Eastern Lombard dialects
Lombard dialects of Italy
Eastern Lombard is a group of closely related variants of Lombard, a Gallo-Italic language
spoken in Lombardy, mainly in the provinces of Bergamo, Brescia and Mantua, in the area around Cremona and in parts of Trentino. Its main variants are Bergamasque and Brescian.
In Italian-speaking contexts, Eastern Lombard is often called as dialetti (lit. 'dialects'), understood to mean not a variety of Italian, but a local language that is part of the Romance languages dialect continuum that pre-dates the establishment of Tuscan-based Italian.
Eastern Lombard and Italian have only limited mutual intelligibility, like many other Romance languages spoken in Italy.
Eastern Lombard does not have any official status either in Lombardy or anywhere else: the only official language in Lombardy is Italian.
Classification
Eastern Lombard is a Romance language of the Gallo-Italic branch, linguistically closer to Occitan, Catalan, French, etc. than to Italian, with a Celtic substratum.
Geographic distribution
Eastern Lombard is primarily spoken in Eastern Lombardy (Northern Italy), in the provinces of Bergamo and Brescia, in the 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.
“Eastern Lombard dialects” enters the record as lombard dialects of Italy. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Eastern, Lombard and dialects can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eastern Lombard dialects” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.