Corsican has been politically separated from Italian for more than two centuries
and Italian, which was the language of administration and civil society, receded
to the point of completely losing these functions: until the end of the 19th
century, Italian was the language in which notaries operated and young
Corsicans often pursued their university studies in Italy. To my knowledge,
Corsica is the only ‘country’ where the national anthem is sung in a ‘foreign’
language – namely, Italian. French having become the official language and
the written language (until the return of Corsican as a language in the last
forty years), it influenced the Corsican language, which has developed by
distancing itself from standard Italian (which is now only taught in secondary
schools as a foreign language) and approximating more closely to French,
through lexical loans and syntactical loan-translation. The vocabulary of public
life and administration is French, by loans or Corsicanisation, as is the
vocabulary of new technologies of all sorts, producing sentences such as: Vo
à fà e legne cù a mo tronçonneuse(je vais faire le bois avec ma tronçonneuse [I am
going to do the wood with my chainsaw]).^22 This hybridisation, which is the
commonest thing in the world (English as we speak it is derived from a
hybridisation of French and Anglo-Saxon), is what makes Corsican a language
equidistant from French and Italian (I exaggerate: the mutual comprehension
is with Italian) and distinct from both. But this is insufficient: to assert itself
as such, this language still needs at least the beginnings of institutional
recognition. This has been the case for some decades: papers and journals in
Corsican, polyphonic songs, publishing houses, the Assimil method of Corsican,
a renascent literature – the language as culture and conception of the world
is in the process of reappearing. But this is still not enough, and here is the
irony: the language must still be sufficiently fixed to be transmitted
paedagogically. This is the role of the educational apparatus, with its grammars
for secondary schoolchildren and its anthologies of texts. Encouragement for
the teaching of Corsican, the creation of a competitive exam for recruiting
secondary schoolteachers in Corsican, and hence a body of functionaries in
the Corsican language appointed by the state, have played a key role in the
survival and potential development of the language.
All this has not occurred without political struggle. And it may be that the
picture I have just painted is unduly optimistic. For it involves survival
192 • Chapter Seven
(^22) See Perfettini 2000, p. 19.