WALSERSPRACHE - The four main objectives of the Alpine Space ...

WALSER WÖRTERBÜCHER – LUXUS ODER NOTWENDIGKEIT?
and even over the history and culture of the Walsers have since then been written much better
and thorough books. It is a book of friendship, of intimate meetings with South Walsers,
which grew out of innumerable outings around Mount Rosa, in Formazza and Bosco Gurin,
between 1921 and 1948. At the close of this book we find the words of an elder from Alagna:
«The world goes on and on and there is nothing that can be done about that, all tongues
change in time, some are forgotten and others completely lost. Young men and girls and
young women no longer speak Titzschu!». Although from the time Balmers last paid a visit to
the South Walsers half a century went by, this sentence never fails to strike us. A lot more was
“forgotten” and “lost”. Whoever today wanders through a Walser valley can meet only elderly
natives who are still truly able to speak the language. Unfortunately the Italian state made
its national language compulsory in all schools for over half a century. The highly local
German dialect of the Walsers was hardly appropriate as an exchange and cultural language
and this inevitably sidelined it. The otherwise enticing development of modern tourism in
places like Macugnaga, Alagna or Gressoney ultimately worked against language preservation.
Luckily Balmers’ gloomy predictions did not come true so soon. Yet the transition to
Italian appears as ultimately inevitable. Thanks to the EU many measures are being undertaken
to protect dialects, above all in schools, where now Titsch is part of the weekly teaching
schedule. Here and there initiatives to teach the dialect to adults are also present. Literature
on Walser subjects is much in demand. On this basis one can see that the recently compiled
dictionaries have become of paramount importance for South Walsers. Already in 1891
Giovanni Giordani had published a grammar of the Alagna dialect (with a dictionary
attached to it). It is not altogether astonishing that it was above all scientists from Germanspeaking
Switzerland who got busy with the language of South Walsers in the first half of the
20 th century: Karl Bohnenberger, Fritz Gysling, Rudolf Hotzenköcherle and, finally, Paul
Zinsli. For forty years he was professor for language, literature and folklore of German-speaking
Switzerland at the university of Bern. It was thanks to his research trips with his students
that a second generation of philologists came to life after 1960. Among them Gertrud Frey,
Marco Bauen and Max Waibel. Luckily the Swiss Language Atlas, which saw the light in
1962, did not stop at the border and took a good inventory of Walser civilisation on the other
side of the Alps. In Italy: Gressoney, Issime, Formazza and Rimella. Fundamental were also
the publications of Peter Zürrer. In 1988 the Walser Cultural Centre from Gressoney and
Issime published each a 300-page rich dictionary. They contain a grammatical outline and
a full-fledged Italian-Walser dictionary. Dictionary are not only fun as reading materials, but
also ideal companions when reading dialectal texts, like «Orizzonti di poesia», a poetry anthology
from Gressoney and Issime or «Aesop’s tales» in the dialect of Issime. In 1990 there
appeared in Formazza an unpretentious pamphlet entitled «Titsch from Formazza – Spelling
and Basic Words». Three years later the same compiler, Pio Scilligo, published a dictionary of
his native Formazza Titsch, which rests mainly on the rich language of Anna Maria Bacher’s
lyrical production. An ideal complement to these publications are the works published by the
Formazza Walser Association. Finally came the dictionary of the dialect from Rimella, a work
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