Piedmontese (English: /ˌpiːdmɒnˈtiːz/ PEED-mon-TEEZ; autonym: piemontèis [pjemʊŋˈtɛjz] or lenga piemontèisa; Italian: piemontese) is a language spoken by some 2,000,000 people mostly in Piedmont, a region of Northwest Italy.

It is spoken in the core of Piedmont, in northwestern Liguria (near Savona), and in Lombardy (some municipalities in the westernmost part of Lomellina near Pavia).

[3] Due to the Italian diaspora Piedmontese has spread in the Argentinian Pampas, where many immigrants from Piedmont settled.

In the Baroque period, El Cont Piolèt, a comedy by Giovan Battista Tan-na d'Entraive was published.

Nevertheless, literature in Piedmontese has never ceased to be produced: it includes poetry, theatre pieces, novels, and scientific work.

[4] The first documents in the Piedmontese language were written in the 12th century, the sermones subalpini, when it was extremely close to Occitan.

In spite of these advances, the current state of Piedmontese is quite grave, as over the last 150 years the number of people with a written active knowledge of the language has shrunk to about 2% of native speakers, according to a recent survey.

A morphological feature that sharply divides the East from the West is the indicative imperfect conjugation of irregular verbs.

The groups are also distinguished by differing conjugations of the present simple of irregular verbs: dé, andé, sté (to give, to go, to stay).