AHC - Create a surviving Franco-Italian Romance language

The challenge is to create a surviving Romance language, which combines both French and Italian and shares some degree of mutual intelligibility with both.

Unsure whether such a language or closest equivalent ever existed the OTL though.
 
It shouldn't be too hard, I think? The difficulty would be to combine both languages without one being too prominent, else a successful, long-lasting french conquest of northern Italy (under François Ier, or later with Napoleon) would probably work.
 
This is actually OTL, as said there is a Gallo - italic family of languages spoken in northern Italy. One example is Lombard, millions of people still speak it in their daily lives. Italy is actually a much less monolingual country than many people think. So, how about as a challenge, make a Gallo-Italic language the dominant language of home, business, and media in an entire country.
 
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So, how about as a challenge, make a Gallo-Italic language the dominant language of home, business, and media in an entire country.
Kill Dante? Have a plague destroy Florence at the beginning of the Rennaissance?

Seriously, Dante and e.g. Petrarch writing in the vernacular (Tuscan vernacular) and being so successful was what created the 'Italian' language, and why said language is essentially Tuscan dialect.

Get rid of that influence, or have several competing centres of literary excellence in several city- states (Venice or Milan being one if you want a Gallo-Italic corpus). Then 'Italy' stays a geographic term and Venetian and Lombard become languages of administration and literature.
 

This is actually OTL, as said there is a Gallo - italic family of languages spoken in northern Italy. One example is Lombard, millions of people still speak it in their daily lives. Italy is actually a much less monolingual country than many people think. So, how about as a challenge, make a Gallo-Italic language the dominant language of home, business, and media in an entire country.

Thanks for clearing it up.

Was aware to some degree that Italy is a less monolingual country with a significant number subscribing to a more regional identity with their own dialects, though up to now otherwise ignorant on the existence of Gallo-Italic languages let alone other Romance languages within Italy itself.

To what degree are Gallo-Italian languages such as Piedmontese and Lombard a true hybrid of French and Italian, since have read there is a lack of mutual intelligibility between French and Italian at least in terms of spoken communication (though slightly more mutually intelligible in terms of written communication)?

Would be interesting to somehow find a way to have a small-ish Gallo-Italic state remain a separate entity from the ATL Italian Unification.
 
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Thanks for clearing it up.

Was aware to some degree that Italy is a less monolingual country with a significant number subscribing to a more regional identity with their own dialects, though up to now otherwise ignorant on the existence of Gallo-Italic languages let alone other Romance languages within Italy itself.

To what degree are Gallo-Italian languages such as Piedmontese and Lombard a true hybrid of French and Italian, since have read there is a lack of mutual intelligibility between French and Italian at least in terms of spoken communication (though slightly more mutually intelligible in terms of written communication)?

Would be interesting to somehow find a way to have a small-ish Gallo-Italic state remain a separate entity from the ATL Italian Unification.
It is not at all a 'mixture'. Basically languages tend to form a continuum where each village speaks something very like the next village; but by the time you travel hundreds of miles (km, leagues, whatever), the speech is quite different.

So. Dutch to Low German to Upper German to High German isn't several languages, but a gradual shift.
Similarly from south Italy through Rome to Tuscany to Savoy and Provence to
1) various dialects up the Rhone valley to Paris
2) the Occitan dialects across south France to Catalonia to Aragonese to Castillian to Leonese to Galician to Portuguese.

All these languages evolved in place from Vulgar Latin.

So when we say 'Gallo-Italian' we mean somehing that is about half-way from French to Italian - not because of mixture, but because of differing evolution and diffusion of various linguistic tendencies.
 
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