Regional languages resources post and questions about them (esp. Franco-Italic)

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EDIT 2: Why are there resources for languages that are not “regional”?

When I first posted this tread I choose to name it regional language …, because I had in mind to find resources for languages like Breton, Catalan and Piemontese. However, as time as gone on I have found resources for languages that are not really regional languages but are not mainstream.

I have decided to add resources for languages like Kazakh, Burmese, etc. languages that are not mainstream but does not fit the regional description (official language of independent country).

Edit 1: I removed the questions of this post in order to put more ephasis on the resources as the questions did not get that much attention. Also in most cases I sort of knew the answers, one of the questions was also heavily linked to resources anyways.

I have a fascination for regional dialects/languages and I have been playing around with the idea of delving into regional languages. I have no solid plans but I am very interested in Piemontese, Alsatian and Breton.

My resources suggestion (and others to that are posted further down)

Verbix

Is a verb conjugation verb site that have conjugations in more obscure languages such as french creole languages, occitan and Welsh among others.

Tintin in regional languages (french regional language)

fnac.com is a french (I assume) website that have some Tintin cartoons in regional languages such as alsacian, arpitan and monégasque. They don’t have an exhorbitant amount of them. They do however seem to have a quite good stock of regional language books on a whole, mostly grammar books.

https://www.fnac.com/c46926/Tintin-Langue-Regionale

Le petit prince (Italic languages)

Amazon has a version of The little prince in many different Italic languages/dialects. The first link is to the book in Neapolitean language further down the page at “customers who boguht this book also bought” sections there’s the book in other languages.

Here is a link to a page that shows in which all languages The little prince has been translated into, which might come in handy when looking for it in translation.

Petit Prince Collection -  544 translations

languagegulper.com

Is a web site (seems) dedicated to the preservation of regional language of the world. They have articles on many lesser known languages of the world. The admins of the website say that they are actively updating the site. However, the coverage of some language is quite sparse.

https://languagesgulper.com/eng/Home.html

From Bokus I have found the following book (first link under breton). It’s a Swedish website (however, they do have international shipping) that have books on some more obscure languages.

Alsatian

https://livre.fnac.com/a2818719/Raymond-Matzen-Wie-geht-s?omnsearchpos=9

Aragonese

http://www.academiadelaragones.org/GBA_v0.1_.pdf

Asturian

http://www.academiadelallingua.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Gramatica_Llingua.pdf

Australian aboriginal grammar

Basque

http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/le-basque-unifie-initiation

https://livre.fnac.com/a4745364/Collectif-Dictionnaire-basque-francais-et-francais-basque?omnsearchpos=5
https://livre.fnac.com/a9513525/Pour-les-Nuls-Le-basque-Guide-de-conversation-pour-les-Nuls-2e-Jean-Baptiste-Coyos?omnsearchpos=23

A christmas carol

https://armiarma.eus/emailuak/dickens/eguberrikanta.htm

“Armiarma.eus, seems to have quite a lot of copyright free classics in Basque. I first found this site about a few weeks ago and I remember when I did click on some link, download button, etc. I did get a warning. So, caution is advised. The second link leads to a list of books with options to download as pdf or epub. I tried a few of them and they seem to be fine.”

http://armiarma.eus/liburu-e/

I found from this website a Basque grammar book it seems quite old but it seems like a fairly standard small grammar guide which could be useful.

Liburuklik: Gramática vasca : gipuzkoera : primer grado / por José de Zabala-Arana

Bavarian

Bengali

https://www.routledge.com/Bengali-A-Comprehensive-Grammar/Thompson/p/book/9780415411394

Breton

http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/breton#livre-numerique-enrichi
http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/le-breton-278#livre
https://livre.fnac.com/a9513524/Pour-les-Nuls-Le-breton-Guide-de-conversation-Pour-les-Nuls-2e-Herve-Le-Bihan?omnsearchpos=29

Burmese

https://www.routledge.com/Burmese-A-Comprehensive-Grammar/Jenny-Tun/p/book/9780415735698

Catalan

Parla.cat

I have not tried this website but if it lives up to its description then it is the motherload of Catalan content. There is two options self-study and study with help of a tutor, the first one is completely free of charge while the other one requires a fee.

