Introduction to Patois
6 9 2024
Introduction to Patois

A literary language of things

In the outskirts of Turin, Piedmont, in the North-West of Italy, just a couple of hours from France, lies Val Germanasca, a beautiful and secluded valley belonging to the Valadas Occitanas (Occitan valleys), an area where varieties of the Occitan language (langue d’oc), called Patois, are spoken alongside Italian even today.

At Politecnico di Milano's Mantova Campus, sun is finally back. It’s time for another instalment of the series featuring "other" first languages of Italian authors and today it’s Valeria Tron’s turn. The illustrator, songwriter, and author of L’equilibrio delle lucciole and Pietra dolce, but more importantly, a born-and-raised in Val Germanasca, is here to introduce her mother tongue.

Through lyrics and songs shown provided in their original and translated version, for example Man dë péiro (Hands of stone) from her 2011 album Lève les yeux, Tron shows how Patois is her language of comfort, of complaint, of intimacy. And music. Being it a Franco-Provençal dialect stemming from the Occitan tradition of troubadours, it is a “narrative” language where rarely something is written, but every story is learnt by heart – because, as locals teach, “every story when forgotten is gone”, and/or put into music.

As it’s often the case with local languages, the vocabulary is more concrete and direct, a “dictionary of the senses”, as she describes it, but also evocative and poetic. Feeling misinterpreted is not so common in Patois, as it’s so connected to the community and the “roots of things”.

The audience gets the opportunity to chime in and brainstorm on the materials provided. Even if the language won’t transport you “home”, Tron claims, it will transport you “somewhere”, and this introduction indeed helped our spectators take a moving trip through recollections, anectodes and knowledge sharing.