Nizza

People often argue that IQ has "racist/eugenist roots" and my problem with that arguments is that roots need to be the origin of something, not just some part of its history.

Alfred Binet (née Alfredo Binetti) designed IQ tests (at the time mental age tests, IQ was invented later by dividing the mental age by the actual age) in the early 20th century, and back then in France public education had freshly become mandatory. The brand new french education system didn't know how to deal with mentally disabled children struggling in school, and at the time the main proposal was to send them to mental asylums

Binet's idea was basically to avoid that by accurately identifying the children's actual difficulties. The test was also designed to be somewhat neutral to educational background. You can learn more in this video (in french). What's for sure is that when Binet found out (in the last years of his life) that his tests had gained popularity in the US in particular as a means of eugenics and enforcing racism, he promptly condemned and disavowed that use. Those aren't roots.

No, IQ is rooted in Nizza

Nicæa was originally one of many greek colonies along the provençal coast, and was integrated into the roman province of Alpes Maritimæ in the time of Augustus, remaining there until the end of the western empire (i'm insisting on that point because the idea that it was ever in Regio IX Liguria is very much a recent nationalistic rewriting of history). Some maps include Alpes Maritimæ into Liguria, but in actuality it wasn't in roman italy, and was considered similar enough to neighbouring Provincia Narbonensis to be integrated with it into the diocese of the 7 provinces. And when the empire fell in the west Niça and the rest of Alpes Maritimæ (which had been enlarged by that point) were included in the county of Provence (Provença), later included in the kingdom of Arle, itself later included into the Holy Roman Empire.

In 1125 the county of Provence was partitioned into the houses of Tolosa, Forcauquier and Barcelona. The former part was eventually divided between France and the Papal states at the extinction of its ruling house, while the latter two were reintegrated into a Provence that passed to the capetian house of Anjou, which also ruled Naples.

The assassination of queen Joan of Naples and Provence in 1382 threw the county into turmoil which turned into a succession war, at the end of which Niça, which had favored the house of Duratz (Durrës/Durazzo) over that of Anjou, seceded from provence to join Savoy in 1388.

The county of Nizza remained a part of the house of Savoy until 1860, as it transformed into the kingdom of Sardinia.

That county of Niça/Nizza/Nice was probably originally made out of the diocese of Niça (the ecclesiastical geography remained more or less the same from the roman empire to the french revolution, and often provided the template for administrative divisions), but expanded into that of Glandeva, and later in Savoyard times into the actually ligurian diocese of Ventemilha.

In the historical diocese of Niça, the main local language was Occitan. Specifically, the city and its immediate surroundings have the Niçard dialect, a very conservative variety of Provençal (which has kept most of the final consonants and even clusters, as well as words with stress on the third-to-last syllable), while most of the countryside and mountain use Vivaroalpenc (a northern occitan dialect).

The historical diocese of Glandeva is firmly Vivaroalpenc territory, while that of Ventemilha has various transitional varieties between Occitan and Ligurian, with actual Ligurian spoken in and around the city of Ventemilha (Ventimiglia) proper.

The house of Savoy, even though it was never actually french speaking (Savoy and Aosta traditionnally use the badly named Francoprovençal language, which is neither French nor Provençal) was one of the first states to adopt french as an official language, before France itself even. (the history of administrative language often has very little to do with languages actually spoken by the people, and much more to do with prestige. England and Flanders were the earliest adopters of administrative french, while once very multilingual Hungary kept Latin as its official language well into the 19th century). However, Savoy (later the kingdom of Sardinia) would soon also adopt Italian as a second official language, and draw the line as such:

French was official in the Francoprovençal-speaking regions (Savoy and Aosta)

Italian was official in the Occitan-(Niça and the Valadas Occitanas), Lombard/Piedmontese- and eventually Sardinian-speaking regions.

In fact the kingdom of Sardinia played a large part in the birth of italian nationalism (risorgimento), and eventually morphed into the modern state of Italy by annexing more and more territory to its south, fighting against Austria especially which used to control much of it.

But in exchange for military support to Sardinia against Austria, Napoleon III's demanded cession of Savoy and Nice to France.Of course that was opposed by Niçard risorgimento leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, but to no avail. In 1860 Alfredo Binetti became french.

Now the thing about IQ tests in the modern day is that because language abilities are such a core part of what is measured, you are absolutely supposed to take them in your native language. In fact dialectal localizations are often necessary, there are Australian English and Québécois French version of the WAIS test for example.

And these take a while to come out. Iirc it takes over a year for the WAIS to be translated from english to french, maybe multiple years.

This is why those "world IQ maps" that racists love are bullshit. Do you seriously think they had the same test perfectly translated into all 22 of India's official languages and had a perfectly linguistically representative population take it to represent "india's average IQ"? Do you believe they actually translated it into the actual mother tongues of "french speaking" africa? Of course not. Those are bullshit numbers, most of them unsourced, because the actual effort that would go into taking those required measurements would be too much.

But anyways

The ancestor of all modern intelligence tests was designed in french by a man who couldn't possibly have been a native french speaker. And administered in french in a France in which most of the population (80% iirc) didn't speak french natively.

But also, at the time especially there was a class divide in language in France. The urban upper classes had adopted french long before it became mandatory, and their children weren't having their native languages beaten out of them by the school system. There's a reason why the patois became stereotyped as "peasant languages" - rural households were their last holdouts.

Except in Nizza.

The Niçard middle and upper classes wouldn't have known french earlier than the rest, because they didn't even live in France until 1960. the prestige language here as in the rest of the occitan-speaking sardinian territories was italian, as it had been since the house of Savoy had deemed occitan closer to italian than to french. So the Niçard elite was tuscanized, not francized.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, but don't you think this is interesting?

Thomas