The interactive courses are divided into 4 levels each with 3 grades. Each grade corresponds to 45 hours of study.

http://www.parla.cat/pres_catalaenlinia/AppPHP/login/index.php

http://www.rtve.es/television/catalunya/historic/

Grammar

http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Catalan/Grammar/index.html

Creoles

Guadelopeen creole

http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/creole-guadeloupeen#livre-numerique-enrichi

Haitian creole

Corsican

http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/corse
http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/corse#livre-numerique-enrichi

A antohology book of expressions of Corsican. There are also a similar book for Langeudoc (Occitan??) and Provence (Provençal dialect, a dialect of Occitan).

Finnish

Finnish Prepositions - Finnish Grammar - Uusi kielemme

Galician

[ L O I A . O R G]

Hawaiian

Hawaiian grammar — Ulukau books

Irish

Kazakh

Luxemburgish

http://fr.assimil.com/methodes?base_language=&learn_language=94&level=&collection=&country=&regional_language

Native American languages

This website has general knowledge about native american languages as well as studying resources for many native american languages. Looking at the list there most be at least 100 languages listed.

American Indian Tribal List: Native American Tribes and Languages

Occitan

http://fr.assimil.com/methodes/l-occitan
https://livre.fnac.com/a6925491/Jordi-Escartin-L-Occitan-tout-de-suite?omnsearchpos=2

Panjabi

https://www.routledge.com/Panjabi-A-Comprehensive-Grammar/Bhardwaj/p/book/9781138793866

Picard (ch’ti)

https://livre.fnac.com/a9322904/Pour-les-Nuls-Le-ch-ti-Guide-de-conversation-Pour-les-Nuls-2e-Pierre-Marie-Gryson?omnsearchpos=34

Piemontese

Piemunteis.it is run by a foundation aiming to preserve the Piemontese language.

http://fr.assimil.com/methodes?base_language=&learn_language=85&level=&collection=&country=&regional_language

Scottish Gaelic

https://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/language/scot.php

Swahili

https://www.routledge.com/Swahili-Grammar-and-Workbook/Mpiranya/p/book/9781138808263

Swiss German

https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-swiss-german

Podclub is a free “podcast station” that has podcasts in the languages of Switzerland (minus Rumanish). In the case of German they have a pod for both Hochdeutsch as well as Swiss German.

https://www.podclub.ch/de/podcast-page/zukker-im-leben---ch
https://www.podclub.ch/en/podcast-page/andrea-erzaehlt---ch

https://www.schweizerdeutsch-lernen.ch/

Tibetan

https://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/language/tibetan.php

Valencian

https://www.avl.gva.es/documents/31595/32337/Gramàtica+normativa+valenciana/825a1c69-34c9-43b6-83f9-7a527a2833e3

Welsh

https://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/language/welsh.php
https://www.routledge.com/Modern-Welsh-A-Comprehensive-Grammar/King/p/book/9781138826304

Yiddish

https://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/language/yiddish.php

Linguistics books

Shakespeare’s English

https://www.routledge.com/Shakespeares-English-A-Practical-Linguistic-Guide/Johnson/p/book/9781408277355

The Uralic languages

https://www.routledge.com/product/isbn/9780415412643?source=igodigital

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Here are a couple more sources for Catalan and one for Piedmontese

TV3 (main channel of Catalonia) has lots of programs that you can watch online. I had a quick look at some of the programs and some, unfortunately use a mixture of Spanish and Catalan. Such as Polonia (political satire) and Crackovia (satirise the football world through the eyes of FCB and Real Madrid).

However, there is at least one family drama series that seems to be all in Catalan called Com si fos ahir. As of 15.10.2018 there is 239 episodes each about 30 minutes.

Then there is also Wordreference Catalan dictionary expect that it’s all-in Catalan. There is however, a forum dedicated to Catalan which is pretty nifty.

