, Friulian and Sardinian possess accepted orthographies (and even out-and-out
standards), whereas other regions may have a particularly prestigious variety that functions as a
kind of koine, like Genoese for Liguria, Neapolitan for Campania and perhaps for other areas in
the South, and Roman for Lazio, which are mostly written using traditional orthographies. Veneto
has an official orthography sanctioned by the regional authorities, the Grafia Veneta Unitaria, which
is however not used much, probably because it is extremely fragmented in its attempt to reproduce
all phonetic features of Venetan, often using signs and diacritics that are difficult to reproduce (see
Tomasin 2013), whereas Sicilian for the time being seems to be doing quite well with several
4 P. COLUZZI ET AL.

orthographies sharing similar features and this does not seem to hinder comprehension of a language
that does not present great regional variation. As for the central Italian regions, local writers do not
seem to have many problems in using the standard Italian orthography to write varieties that are
linguistically close to Italian.
In any case, even when a traditional orthography is present, starting from the nineteenth century
various new phonetic orthographies have sprung up all over Italy, perhaps initially to aid transcrip-
tion of folk material, then to accommodate learners and in some cases to increase differentiation from
Italian. Indeed these new phonetic/phonemic orthographies appear to be perceived positively as most
people speak or want to learn their strictly local variety (and little geographical variation favours the
use of these orthographies) and fear perhaps that outsiders may mispronounce local words. More-
over these orthographic innovations often look simpler than their predecessors. We further feel
that, as language shift continues to reduce opportunities to hear the local language, a phonetic/pho-
nemic orthography may be felt increasingly more as an important record of the language and perhaps
the only testimony left of the spoken language. In addition, for some, particularly autonomists or
separatists, having orthographies which look different from Italian is a plus. For example, Friulian
can be written with two main orthographies, the official one and the Faggin system, whose use of
the hacek diacritic makes it look more Slavic (Coluzzi 2007; Turello 2015). So even though some
orthographies may be more popular than others, each regional language has more than one ortho-
graphy at its disposal and in most cases two main ones: one more traditional featuring some etymo-
logical elements (which normally make it more flexible), and one more modern and more phonetic/
phonemic that tends to highlight some phonological peculiarities which differentiate it from Italian.
The latter tends to be criticised by ‘dialect’ enthusiasts and writers as it disregards the literary tra-
dition on the one hand, and it is perceived as favouring diastratically low varieties on the other, as
it places a lot of emphasis on the reproduction of local pronunciation. A big debate, for example,
took place as early as the nineteenth century in Naples between the scholars and writers in favour
of the traditional Neapolitan orthography and those supporting more modern attempts to reproduce
the actual pronunciation, which led to awkward solutions to reproduce, for example, the mid central
vowel at the end of words so common in Southern Italian varieties (Gavagnin 2003/2004). Dropping
vowels to reproduce this ‘schwa’ or adopting solutions such as writing small vowels seem also to con-
cern many present lovers and writers of Neapolitan and other southern varieties as well (see for
example Galassi 2017 and Di Nunno 2017). More phonetic orthographies seem also to be preferred
by many ethnonationalists, partly because these orthographies make use of letters that do not exist in
Italian, such as <ü> or <ö> in Lombard or the <ł> in Venetan (see also Coluzzi 2008).

Standardisation/graphisation: advantages and disadvantages

As Sebba (2007, 110) has explained:
There are few, if any, languages which have no dialectal variation. When developing a written standard, one
possibility is simply to select one variety as the basis for the written standard; users of other varieties must
then do the best they can, either working out the equivalences with their own dialects or learning the standard
as a new variety. An alternative is to look for a system of representation which is suited to as wide a range of
speakers as possible. In general, there is an inverse relationship between the amount of phonemic or phonetic
detail in an orthography and the “coverage” of the orthography, defined as the range of dialects or varieties of
the language for which the orthography is reasonably well suited.

