Alione's language and the contemporary Piedmontese dialects: historical and geographical variation

Abstract

The article aims to descrivere, at several levels of analysis, the sixteenth-century Asti dialect that emerges from Giovan Giorgio Alione's Opera Jocunda (Asti, 1521) and to compare it to current Piedmontese dialects, mainly from a historical change perspective. This is followed by an analysis of the other dialects that are imitated within the Opera Jocunda, namely the Monferrat dialect and the western Piedmontese dialect of a female servant, which is not better identified. On the basis of the data collected and thanks to comparative linguistic analysis, it has been observed that many aspects of the geographical variation of that time still persist today: many features that are typical of the Lower Monferrato dialects today also characterized them in the 16th century. On the contrary, a more significant change seems to have occurred in western Piedmont: on the basis of the available historical evidence, it has been hypothesized that the variety imitated by Alione is the dialect of Turin, which changed very significantly in the following centuries.