Amaro Lucie. L’occitan alpin d’Usseaux, description d’une langue en danger et en contact avec deux aires dialectales (francoprovençale et piémontaise), et sous l’influence de deux langues standards (français et italien)

Lyon 2, 2014. — 436 p.This thesis presents a morphosyntactic description of the Alpine Occitan language spoken in Usseaux, a small village located in Val Chisone (Italy, Province of Torino). The language is described following a synchronic perspective, but is also partly based on diachronic studies of neighbouring villages and valleys, and mainly on a corpus analysis. The thesis also describes the sociolinguistic profile of Usseaux’s speech community, leading to some thoughts about linguistic diversity, endangered languages and fieldwork. It also presents a phonological sketch, as well as a chapter on the written form of the language. The main issue of the thesis is to show that this language, which is located at the periphery of a linguistic area, is undeniably a variety of Occitan, but shows many common traits with the oïl language and with Francoprovençal as compared with more ‘central’ varieties of Occitan like Provençal and Languedocian.