In Italy three main paths have been followed so far for the establishment of regional languages, which
are in most cases more of an idea than out-and-out standardised forms: (1) Basing the regional
language on one prestigious variety (a process which is more centralised but which is normally felt
as more ‘natural’, partly because it is the path followed by most national languages in the world);
(2) Creating the regional language from a combination of all the varieties or the main ones (a process
that is normally felt as more ‘artificial’); (3) Construing the regional language as simply the totality of all
the related varieties present in the region (a polynomic approach, which is normally felt more
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 5

Table 1. The three main paths followed for the establishment of regional languages.
Approach Examples
Language based on one prestigious Piedmontese (based on Turinese), Venetan (based on Venetian), Ligurian (based on
variety Genoese), Friulian (based on the central variety around Udine)
‘Mixed’ language based on elements from Ladin dolomitan
most/all varieties
Polynomic approach Lombard (through ‘Scriver Lombard’), Venetan (through ‘Parlate Venete Unificae’)

‘democratic’ and inclusive). As a matter of facts, paths (2) and (3) have often been the preferred choice
with regards to regional languages which do not exhibit a prestigious variety. Table 1 provides some
examples of regional languages which have followed these different paths.
It must be emphasised here that the examples given are not always clear-cut. For example, even
though official Friulian is based on the central variety, it does have some polynomic features that
allow it to be pronounced differently in different areas (Coluzzi 2007). Similarly many traditional
writing systems, such as Neapolitan and Venetian, are inclusive enough to be able to be used, at
least to an extent, for other regional varieties. On the other hand Ladin dolomitan for the different
Ladin varieties and the Limba Sarda Comuna for Sardinian could perhaps be both considered as
‘mixed’ languages (point 2 in Table 1) and be the result of a polynomic approach (point 3 in
Table 1), even though Limba Sarda Comuna is based on a natural transitional variety between its
two main varieties: Campidanese and Logudorese (see for example Iannàccaro and Dell’Aquila
2008 for Ladin dolomitan; Dell’Aquila and Iannàccaro 2010 for Limba Sarda Comuna).
These three approaches tend to make use of different orthographies. The regional languages based
on one variety tend to use a traditional orthography and/or sometimes a modern phonetic one,
whereas the regional languages based on a combination of all or the main varieties tend to use a pho-
netic/phonemic orthography. Finally a polynomic approach has to make use of a polynomic orthogra-
phy4 that can be used for all the local varieties and can be read and understood by all their speakers, as
it programmatically abstains from representing, through the sequence of graphemes, the exact
sequence of phonemes of a particular local pronunciation. All this is shown in Table 2 below.
Basically, there is no perfect orthography: all of them have strong and weak points, advantages and
disadvantages. For example, traditional orthographies tend to have stronger links with the literary tra-
dition produced after the sixteenth-seventeenth century (basically after the invention and spread of
press, when most of them were developed), whereas modern phonetic/phonemic orthographies (and
to an extent the traditional ones) are easier to learn for new speakers. On the other hand, more modern
and polynomic orthographies tend to look more different from the dominant language, Italian, which
helps create a sense of unity and autonomy that are probably even stronger than that provided by the
orthographies used for regional languages that are based on only one prestigious variety. A local-poly-
nomic orthography, such as the one that will be introduced in the next section, is the most inclusive at
the regional level, inspiring in a more direct way a sense of mutual respect among all the local varieties
of the language. These advantages and disadvantages have been summarised in Table 3.

Case study 1: Lombard

Lombard is a very interesting case because it has been and is being written using the three main
orthographies highlighted above. The Lombard language can be roughly divided into four main var-
ieties (Sanga 1997, 255–259; Lurati 2002, 226–227; Bonfadini 2010, 22):

Table 2. The three approaches and the kind of orthographies they tend to make use of.
Approach Orthography
Language based on one prestigious variety (unitary model) Traditional-Modern/phonetic-phonemic
‘Mixed’ language based on elements from all varieties (unitary model) Modern/phonetic-phonemic
Polynomic model Polynomic
6 P. COLUZZI ET AL.

