Bilingualism and language contact in 16th-century Northern Italy

Abstract The paper aims to present some lesser-known evidence relevant to the phonological history of French gathered through the bilingual texts in the Opera Jocunda by Giovan Giorgio Alione, published in Asti, Piedmont, Northern Italy, in 1521. In these texts, French is spelled using the graphemic system that the author employed primarily to write in his native Gallo-Italian dialect, thus rendering French phonetically transparent through linguistic comparison. This makes it possible to sketch a phonetic profile of the French known to the author at the end of the Middle French period. The evidence gathered seems to point to a more conservative variety if compared to the commonly reconstructed relative chronology of the phonological history of French. Some hypotheses in a framework of historical sociolinguistics and language contact are put forward to explain this discrepancy.