Ligurian spelling

As with many other languages, more than one proposal has been put forward over time for writing Ligurian with a common spelling system. Some varieties, such as Monegasque and Tabarchino, have developed their own independent writing conventions.

Genoese – the most widely spoken variety of Ligurian, which serves as a common language – has its own spelling system shared by many, carrying on the language’s literary tradition, documented particularly in Genoese periodicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in the dictionaries of G. Casaccia and F. Frisoni, among others. Here, “Genoese” means more than the speech of the city of Genoa: it refers more broadly to the group of Genoese-type varieties, which includes those of Savona and Chiavari, among others. The rules of this spelling system, already used by many authors, were codified by Fiorenzo Toso in Grammatica del genovese (1997) and updated in 2015 for the page of Secolo XIX devoted to Ligurian. Its principles are described in Stefano Lusito’s Aspetti teorici e pratici della redazione di un dizionario genovese-italiano della lingua contemporanea (Edizioni dell’Orso, 2025), which won the Saggi (Essays) category of the Premio Tullio De Mauro 2026.

This is the de facto common spelling system. Some authors and enthusiasts instead use personal rules or rules shared to varying degrees for writing Genoese and other Ligurian varieties. Ligurian Wikipedia offers many examples: the project does not impose a common spelling system and therefore has pages written in dozens of different systems, sometimes used by just one author. There are also bombastic names, such as the self-styled “grafia offiçiâ” (“official spelling”), whose “official” status extends only to the association that proposes it.

In the dictionaries available on this site, the original spellings may differ from the forms adapted to modern spelling. The dictionaries of G. Casaccia and G. Frisoni use rules very close to the standard, with some differences; G. Olivieri’s dictionary instead uses conventions closer to Italian, such as the letter ‹u› for the sound [u], traditionally represented in Genoese by ‹o› (his luassu, for example, corresponds to the standard form loasso). The same use of ‹u› for [u] appears in S. Ferrarazzo’s Dizionario di Sorli e del novese. For every dictionary, the original forms can always be consulted alongside those adapted to standard spelling.