Table 3. Orthographies and their advantages.

Orthography Link with the literary tradition5 Inclusiveness Learner-friendly Differentiation
Traditional + + +
Modern/phonetic ++ +
Polynomic ++ +

. Western Lombard (spoken in the provinces of Varese, Como, Lecco, Sondrio, Milan, Monza,
Pavia and Lodi, in addition to Novara and Verbania in Piedmont and Canton Ticino in
Switzerland)
. Eastern Lombard (spoken in the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia, Northern Cremona and Northern
Mantua)
. Alpine Lombard (spoken in the provinces of Sondrio, Trento and Verbania, in Canton Ticino and
Canton Grischun in Switzerland)
. The so-called peripheral varieties of the lower lands (spoken in the provinces of Pavia, Lodi,
Cremona and Mantua).

So far, each Lombard variety has been written using different orthographies, some more phonetic,
some more etymological. For example, the western variety of Lombard, and more specifically Mila-
nese, has been written so far using two main systems (see also Coluzzi 2007, 2008; Miola 2015a): the
traditional one, more etymological, and the modern one, more phonetic, used in Switzerland as well.
The two systems differ mainly in the way vowels are represented (see Table 4). In both orthographies
the consonants are spelt as in Italian, with the addition of the digraph <sg> before <e> and <i> to
represent the sound /ʒ/ which does not exist in Italian, and the use of an apostrophe to separate
the <s> from <c> and <g> before <e> and <i> or at the end of a word so that they are read respect-
ively as as /sʧ/ (s’c) and /zʤ/ (s’g), sound combinations that do not exist in Italian.
However, a new writing system was devised by the linguist Lissander Brasca about ten years ago,
and published in 2011, which is currently used by a dozen activists and ‘freely’ interpreted/adapted
by others. The system has been called ‘Scriver Lombard’ (henceforth SL) and defined as a local-poly-
nomic orthography and its aim is to allow the speakers of all Lombard varieties to write every word of
their own local variety in a graphic form which is very similar or even identical to the form in which
the speakers of any other Lombard variety would write it, so that the identity and meaning of the
words would be easily recognised by speakers of other varieties. This implies that the system cannot
reflect directly all the phonetic features of any variety, and the speakers of each variety will need to
learn how to write this system that is necessarily the most etymological (deep) and least phonetic
(shallow) among the ones used so far. SL looks quite different from the orthographies that have
been used so far for the Lombard varieties. Whereas the use of vowels is similar to that in the tra-
ditional Milanese orthography, consonants are used that are not found in the Italian alphabet, such
as <ç>, <j> and <x>, while others are used differently from Italian, such as <q> that can be followed
directly by <e> and without the interposition of <u> (corresponding to /ke/ and /ki/), or <g> which is
mostly pronounced as /g/ even before <e> and <i>. On the whole, whereas the traditional Milanese
orthography is, at least as far as vowels are concerned, a little closer to French and the modern one to
German, ‘Scriver Lombard’ is closer to the way Lombard was spelt in medieval literature.

Table 4. The main differences between the traditional Milanese orthography and the modern
system as far as vowels are concerned.
IPA Traditional Modern
ɔ ò o
u ó (or ‘o’ if unstressed) u
ø oeu ö
y u ü
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 7

