Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 April 2026
In 1873, Graziadio Isaia Ascoli proposed to distinguish, in addition to the two recognized Gallo-Romance linguistic areas of North French and Provençal, a third, which he named Franco-Provençal. He defined this as
un tipo idiomatico, il quale insieme riunisce, con alcuni suoi caratteri specifici, più altri caratteri, che parte son comuni al francese, parte lo sono al provenzale, e non priviene già da una tarda confluenza di elementi diversi, ma attesta bensì la sua propria indipendenza istorica non guari dissimile da quella per cui fra loro si distinguono gli altri principali tipi neolatini.
1 In his Schizzi franco-provenzali, Archivio Glottologico Italiano 3.61–120.
2 Cf. the brief but informative article by G. Bertoni, Franco-Provenzale, Enciclopedia Italiana 16.15–16 (1932), and the references in fn. 3.
3 For instance, Bertoni, Enc. It. 16.15–16; G. Millardet, Francia: Lingua e dialetti, ibid. 15.964–971 (1932); W. von Wartburg, Evolution et structure de la langue française 72 (Leipzig–Berlin, 1934); A. Dauzat, Histoire de la langue française 541 (Paris, 1930). C. H. Grandgent, in his Outline of the phonology and morphology of Old Provençal iv, 1, and map on p. viii (Boston, 1905), likewise accepts Franco-Provençal as a dialect area distinct from Provençal, as do most other modern scholars.
Some scholars, like E. Bourciez (Eléments de linguistique romane3 [Paris, 1923]—I have not been able to see the recent fourth edition) and M. Cohen (Histoire d'une langue: Le français 80 [Paris, 1947]) recognize the transitional character of Franco-Provençal, but attempt precise delimitation of its area; Cohen (81) gives a map similar in exactitude of outline to our Map 1.
4 J. Gilliéron and E. Edmont, Atlas linguistique de la France; Paris, 1902–8. Although the base map used in this article provides numbers for the points of the Italian and Catalonian atlases, these latter have not been drawn in because their material was recorded a quarter of a century or more later than that of the ALF, and hence is not completely comparable chronologically.
5 The reader can make the picture given in Map 10 even clearer by drawing cross-hatchings of different colors and slants between the outer limits of the various transitional zones, which will then stand out more clearly than in the black-and-white imposed by limitations of printing.
6 A transitional area which, by now, has undoubtedly shifted somewhat farther south in the fifty years since the ALF material was collected in 1897–1901.
7 Since this article was written and accepted for publication, I have been able to see two items which had previously been inaccessible to me because of wartime and postwar conditions: P. Gardette, Limites phonétiques du franco-provençal au pays de Forez, Mélanges Duraffour 22–36 (1942); and K. Lobeck, Die französisch-frankoprovenzalische Sprachgrenze zwischen Jura und Saône (Genève–Zürich, 1945). Gardette treats all limits as having exact boundaries, and takes no account of relic areas outside the Franco-Provençal region. Lobeck considers the preservation of final vowels a more distinctive feature of Franco-Provençal than the treatment of á (110), and recognizes that the division is not an exact line but a spreading bundle of isoglosses (111). In any case, neither of these items affects the main conclusion of this article: that Franco-Provençal is a great transitional zone, not a major dialect division of Gallo-Romance.