He is celebrated as a pioneer of Franco-Provençal grammar and lexicography, identifying a vocabulary for a set of dialects that had hitherto very largely been transmitted only orally.

[1][2][3] Cerlogne was born in the hamlet with which he shared his surname, in the comune of Saint-Nicolas, a mountain village several kilometers west of Aosta.

He returned briefly to the Aosta Valley in 1841, and this time when he went back to Marseilles he obtained a job at the "Hôtel des Princes" where he worked as a scullion in the kitchens.

[5] After the Battle of Novara (23 March 1849) the war spluttered to an end, and he was sent on indefinite leave: he returned to Saint-Nicolas where, despite his age, he resumed his habit of attending the village school as a pupil, alongside the children.

The same year, before Christmas, Cerlogne wrote a second poem, entitled La maènda à Tsésalet ('Dinner at Chesallet'); the bishop declared that Cerlogne's abilities were wasted in the kitchen ('Ce garçon-là devrait avoir du talent pour autre chose que pour faire la cuisine.

The French language we battled for so long, that is our ancestral tongue..." "De tout temps ceux-ci se disaient Savoyards et encore aujourd’hui qu’on nous a fait Italiens, les Valdôtains sont appelés et ils s’appellent Savoyards et grâce aussi à leur langue française, sont considérés plutôt comme Français et non-comme Piémontais, et bien moins encore comme Italiens.

On 1 February 1865, he was appointed deacon at Valgrisenche, where he would recall wryly that the holy water in the church remained frozen for five months,[5] and where he translated the papal bull "Ineffabilis Deus" (on the Immaculate Conception) into patois.

Towards the end of September 1866, he was transferred to Pontboset, where he was awarded a medal of civil merit in recognition of the help he gave the people during the cholera epidemic of 1867.

[5] Here he published two volume of a "village almanac" ("L'Armanaque di Velladzo"), which in its 1893 edition included his "Tsanson de Carnaval" ("Carnival Song").

[1] He was transferred again on 30 October 1894, this time to the parish of Pessinetto, where in January 1896 he published a new version of his "Tsanson de Carnaval" ("Carnival Song"), inspired as before – but more obviously – by social injustice and the gulf between rich and poor.

Although he expressed his joy at being back in the land of his birth, one more posting in Piedmont ensued, when he was transferred on 26 August 1899 to Canale d’Alba, where he remained till 12 May 1901 (or 1900).

Cerlogne's writings had long reflected a deep respect for the kings of Italy, to whom several of his works had been dedicated, such as his 1890 poem "To her Majesty, the Queen of Italy" ("À Sa Majesté la Reine d'Italie"), dedicated to Queen Margherita, for which he revisited his memories from his time serving in the army of King Charles Albert during the First Italian War of Independence.

He continued to work, authoring "Le patois valdôtain" which included "La fenna consolaye", a song which, according to Cerlogne, the oldest people in the local villages had already learned long ago from their grandmothers.

On 6 March 1908 he quit the priory and went to live at the home of the poet Marius Thomasset at Villeneuve, working almost to the end on the linguistic development of the Valdôtain patois.