As Lüpke has explained (2011, 329), ‘Philologists, linguists and educators have insisted for several
centuries that the ideal orthography has a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and pho-
neme’; these are the proponents of autonomous views of literacy, for whom not ‘all writing systems
are […] seen as equally good. Instead there is a clear preference for phonemic systems’ (Sebba 2007,
15). Many lay people who have a limited knowledge of linguistic phenomena also seem to share this
viewpoint, including some activists for the local languages. However, even though all these individ-
uals tend to believe that ‘it is better in an orthography to overspecify than to underspecify, under-
specification (or the conflation of several phonemes into one grapheme) can be a powerful tool
for the creation of a pandialectal orthography in the case of unstandardised and internally diverse
speech varieties’ (Lüpke 2011, 332), such as the Lombard local-polynomic orthography.
As a matter of fact, not so many writing systems in the world are completely phonetic/phonemic,
and some may distance themselves considerably from the actual pronunciation, but without creating
particular problems for the readers who are used to those systems. Shallow systems6 (traditional and
modern orthographies) have the great disadvantage that they can only be used in a restricted area, or
they need a standardised pronunciation, whereas deep systems, such as SL, are more transparent,
flexible and allow for local pronunciations of the language. This means that if on the one hand
new speakers may find it difficult to learn how to read and write the language at the initial stages
using SL (but not particularly those who already speak it), the great advantage will be that they
will be able to read and understand all Lombard varieties and a sense of unity of the language
will be enhanced. This also means that it will be possible to publish more copies of any written docu-
ment, from poetry to novels to scientific books, enlarging the audience (any Lombard speaker will be
able to read them) and reducing costs. It is because learners seem to be helped by shallow orthogra-
phies that reflect the actual pronunciation that linguists such as Sallabank and Marquis (2018, 249)
have affirmed that ‘a shallow orthography […] is easier for beginning readers to process’, particularly
in the case of minority and regional languages where ‘learners […] are more reliant on written
materials than learners of languages of wider communication, as they are unlikely to have much
exposure to the language outside lessons’ (Sallabank and Marquis 2018, 250). In fact,
There is a consensus that phonological, in particular phonemic, awareness is beneficial to learning to read, and
that shallow orthographies, which make most use of that awareness, are helpful to the learner at an early stage.
On the other hand, many, probably most, of the world’s readers use ‘deep’ orthographies where the sound and
the letter composition of words are indirectly related or even unrelated. (Sebba 2007, 23)

Another problem that deeper orthographies may have for learners is giving an Italian pronunciation
to letters that are pronounced differently in the minority or regional language. As far as Friulian is
concerned, for example, Turello (2015, 518–519) has observed that many new speakers pronounce
the <z> as in Italian (/dz/) even in the cases when according to the official Friulian orthography it
should be pronounced as /dʒ/, or stress some words wrongly following Italian use. Obviously in
all these cases good and varied audio material may help solve the problem, even though the strong
influence of the majority language can never be underplayed.
Returning to the Lombard language, an example of the same sentence in the Milanese variety
written using the traditional, the modern and the local-polynomic system can be seen in Table 5.
Whereas the last sentence would be read like the two previous ones by a Milanese speaker, it could
easily be read by a speaker of Bergamasco, for example, and understood just by knowing that ‘el
cusin’ in western Lombard stands for the Bergamasco ‘ol jerman’ meaning ‘the cousin’. In fact,

Table 5. The same sentence written in the different orthographies.

English My cousin heard her voice and rushed out to hug her
Italian Mio cugino ha sentito la sua voce ed è corso fuori ad abbracciarla
Traditional system El mè cusin l’ha sentuu la soa vos e l’è cors foeù a brascialla su
Modern system El mè cüsin l’ha sentüü la sua vus e l’è curs föö a brasciala sü
Local-polynomic system El mè cusin l’ha sentud la soa vox e l’è cors fœr a braçar-la su
8 P. COLUZZI ET AL.

