Arpitan pronunciation

Dzakye — 2026-08-10T05:08:21Z

In the video linked here, I presented the way Arpitan is written : https://youtu.be/qJYQA4eaYkg?is=YaKelAFoPjJFwh_A

Here is the question I got as a reaction to viewing it, five years ago by @michaelm-bs2er :

Hello. I'm curious about comparing the sounds of Arpitan to the major romance languages. For example, the word for white in Italian, Spanish and French is Bianco, Blanco and Blanche respectively. what would it be in Arpitan ? Do you have a video that lists basic words in Arpitan and shows how they are pronounced clearly ?

Answer
Hello there !
It seems I'm not very assiduous in answering my YouTube maiL !… After five years, here comes my reply.

I can't provide the list you require, particularly because Arpitan is a very dialectal language, with lots of regional, even village differences.

The pronunciation in Valais, on the river Rhône before Lake Geneva, however, has been analysed precisely by a linguist, mrs. Gisèle Pannatier.As you will see in the document I am referencing below (I hope you can read French), the pronunciation in the Episcopal Valais (my region, between Sierre and Sion) is very different from the rest of the Valais, that is the lower part, from Conthey to Saint Gingolf. https://bit.ly/arp-vs-dif

A striking difference, even in the episcopal dialects, is the introduction of a non-etymological "k" sound, at the end of words which should've ended with a stressed vowel ; nek for nê or ni (snow), Valek for Valé, or Vawi.

I've been told that the dialect of Savièse (my dialect) is quite striking in its pronununciation of "u" in the Italian way, as a phonetic short /u/.

The pronunciation of the regions under Savoy influence, among other things most parts of the Aosta Valley is particularly similar to that of French. For example, they pronounce "u" in the French way.

Another striking feature of the Aosta Valley dialects is the way they adopted the French ending '-er' for the Latin verbs of the first group in "-are". By the way, this can sound shocking, or even debasing, for Episcopal Valais people...

Savoy people will always insist of on their pronunciation of CH ; they make it in the same manner as the TH sound in "mouth" or "south". Some of them even think that this is a distinctive trait of Arpitan pronunciation : /kluth/ for /kluse/ (bell, "cloche").

The pronunciation of "cl-" also differs enormously from a region to the other, which made the transcription of this phoneme harduous for Dominic Stich, who based his dictionary on a kind of middle ground between the individual Arpitan "realisations" of the Latin words. https://bit.ly/stich-dico

There is, however, no prominent general feature of pronunciation of Arpitan.

Researchers have rather analysed the lexis rather than the pronunciation of the Arpitan dialects, because these make intercomprehension particularly difficult, rather than the pronunciation. Personally, I even wanted to make a list of the main differences between the dialects, for the use of the speakers of the different regions. I ended up having to mention so many differences that I had a problem selecting the words. Basic words like "man, woman, father, mother, son, daughter, nice, thing, a lot of" often differ - according to the rule of course that words which are used most, tend to differ most. Here is this overview : https://arpitan.ch/spip.php?article693

arpitan.ch & francoprovencal.ch

Arpitan pronunciation