Corsica’s lively culture is the product of centuries of maintained customs and richly expressed in music and crafts. The village fair, a showcase for the Corsican way of life with its winemaking tradition going back to antiquity and its gastronomy full of local flavours, is just one way of discovering and learning to love Corsica. And when in the night air you hear the "paghjelle", the traditional three-voice style of singing, it is the proud, fiery Corsican soul music that you are hearing.
Local language or "transformed Italian"?
This question is still the source of heated debates. The reality of the situation, however, is fairly easy to understand. All it takes is a short look at Corsican history. Human occupation of the island certainly dates to 7,000 or 8,000 BC, maybe even earlier. What language did our prehistoric ancestors speak? Unfortunately, we do not have any precise answers to the question, but linguists tell us that it was an old Mediterranean language common to the entire basin. Traces remaining in old place names are the main source of these observations.
By examining the similarities between the names of mountains or rivers in the countries running from the Iberian Peninsula to the Black Sea, identical linguistic bases have been identified.
The Corsican lexicon today still includes some of these very old words: a teppa (the heights), a tozza (rocky hill), u pentone (rock), u ghjacaru (dog), etc. These words are not from Latin, they are much older.
Arrival of the Latin Language
In 260 BC began the Roman colonisation that little by little was to bring the Latin language to the island. It was to replace the old language and its thousands of years of history. Latin transformation was, of course, a slow process that was unequal in different areas: more quickly in the plains, areas of passage and colonisation, much slower in the back country away from the new civilisation. It was nonetheless massive and definitive.
Didorus of Sicily wrote in the 1st Century BC that "the barbarians who live on the island have a strange language that is very difficult to understand", in the 5th Century, at the fall of the Roman Empire, Corsica had undergone profound Romanisation, although it is hard to evaluate it on the linguistic level. Historians think that Latin transformation was complete by 600 or 700 AD.
Little by little, Latin spoken in Corsica was transformed into a Romance Language, the Corsican language, just as the Latin in other regions colonised by Rome gave rise to Portuguese, Spanish or Catalan, Provençal, Tuscan or Sicilian.
The Republic of Pisa and the Genoese Domination
When the Republic of Pisa came to administer Corsica in the 10th Century, the island language was already fully formed. From then on, the economic and cultural exchanges between Corsica and Pisa in the following centuries strengthened the resemblance between Corsican and Tuscan.
In the 14th Century, the island came under Genoese domination, but Tuscan continued to be the official written language in Corsica as it was the prestigious language of authors, poets and artists.
Until the French conquest in 1769, and even after that date until the middle of the 19th Century, Corsican, the local language directly derived from the Latin spoken on the island, was under the influence of the Tuscan language.
Transformation of the Corsican Language
Starting in 1850, France imposed its language in all civil and administrative documents. In 1880, with the beginning of free, secular, obligatory public schooling, in French, the usage of Corsican was counterbalanced. Forbidden in the administration and schools, outlawed and losing its status even among families, the Corsican language quickly lost ground.
In 1890, 1914 and from 1920 to 1940, reactions in defence of the language broke out with Santu Casanova, Saveriu Paoli and Ghjacumu Santu Versini, then among teams of militant writers.
After the Second World War, U Muntese, whose founder was Petru Ciavatti, took up the struggle until 1972, when political and cultural demands led to the founding of an immense protest movement. This "second renaissance" gave rise to a variety of artists, singers, musicians, poets and writers whose main motivation was the passionate defence of a threatened language.