the same sentence in the Bergamasco variety would be written as: ‘Ol mè jerman l’ha sentid la so vox
e l’è cors for a braçar-la su’, a sentence that is very similar to the one above and perfectly understand-
able by a Milanese, for instance. The list of frequent words that are completely different in the differ-
ent varieties is not long and they could all be learnt very quickly.
In the choice of a graphic form for a word, SL observes the two following general criteria: (1) A
sequence of graphemes are preferred which are phonographically interpretable as a sequence of pho-
nemes found in the most conservative forms attested nowadays in Lombardy, corresponding to the
highest quantity of etymological phonetic material; (2) In general, a philological form is preferred,
namely one that is attested in manuscripts or critical editions of texts written in the Lombard
language. Besides limiting the proliferation of different written forms for the same word, the first
criterion makes the single morphemes in the word more easily identifiable and helps to avoid homo-
graphs. Both criteria make the texts written using SL look closer to medieval Lombard literature,
which in turn should make the latter look less alien to modern Lombard readers.
In the expression ‘local-polynomic’, ‘local’ refers to the fact that SL allows the writer to represent
some peculiarities of his/her local pronunciation in the written forms, mainly in the lexical roots. In
fact, a Milanese speaker would write <piaxer> (pleasure), whereas a Bergamasc speaker would write
<piacer>. Similarly, the writer can represent some of his/her local morphological peculiarities, e.g. a
Milanese would write <parlom> (we speak) while a Bergamasc would write <am parla>. This is
meant to enhance the sense of inclusiveness even further, giving each writer/reader the opportunity
to recognise a little bit of his/her own local identity in a possible official and/or important supra-local
written text. ‘Locality’ is also meant to allow Lombards – who are used to the Italian (largely) pho-
netic orthography – to get slowly used to logo-morphography. Indeed, a possible decision to reduce
the level of ‘locality’ – profitably enhancing the level of inter-dialectal homogeneity – may be taken in
the future, as writers/readers become more proficient in SL.

Case study 2: Piedmontese

Albeit being part, as well as Lombard, of the Gallo-Italic continuum and being spoken in a bordering
region, the written tradition of the Piedmontese language is quite different from that of Lombard.
The main difference is due to the fact that Piedmontese has had, from the eighteenth century
onward, a koine variety. This variety was the dialect spoken in Turin, the capital of the Kingdom
of Sardinia and of the Kingdom of Italy from 1861 to 1865. Diatopically, Piedmontese varieties,
which enjoy a high or very high rate of mutual intelligibility both among them and with Turinese
as well, can be divided into High Piedmontese (which includes Turin and the western part of the
region) and Low Piedmontese (which in turn may be separated into north-eastern and south-eastern
Piedmontese). However, the koine was felt to be more formal and more prestigious than local dia-
lects and occupied, along with Italian, the high position in a diglossic Piedmont at least until the
1950s (Regis 2012a, 96‒97). In the 1930s Piedmontese orthography was codified by Giuseppe Pacotto
and Andrea Viglongo (see Pacotto 1930). Pacotto and Viglongo’s orthography (henceforth PV) is
mainly phonetic, based on Turinese (see also Table 1), and before long superseded all other ortho-
graphies used for Piedmontese that co-existed with it, such as ortografia virigliana (named after its
proponent, Alberto Viriglio) or that used in Pipino’s first grammar of Piedmontese (1783). Table 6
shows the rough grapheme-phoneme correspondences in the PV orthography.
The differences between the PV orthography, the ortografia virigliana and other orthographies
used in printed publications of the 18th and 19th centuries are mainly to do with the graphisation
of phonemes that are not part of the Italian inventory. Nonetheless, these differences are very few
and minor (see Table 7 and Goria/Goria 2011; Perrini 2011). This, in turn, possibly helped the
PV orthography be accepted by all Piedmontese writers – even though reluctantly by some.
Apart from original solutions, these orthographies (similarly to the Milanese traditional orthogra-
phy) appear to be more oriented towards the French orthographic system, at least as far as vowels are
concerned. Digraphs such as <eu> for /ø/ or <ou> for /ʊ/ (and/or for its allophone /u/), and
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 9

Table 6. Graphemes-phoneme correspondences of the Pacotto-Viglongo’s Piedmontese orthography.

