Camunian dialect
| Eastern Lombard | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Italy |
| Region |
Lombardy (Province of Bergamo, Province of Brescia, part of the Province of Mantua and Province of Cremona) Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol (part of Trentino) |
|
Native speakers
|
1.5 million (date missing) |
|
Indo-European
|
|
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog |
east2276east2278
|
| Linguasphere | 51-AAA-oda; -odb; -odc |
Eastern Lombard is a group of related languages, spoken in eastern Lombardy, mainly in the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia and Mantua, in the area around Crema and in a part of Trentino. Its main variants are Bergamasque and Brescian.
In Italian-speaking contexts, Eastern Lombard is often generically called a "dialect". This is often incorrectly understood as to mean a dialect of Italian, which actually is not the case, it's not a dialect but a language. Eastern Lombard and Italian are different languages and have only limited mutual intelligibility.
Eastern Lombard does not have any official status either in Lombardy or anywhere else: the only official language in Lombardy is Italian.
Eastern Lombard is a Romance language and belongs to the Gallo-Italic branch. Its position on the language family put in evidence that it is genetically closer to Occitan, Catalan, French, etc. than to Italian. Its substratum is Celtic.
Eastern Lombard is primarily spoken in eastern Lombardy (Northern Italy), in the provinces of Bergamo and Brescia, in northern region of the province of Mantua and in the area around Crema. The varieties spoken in these regions are generally mutually intelligible for speakers of neighboring areas but this is not always true for distant peripheral areas. For instance, an inhabitant of the alpine valleys of Bergamo can hardly be understood by a rural inhabitant of the plains of Mantua. Differences include lexical, grammatical and phonetic aspects.
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Wikipedia