Insertion and survival of the Piedmontese dialect in the “Argentine Gringa Pampa”: Publications and didactics of an immigration language

Abstract

As is well known, Italian, as the language of immigration, tended to merge partially with Spanish Rioplatense until it became one of the superstrata that had the greatest impact on this regional variety of Spanish. The Piemontese dialect, as a language, not just of simple immigrants but of settlers who settled in depopulated areas, has survived several decades and generations, since the arrival of the immigrants who brought it to Argentina. Its use in certain areas of the Pampa Gringa was common and it even became a valuable tool for work and commercial exchange, even for the inhabitants who were not of Piedmontese origin. This led to the circulation of grammars and dictionaries of the Piedmontese dialect within regional associations, Italian societies, libraries and parishes. Our contribution, which became the hypothesis of this work, is the confirmation of the existence of material of incalculable grammaticographic value, arising from different actors of the Argentine Pampa Gringa, material that helps to consolidate the dialectal variety of Piedmontese in Argentina as a linguistic form with its own characteristics. It aims at the search, description and classification of texts, in the Piedmontese dialect, present in the libraries of the Piedmontese regional associations of Argentina or that are currently used during the dictation of Piedmontese classes in our country.