Grapheme Phoneme

<a> /a/ (/ɑ/, if stressed, when the orthography was codified)

<b> /b/
<c> /k/, /tʃ/
<d> /d/
<e> /e/, /ɛ/
<ë> /ə/
<f> /f/
<g> /g/, /dʒ/
<h> (only used for etymological reasons with some words deriving
from Lat. HABERE , or in the digraphs <ch>, /k/, and <gh>, /g/)
<i> /i/, /j/
<j> /j/
<l> /l/
<m> /m/
<n> /n/, /ŋ/
<n-> /ŋ/ (only between vowels)
<ò> /ɔ/
<o> /u/ (/ʊ/ when the orthography was codified)
<p> /p/
<q> /k/
<r> /r/
<s> /s/, /z/
<s-> /ʃ/, /ʒ/ (always followed by /tʃ/ or /dʒ/)
<t> /t/
<u> /y/, /w/, /u/
<v> /v/, /w/
<z> /z/

graphemes such as <u> for /y/ are no doubt due to the cultural superposition of French orthography.
Furthermore, the choices of <u> for /y/ and, most of all, of <o> for /ʊ/ or /u/ are quite removed from
the Italian orthographic system. However, given the phonetic changes that took place in Piedmon-
tese and in Italian, the dominant language in Piedmont, PV choices resulted in ‘an orthography that
is […] oblivious of the phonological differences between the two languages’ (Tosco 2008: 6). As just
one example, the word <cultura>, ‘culture’, is written in the same way in both languages, even though
it is pronounced /kyl’tyra/ in Piedmontese (and incidentally in Lombard, too, when the traditional
orthography or SL are used) and /kul’tura/ in Italian.
More recently, linguist and activist Bruno Villata and activist Enrico Eandi have come up with a
new orthography for Piedmontese (see Eandi 2008; Villata 2001; Vitali 2010). According to its pro-
ponents, Villata and Eandi’s orthography (henceforth VE) was designed to be strictly phonetic, i.e.
with a 1:1 correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, and more similar to the orthographies
that Piedmontese speakers already know (Villata 2001), i.e. arguably, the Italian or the Spanish ones,
since VE wanted to meet the needs of Piedmontese speakers both in Italy and Argentina. The differ-
ences between VE and PV orthographies mainly concern the graphisation of vowels (see Table 8;

Table 7. The main differences between Pacotto-Viglongo’s orthography and other 18th and 19th-century orthographies for
Piedmontese.
Phoneme PV Ortografia virigliana (and other orthographies)
/ʊ/ <o> <ô> ( <o>, <ou>)
/ə/ <ë> <ë> ( <ę>)
/ɔ/ <ò> <o> ( <ö>)
/ø/ <eu> <eu> ( <ēū>, <ö>)
/ɛ/ <e> <e> ( <ë>, <ę>)
/e/ <e> <e> ( <ė>)
/ŋ/ (between vowels) <n-> <ñ> ( <ñ>, <nh>, <nn>)
10 P. COLUZZI ET AL.

Table 8. The main differences between Pacotto-Viglongo’s and Villata-Eandi’s orthographies.

Phoneme PV VE
/ʊ/ <o> <u>
/y/ <u> <ü>
/ɔ/ <ò> <o>
/ø/ <eu> <ö>
/ə/ <ë> <ë>, <e>7

Table 9. The same sentence written in the different orthographies.

English My cousin heard her voice and rushed out to hug her
Italian Mio cugino ha sentito la sua voce ed è corso fuori ad abbracciarla
PV Mè cusin a l’ha sentì soa vos e a l’é scapà fòra për ambrassela
VE Mè cüsin a l’ha sentì sua vus e a l’é scapà fora per ambrassela

