The Aosta Valley was the first government authority to adopt Modern French as working language in 1536, three years before France itself. French has been the official language of the Aosta Valley since 1561, when it replaced Latin.Langue et littérature en Vallée d'Aoste au XVIe siècle, Système Valdôtain des Bibliothèques. In the 1861 census, the first held after the unification of Italy, 93% declared being Francophone; in 1921, the last census with a question about language found that 88% of the population was French-speaking.Une Vallée d'Aoste bilingue dans une Europe plurilingue, Fondation Émile Chanoux. The suppression of all French-language schools and institutions and violence against French speakers during the forcible Italianisation campaign of the Fascist government irretrievably damaged the status of French in the region. Italian and French are nowadays the region's official languagesStatut spécial de la Vallée d'Aoste, Article 38, Title VI, Weblink , access date: 5-11-2012. and are used for the regional government's acts and laws, though Italian is much more widely spoken in everyday life, and French is mostly used by intellectuals and within cultural events. Though French was re-introduced as an official language after World War II, by 2003 just 0.99% reported speaking standard French natively. French remains widely known as a second language, but it is no longer spoken as part of daily life. In 2001, 75.41% of the population of Aosta Valley was French-speaking, 96.01% declared to know Italian, 55.77% Franco-Provençal, and 50.53% all of them.Assessorat de l'éducation et la culture de la région autonome Vallée d'Aoste - Département de la surintendance des écoles, Profil de la politique linguistique éducative, Le Château éd., 2009, p. 20. School education is delivered equally in both Italian and French so that everyone who went to school in Aosta Valley can speak French and Italian at least at a medium-high level.