The Institute for Catalan Studies has a similar dictionary, again just in Catalan however it can come in handy since it shows idiomatic phrases used with the word that you search for.

Piedmontese

The link below is to a web site that has a short course (19 lessons) in Piedmontese.

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I own Assimil’s “Occitan sans peine”, a nice resource to learn that beautiful language. In contrast, “Catalán sin esfuerzo” is pretty bad.
A show in Catalan that I think can be of interest for polyglots is “Caçador de Paraules” (word hunter) about the Catalan language and related topics: I liked the Alguer episode (city in Sardinia where a Catalan dialect is spoken) and the one about Aranés (the Gascon dialect spoken in Val d’Aran):
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=caçador+de+paraules

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That’s great to know, I have to be on the lookout for the Occitan sans peine if I ever decide to learn it. My next linguistic project that I will start from the beginning will probably be Catalan (already bought TY Catalan).
It hadn’t occurred to me to look up Assimil books, I did google them just now and seems that they have some eBooks for Breton, Corse, some creole languages and Luxemburgish.

It’s great that a big company like Assimil has taken the time and effort to support some of the lesser spoken and endangered languages.

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France’s regional languages have been dying out for decades, if not more. France is a very centralist country and has been so for centuries. Giving regional names to your children or speaking a regional language at shcool for example was forbidden until the 20th century. Even nowadays, little is made for regional languages and as a result they are dying out. Don’t trust the figures you’ll find on some regional websites, they tend to overestimate them…

I think -I’m no expert though- that in most regions, local languages, when they are spoken at all, are only spoken by a minority of old people (60-70+ year-old) in rural areas. An exception to this seems to be Alsace -surely due to its rather specific history- where the language is still quite alive and you can hear it frequently, even in Strasbourg. However, the young generation does not really speak it. I have a few friends from there and, though they can understand it, they don’t speak it. Their parents (40-50+ years old) speak it. So even Alsacien may be dying out within a few decades.

I don’t know what the situation is in Lorraine.

In the Basque country, Corsica and French Catalunya, there’s a strong local identity and regionalist movements there try to promote the local language. I’m not sure whether they are succeeding or not, and the governement (and the French people in general) is always very reluctant to support them.

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I am having trouble finding resources for Sicilian. I have a book for it, although it could not get me really any further than an A2 level. I’ve heard so far that parts of films are most of the authentic content available. Any suggestions?

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Unfortunately no, the closest, I can get is Metatron’s YouTube channel. He is a linguist (academic) from Sicily. I have been meaning to ask him if he could do videos on Italian languages but always forget or don’t have the motivation to get to it.

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It’s not Sicilian but the YT channel “Italiano automatico” has a few episodes about the author’s (and especially his granny’s) dialect. In general, it’s a very interesting resource for learning Italian. You can find their lessons on Lingq as well

Example video:

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have you tried basque/eureska although it’s not franco italic

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IMO, the best Catalan dictionary is the “Diccionari català-valencià-balear”: http://dcvb.iecat.net/
It’s mostly Catalan-Catalan but it also includes a translation into Spanish for every meaning (marked as “cast.” for “castellano”). It’s easy to use, very comprehensive and includes dialectal variations and different pronunciations, as well as many usage examples from litterary sources and the different forms of verbs, etc.

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Once I did half seriously though about learning Basque. I figured if I can’t find a grammar book from the internet I could make a detour to Bilbao on a trip to Madrid. The Madrid-Bilbao trip has never materialized but I did find an Assimil Basque (link is in the OP).

I suppose it depends on a few things, such as how far I am in my main languages, how challenging the grammar (I like grammar but I have become lazy) is and the amount of compelling resources. I have a somewhat bad habit of getting exited about many languages and wanting to change direction. Right now it would seem that I want to learn Spanish, French, Italian and German up to fluency, maybe learn Dutch so I can read Dutch novels by authors whose work are probably not readily found in English.

I think resources for Basque should not be as hard to find as for some of the other regional language. In Spain, I think they have been more open to the idea of preserving regional languages, probably something to do with that they were repressed during the Franco era.