incidentally the differences are basically the same as between the traditional and the modern ortho-
graphies for Lombard).
However, VE does not perfectly satisfy its programmatic points. On the one hand, the 1:1 corre-
spondence between graphemes and phonemes might hold well as far as vowels are concerned, but
does not when the graphisation of consonants is considered closely. In the consonant system,
digraphs and allographs abound and can assure the unambiguous correspondence between
grapheme and sound, e.g. similarly to Italian <ch> is used for /k/ when followed by /i/, /e/, /ɛ/ or
/ə/, <gn> stands for /ɲ/, <s> and <ss> are used for initial /s/ and body-of-word /s/ respectively.
As a matter of fact, all these choices correspond to those made for PV. On the other hand, VE is
not so similar to the orthography that Piedmontese speakers living in Argentina know: <ch>, for
instance, stands for /k/ in Piedmontese (and Italian), but does not in Spanish (or in French, or in
English), where it is rather the graphisation of /tʃ/. Therefore VE would not be transparent for Pied-
montese speakers worldwide, but only for those who live in Italy, where Piedmontese is primarily
spoken. The result is that, using VE, Piedmontese is perhaps easier to read for Italian speakers, look-
ing like some sort of Italian, with possibly some influence from German orthography.
Summing up, PV and VE are orthographies in competition, although the former is decisively
more widespread in printed and cultured publications. Activists strongly promote PV (see e.g. Clivio
2001; Perrini 2011) since PV looks somewhat more like French and less like Italian, as has been
shown in relation to the graphisation of vowels, even though Pacotto codified his orthography on
the basis of strictly philological criteria, and not to make Piedmontese ‘less Italian’ or more French
(Regis 2012b). In any case, this choice is perhaps consistent with the tendency to Frenchisation pur-
sued by activists trying to ausbauise Piedmontese (Tosco 2012; Cerruti/Regis 2014, 94‒97). However,
PV is not immediately comprehensible to Piedmontese speakers, who have been alphabetised in Ita-
lian. Academics, on the other hand, are not unanimous on this issue. Some have proposed slight
graphic revisions to PV, exploiting possible ‘polynomic’ features in order to represent a larger num-
ber of dialects of the language (Miola 2015b). This is mainly due to the fact that active Piedmontese
speakers and potential writers are nowadays speakers of peripheral varieties, and not of the Turinese
koine; written Piedmontese is thus undergoing a process of dekoineisation (Regis 2012a, 97ff.). Other
scholars prefer Villata and Eandi’s orthography – at least in a regime of digraphia with PV (Regis
2012b). Anyhow, as illustrated in Table 9, the graphic distance between the two systems is rather
small.

Conclusions
As we have seen, none of the orthographies discussed above is perfect or ideal, each one having
advantages and disadvantages from different perspectives. We do believe, however, that a local-poly-
nomic orthography is particularly useful in the case the regional language (even when the ‘region’
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 11

does not correspond to an official administrative region) is fragmented into ‘dialects’ that use differ-
ent orthographies. In the latter case the unity of the language is obscured and its maintenance or
revitalisation made difficult, which can only lead to further language shift towards Italian. The
most common strategies of status planning, i.e. the use of the local language in print and the
media, and of acquisition planning, i.e. the teaching of the language at school, cannot be carried
out effectively without agreeing on at least one common orthography. There are many areas in
Italy, we believe, where a polynomic approach may be feasible and could be highly beneficial, for
example in many southern regions. While it is obvious, for instance, that only well prepared local
linguists could tell whether a (local-)polynomic Abruzzese or Lucanian orthography is indeed poss-
ible (both the so-called ‘intuitive’ orthography and perhaps even more the etymological orthography
developed by Eligio Villa for Abruzzese may be already polynomic to an extent, see ‘Ortografia dei
dialetti d’Abruzzo’ in Wikipedia), regions like Apulia or Calabria may need to create two orthogra-
phies as both median and extreme southern varieties are spoken within their regional borders. On
the other hand, from the strictly linguistic point of view, northern Calabrese could be subsumed into
a Lucanian (local-)polynomic orthography, and southern Pugliese or Salentino and southern Calabr-
ese into a Sicilian one. In fact, extreme southern varieties may be similar enough, and their speakers
may feel culturally close enough to allow for the use of just one local-polynomic system for all their
varieties. However, regional identities might not make this advisable, as linguistic factors must
always be balanced against social and historical factors. Some even claim that a (local-)polynomic
system may be developed for the whole southern group, which Ethnologue calls Napoletano-
Calabrese.
There is one last point we would like to make. What can really be disruptive for the main-
tenance and revitalisation of Italian regional languages are conflicts and disagreements with
respect to orthographic issues. The long and ongoing debates on the best orthography for Friu-
lian or Sardinian have slowed down language planning and divided the community. We believe
that accepting the possibility of a digraphic system whereby two orthographies are learnt and
used at the same time, at least on a transitional basis, would be highly beneficial for the languages
involved. For students in many parts of the world learning more than one orthography or even
more than one script is quite a normal state of affairs ‒ Japanese children, just to name but one
example, have to learn Chinese characters (kanji), the two Japanese syllabaries (hiragana and
katakana) in addition to Roman script (romaji), and this does not seem to be particularly pro-
blematic. As far as Lombard is concerned, the traditional and modern orthographies for the
single varieties could be backed up by the local-polynomic system ‘Scriver Lombard’. With
regards to Piedmontese, perhaps the ‘polynomic’ features of the Pacotto-Viglongo orthography
could be enhanced to allow the speakers of other regional varieties to identify more with it,
while considering also a possible period of digraphia with the Villata-Eandi. Allowing for the
use of two orthographies may reassure traditional speakers and writers who are used to and cher-
ish traditional orthographies; in fact, as Sebba (2007, 133) has explained: ‘Once established,
orthographies are extremely difficult to change, as a variety of conservative forces come into
play to resist any tampering with the norm […]. The fact is that once a norm has been estab-
lished, it will be resistant to change even if it has a very short history’. A digraphic system, as we
have seen, may also help the learners of the language, who, let’s not forget, are going to be as
important for the future of the language as the first language speakers whose number is sadly
shrinking. As Sallabank and Marquis (2018, 251) have reminded us: ‘The future of highly endan-
gered languages […] lies with “new speakers”’, and this has always to be kept in mind when mak-
ing decision on orthographies for minority or regional languages.

