Joseph Henriet

Joseph Henriet (born 13 March 1945), also known in Arpitan as Josèf Harriet or Joze Harrieta, is an Aosta Valley teacher, writer, political activist and language activist associated with Arpitan cultural and political activism. He was a leading figure in the development of the ideas of Arpitania and Arpitanism during the 1970s, and is known for his 1976 work La Lingua Arpitana, in which he proposed a standardised Arpitan koiné.

Biography Joseph Henriet was born on 13 March 1945 in Excenex, a village in the hills near Aosta, in the Aosta Valley. He was the youngest of three children. According to later accounts, he grew up in a farming family in which French and the Valdôtain variety of Arpitan were used.

Henriet began his primary education in the local village school and later continued his secondary education in Chieri, in Piedmont. He trained as a schoolteacher. The movement initially sought the separation of the Aosta Valley from the Italian Republic and the union of the Alpine peoples of the traditionally French-speaking area around Mont Blanc in a single Alpine state. This development contributed to the emergence of Arpitanism as a cultural and political current. In 1972, ALPA gave way to a new movement, HEL. In his 1971 book Harpeitanya, written under the pseudonym Edur Kar, Henriet argued that the inhabitants of Arpitania formed an Arpitan people defined by shared features such as language, culture, history and social values.

According to Henriet, the Aosta Valley branch was given room by Umberto Bossi to work again on the project of a Cisalpine Arpitania, which would cooperate with Padania as a state or region. The movement also sought transalpine contacts with the Ligue savoisienne, a separatist movement in neighbouring Savoy.

In the 1996 Italian general election, Henriet was a Lega Nord candidate in the Aosta Valley, receiving 9.67% of the vote, which was not enough to win representation in the Senate. In the 1998 Aosta Valley regional election, the party, running under the name Lega Nord - Val d'Aohta Libra, received 3.39% of the vote. Henriet then stepped down as party president and continued as political secretary. He left the post of political secretary in 2001.

Work

Arpitan koiné Arpitan is spoken in several regional varieties. In 1976, Henriet considered it necessary to develop a standard Arpitan form in order to provide the endangered language with a common written standard that could function as an alternative to French and Italian.

For the development of a uniform standard within the dialect continuum, Henriet used as his starting point a variety from the area around Montjovet, which the Swiss linguist Hans-Erich Keller had described as particularly conservative and therefore less influenced by French or Italian. For writing this standard, Henriet chose a phonological spelling based on the Latin alphabet, but with letter values that did not always correspond to those of French or Italian. In this spelling, for example, the voiceless velar plosive was written with k, while the voiceless postalveolar fricative was written with x.

Henriet's work on this standard form was published in 1976 as La Lingua Arpitana. The proposal was not adopted by political authorities or institutions as a language of education or administration in the Aosta Valley or in other regions where Arpitan varieties are spoken.

+ConsonantsBilabialLabiodentalDentalAlveolarAlveolopalatalPalatalVelarGlottalPlosiveVoicelessP /p/T /t̪/(TY) /ʈ/(KY) /c/K /k/VoicedB /b/D /d̪/(DY) /ɖ/(GY) /ɟ/G /ɡ/NasalM /m/N /n/NY /ɲ/AffricateVoicelessC /t͡s/(CY) /t͡ʂ/VoicedJ /d͡z/(JY) /d͡ʐ/FricativeVoicelessF /f/S /s/X /ʃ/H /h/VoicedV /v/Z /z/(ZY) /ʒ/LateralL /l/LY /ʎ/RhoticR /ʁ~r/SemivowelsW /w/Y /j/+VowelsLettreAPIA/ä/E/ɛ/O/ʌ/OE/ə/EI/e/OU/ɤ/I/i/Ü/ʉ/U/ɯ/

Selected works