Italo-Romance: Gallo-Italic

Abstract

Gallo-Italic dialects are spoken in northern Italy, in a wide area covering Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, and Emilia-Romagna and some adjacent territories of Trentino, Tuscany, Le Marche, and southern Switzerland. The term Gallo-Italic was coined by Bernardino Biondelli about the middle of the 19th century and later used in a more rigorous way by Graziadio Isaia Ascoli to identify a group of dialects sharing a significant amount of linguistic features (mainly, but not only, phonetic features). However, Gallo-Italic dialects are not demarcated by a single isogloss and represent rather a group of dialects centered on a cluster of areas defined by individual isoglosses. The highest concentration of these isoglosses (cf., e.g., lenition, loss of final vowels other than -a, labialized front vowels [ø] (or [œ]) < ŏ in stressed open syllable, and [y] < ū, the fronted outcomes [i̯t]/[ʧ] < -ct-) can be found in western Lombardy and Piedmont, whereas some of them do not reach, for example, Liguria and eastern Emilia-Romagna. Such a geographical distribution of isoglosses suggests that they must have spread in northern Italy primarily from Milan or both Milan and Turin, the two main centers of innovation in this area.