Berrichon is a French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 dialect

Dialect

The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...

 spoken in the French province of Berry

Berry (province)

Berry is a region located in the center of France. It was a province of France until the provinces were replaced by départements on 4 March 1790....

. The word is also used as a demonym

Demonym

A demonym , also referred to as a gentilic, is a name for a resident of a locality. A demonym is usually – though not always – derived from the name of the locality; thus, the demonym for the people of England is English, and the demonym for the people of Italy is Italian, yet, in english, the one...

 and as an adjective meaning "pertaining to Berry".

The dialect evolved out of the langues d'oïl

Langues d'oïl

The langues d'oïl or langues d'oui , in English the Oïl or Oui languages, are a dialect continuum that includes standard French and its closest autochthonous relatives spoken today in the northern half of France, southern Belgium, and the Channel Islands...

 which evolved during the Middle Ages out of the Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin is any of the nonstandard forms of Latin from which the Romance languages developed. Because of its nonstandard nature, it had no official orthography. All written works used Classical Latin, with very few exceptions...

 spoken in northern Gaul

Gaul

Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...

. Its general use in the Berry region began to decline in the sixteenth century as the local aristocracy and bourgeoisie began to adopt standard French, leaving Berrichon as a "patois

Patois

Patois is any language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. It can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects, and other forms of native or local speech, but not commonly to jargon or slang, which are vocabulary-based forms of cant...

" used by the peasantry in the countryside. Subsequent developments, such as the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

, which created a sense of nationalism

Nationalism

Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

, and the establishment of free, mandatory, primary education

Jules Ferry laws

The Jules Ferry Laws are a set of French Laws which established free education , then mandatory and laic education . Jules Ferry, a lawyer holding the office of Minister of Public Instruction in the 1880s, is widely credited for creating the modern Republican School...

 under the Minister of Public Instruction, Jules Ferry

Jules Ferry

Jules François Camille Ferry was a French statesman and republican. He was a promoter of laicism and colonial expansion.- Early life :Born in Saint-Dié, in the Vosges département, France, he studied law, and was called to the bar at Paris in 1854, but soon went into politics, contributing to...

, which greatly expanded the teaching of French, further undermined the position of Berrichon.

It is, therefore, no longer possible to say that a Berrichon "patois" exists, but rather that a regional version of French does. Traces of Berrichon and its regional varieties remain today. Most Berrichons still remain very fond of regional words and expressions and use them often. For example, instead of the word pie (magpie), one often hears edjasse in the north and ajasse in the south of region.

Phonology and lexicon

Although Berrichon does not have an official grammar or pronunciation, there are general rules as to how it differs from French. Berrichon differentiates between closed and open a. Rs are rolled

Alveolar trill

The alveolar trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents dental, alveolar, and postalveolar trills is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r. It is commonly called the rolled R, rolling R, or trilled R...

 and emphatic. Words which have the o sound in standard French are pronounced with a close back rounded vowel

Close back rounded vowel

The close back rounded vowel, or high back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is u....

, resulting in, for example, un houmme (man), une poumme (apple). The oi [wa] sound becomes oé [oe]. The suffix

Suffix

In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...

 -eur becomes -eux in Berrichon, and -eau becomes -iau; therefore, leurs (theirs) is ieux and un seau d'eau (a bucket of water) is un siau d'iau.

Conjugation is also different. The present indicative of the first person

Grammatical person

Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...

 singular, the third person singular and the third person plural are all conjugated in the same manner, which results in phrases of the type, "j'menons les oies" ("I lead the geese

Goose

The word goose is the English name for a group of waterfowl, belonging to the family Anatidae. This family also includes swans, most of which are larger than true geese, and ducks, which are smaller....

"). In addition there is also frequent truncation: "i m'nons les oies" ("they lead the geese"). Tense endings are also different from standard French, as in the third person plural imperfect ending -aient is replaced by -aint, e.g., "i's étaint" instead of "ils étaient" ("They used to be").

In Berrichon it's customary to precede pronoun

Pronoun

In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...

s with article

Article (grammar)

An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...

s: la for feminine

Grammatical gender

Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...

pronouns and eul for masculine.