What Nendaz still speaks

I live in a valley where Franco-Provençal has not quite disappeared. Not as a museum tongue, recited for tourists on a feast day: as a language of daily use, among people of fifty or sixty who speak it to one another every day, and some of whose children still hear enough of it to understand it, if not to take it up. The Val d'Hérens holds on better than we do, Évolène foremost. Nendaz, Hérémence, Savièse still hold on, each with its own valley variants, each with its own window closing at a different speed.

On the other side of the canton, between Sierre and Salquenen, a tiny stream, la Raspille, serves as an almost exact linguistic frontier between the German-speaking Upper Valais and the rest of the canton. I am fond of this geographical precision: it reminds us that a language frontier is not an administrative abstraction, it is a fold in the terrain that one can point to. On its side of the fold, the Upper Valais has better kept its dialect — passed on at the table, spoken in shops, present in the regional media. Ours is fading, generation after generation, before a standard French imposed by the school, the administration and the Church long before the first digital tool. The essay sets out the reasons for this asymmetry in detail; I shall not return to it here.

What concerns me here is narrower than a hope of survival. Among the action plans that extend the essay, I defend one that would entrust to Idiap and HES-SO Valais a programme of linguistic documentation of Franco-Provençal and Walliserdeutsch: interviews with the last traditional speakers, transcription of the sound archives, digitisation of the collections, and in time the training of specialised models on this corpus. The cost is modest on the scale of a cantonal budget. The window, for its part, is a matter of fifteen or twenty years, after which the last native speakers will have gone and there will remain only associations, dictionaries and patois competitions — admirable, insufficient to restore a living syntax.

I know of no large language model that has been trained on a corpus of Valais Franco-Provençal sufficient to restore its sentence construction, still less the images it carries. This is no one's fault: these models learn what exists in bulk on the network, and a language spoken by a few thousand people, never standardised, passed on by ear rather than at school, simply leaves too little trace there. The practical upshot is that an artificial-intelligence tool, even the most capable, does not by default carry what Nendaz knows how to say of a vine on a slope or of a beast climbing to the high pasture. One must give it to it, or do without — and to do without today amounts to doing without forever.

It is a question I put to myself directly, as this site opens to other languages. To translate is always to choose what one carries across and what one leaves on the platform. An automatic translation, invisible, done without saying so, would carry the meaning across and leave the rest: that grain of territory which no paraphrase can reduce, that particular relation to place which a standardised language always ends up smoothing away. A translation owned up to, documented, done in the knowledge of what it loses and why, does not avoid the loss. It refuses to hide it beneath a surface fluency. In concrete terms, this means signing a translation as one signs a text, stating who made it and by what method, human or assisted, rather than letting it be believed that a piece of content exists natively in a language it has only passed through. The difference seems minor. It is not so for anyone who seeks, one day, to understand not only what was said, but from where.

Franco-Provençal will probably not recover. Regional languages have reversed the trend — Catalan, Basque — but under political and demographic conditions that the Valais does not meet, and it is better to say so than to keep up a false hope. To record it, to document it, to train a model that will at least know how to understand it when no one any longer knows how to speak it, is not nostalgia. It is the only thing still doable while the window is open.