Notes
1. We are not considering Occitan and Francoprovençal in this paper as they are minority languages spoken
mostly outside the Italian territory.
12 P. COLUZZI ET AL.

2. Polynomy in linguistics refers to languages defined both by their internal variation (multiple centres of “auth-
enticity” and “authority”) and by speakers’ recognition of linguistic unity in diversity (Jaffe 2003, 515). The term
was first introduced by Marcellesi (1984) with reference to the Corsican language.
3. It is important to point out here that most Italian regional languages, including Lombard and Piedmontese,
feature vast literatures in some cases dating back to the Middle Ages (see for example Haller 2002). Therefore
the idea of a written form for Italian regional languages is old and widely accepted. In addition, in our modern
society, a non-written language has scarce opportunities to spread among new speakers in a situation of
ongoing language shift where native speakers are dwindling, as in the Italian case.
4. In this paper the expression ‘polynomic orthography’ will be used with its broad meaning of ‘logographic’ (or
‘morphographic’) writing (generally an etymological one) that does not intend to represent the word as the pre-
cise sequence of the phonemes pronounced in a particular local variety, allowing instead (and perhaps facilitat-
ing) different local pronunciations of it. For other more specific uses of that expression, see Iannàccaro and
Dell’Aquila (2008) and Regis (2012a).
5. We are referring here to the most recent tradition, as SL, the local-polynomic orthography we are referring to
further on in this article, does feature a strong link with the oldest medieval literary tradition.
6. ‘A shallow orthography is one where the relationship between sounds and characters is close to one-to-one, so
that the written word closely corresponds to the pronunciation of the word in the context where it occurs. Fully
phonemic orthographies are therefore shallow. A deep orthography is one where the relationship between
sounds and letters is more complex. In deep orthographies words may sound the same but be spelt differently
(soul and sole) or sound different but have the same spelling (row, lead). English and Hebrew are often cited as
examples of languages with deep orthographies, and Spanish, Italian and Finnish as examples of languages with
shallow ones’ (Sebba 2007, 19).
7. <e> for /ə/, used mainly with function words, was only recently proposed in the Dizionario Elettronico Piemon-
tese, which is available on-line on the website of the Enrico Eandi Foundation at: http://piemunteis.it/dep/
dizionario.dep.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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