I have at least an small interest in all most every western European minority language. I know that Catalan is a vibrant and flourishing language and to a lesser degree so does Basque. I have heard that Germans these days are more regionalistic then nationalistic (with some exceptions) so I figured there might be more readily resources to be found for German dialect, hence the specification Franco-Italic

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I happened to read one episode of Luca Lampariello’s podcast on lingq about the Neapolitan language and a guy he interviews mentioned The little prince by Saint-Exupéry. A quick googling session later I found out that Amazon has the book translated into many different Italic languages.

The languages include the aforementioned Neapolitan language, Romagnolo, Milanese and Calabrese (not Sicilian however), there are a few more. I leave a link to the first one I found, further down the page there is a list of the book in the other languages.

P.S In the description (number of pages, editor, etc.) it will say Italian however if you click on the pictures of the front cover it will say something like traduzione in lingua … di (insert name).

I also found a page where they list all the languages that The little prince has been translated to and the name in those languages. That might come in handy when looking for the book in other languages.

http://www.petit-prince-collection.com/lang/translations.php?lang=en

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Update: Inspired by this thread I purchased Assimil “Le basque unifié”. I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s a wonderful resource and it really helps wrap your head around the language (no mean feat). I plan on finishing it and then keep on exposing myself to the language using yT videos and uploading texts to readlang, which is the closest thing to Lingq that offers basque. Its basque to Spanish translation system seems to work all right

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I am glad to hear that, as one of the reason of this thread was to encourage/help people to study and find resources. Also thank you for mentioning readlang, I just signed up. I admire your willingness to go for the more exotic language. I might have a go at Swahili and Afrikaans, once I reached a more solid ground in my main languages.

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A few weeks back, I looked after the Italian version for A Christmas carol as it is one of my Christmas traditions to read it in December. While I was at it I found it in basque as well.

Armiarma.eus, seems to have quite a lot of copyright free classics in Basque. I first found this site about a few weeks ago and I remember when I did click on some link, download button, etc. I did get a warning. So, caution is advised. The second link leads to a list of books with options to download as pdf or epub. I tried a few of them and they seem to be fine.

https://armiarma.eus/emailuak/dickens/eguberrikanta.htm
http://armiarma.eus/liburu-e/

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I found some grammar resources for Spanish regional languages.

Aragonese

As I googled gramatica aragonesa I found this about 350 pages grammar book by academia aragones which is a “basic introduction to Aragonese grammar". A slightly weird/annoying thing is that it takes forever to load unless you use chrome.

http://www.academiadelaragones.org/GBA_v0.1_.pdf

Asturian

Similarly, to the Aragonese grammar book there is a book on Asturian grammar.

Gallaecian

This website has a small article on some of the features in Gallaecian as well as list of resources.

http://consellodacultura.gal/cdsg/loia/gramatica.php?idioma=3

Valencian

Similarly as above, courtesy of the academy of Valencia language.

https://www.avl.gva.es/documents/31595/32337/Gramàtica+normativa+valenciana/825a1c69-34c9-43b6-83f9-7a527a2833e3

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I am sure that this somewhat useless since it’s such a obscure language and a pricey book what why not. Google books has a book on Northern Sami called “North Sámi: An Essential Grammar”. Whats more, it is a Routledge to be perfectly honest I have not much experience of the Routledge essential grammar series but from what I seen it is a quality grammar book series.

It is rather costly, at the time of writing it is 38.75 €.

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I found from this website a Basque grammar book it seems quite old but it seems like a fairly standard small grammar guide which could be useful.

http://www.liburuklik.euskadi.eus/jspui/handle/10771/10275

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I believe that I have mentioned Routledge as a great resource for more obscure languages. Today I decided to google around and see what I could find. I did find some pretty interesting books; they are of course really grammar heavy books but still.
All so for those interested in linguistics there I found books on linguistics as well. As usual I also put the links in the OP as well.

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I found this baverian languge learning site when watching get germanized “how to speak baverian” (second link).

https://www.bayrisches-woerterbuch.de/
How To Speak The Bavarian German Dialect | A Get Germanized Guide To The Dialects Of Germany - YouTube

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