Ruelle Sainte-Dévote

Before we start to walk down this little alleyway, I just want to explain why the street signs here in the Old Town are in two languages. If anyone has been to the Nice Old Town, you might have noticed that all the signs are in two languages – the national language and the local dialect. In Nice, this is Nissart, a dialect that is now considered dead after it was outlawed in France around the 1860s, as Napoleon III was unifying the different regions of France and banned all local dialects in favour of the overarching language of French. Monaco has a different history, and a different relationship with its local dialect, which is Monegasque. Monegasque is still spoken within Monaco – the children are all trilingual in French, Monegasque and English; lessons at school are taken in Monegasque; and indeed the local population still speaks Monegasque to each other. If you go into any shop, bar, restaurant, museum etc everything will be in French, but spend a little bit more time here and you will hear Monegasque being spoken around you.

This sign is a good way to distinguish between French and Monegasque. On the top, we have the Romance language, French, reading RUELLE SAINTE DEVOTE. On the bottom, we have Monegasque, reading CARRUGIETU SANTA DEVOTA, obviously referencing the patron saint of Monaco, Sainte Devote. It looks and sounds very different – Monegasque is an Occitan language, and actually very similar to the North Italian dialects just over the border, in particular Ligurian which is spoken around Ventimiglia and Genoa. It is also similar to the Nissart in Nice, the Provencal in Provence and to Catalan, spoken in the Catalunya province of Spain. The occitane languages have historically been repressed, due to the nation building going on in Europe as already mentioned – the Catholic Church favoured the Romance languages and encouraged the leaders to prioritise them over the local dialects, so that everyone within the new nations could speak the same language and be understood by everyone else within the arbitrary borders of the state. This is why we speak Spanish in Spain, French in France, Portuguese in Portugal, Italian in Italy – many of the local dialects were lost or repressed during this period.

Monaco has a slightly different history to all of this – they did not officially ban the language, but it fell out of fashion as people believed it to be dirty and poor, particularly in comparison with the ever so elegant French. Only recently, they have had a resurgence in popularity surrounding the language, as the local population treasures it as part of their local identity and culture, and these signs around the old town are now one of the ways in which they proudly display their local language, side by side with their national language.