this reason promoted the union of Nice to the Kingdom of Italy. Today some scholars, like the German Werner Forner, the French Jean-Philippe Dalbera and the Italian Giulia Petracco Sicardi, agree that the Niçard has some characteristics - phonetic, lexical and morphological - that are typical of western Ligurian. The French scholar Bernard Cerquiglini pinpoints in his Les langues de France the actual existence of a Ligurian minority in Tende, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin and Menton. Another reduction in the number of the Nizzardi Italians happened after World War II, when defeated Italy was forced to surrender to France the small mountainous area of the County of Nice, that had been retained in 1860. From the Val di Roia, Tenda and Briga, one quarter of the local population moved to Italy in 1947. The entire population of Nice before the 1960s had Italian surnames. The Niçard Vespers were three days of popular uprising of the inhabitants of Nice in 1871, promoted by Giuseppe Garibaldi in favor of the union of the county of Nice with the Kingdom of Italy. In the century of nationalism between 1850 and 1950, the Nizzardi Italians were reduced from a majority of 70% of the 125,000 people living in the County of Nice at the time of the French annexation, to a current minority of nearly two thousand (in the area of Tende and Menton) today. Nowadays, even though the populations of Nice and its surroundings are fluent in French, some still speak the original Niçard language of Nissa La Bella. See also Italian irredentism Giuseppe Garibaldi Monégasque dialect Mentonasc dialect Italian irredentism in Corsica References Bibliography André, Giuseppe. Nizza, negli ultimi quattro anni. Editore Gilletta. Nizza, 1875 Amicucci, Ermanno. Nizza e l’Italia. Ed. Mondadori. Milano, 1939. Barelli Hervé, Rocca Roger. Histoire de l'identité niçoise. Serre. Nice, 1995. Barberis, Francesco. Nizza italiana: raccolta di varie poesie italiane e nizzarde, corredate di note. Editore Tip. Sborgi e Guarnieri (Nizza, 1871). University of California, 2007 Bec, Pierre. La Langue Occitane. Presses Universitaires de France. Paris, 1963 Gray, Ezio. Le terre nostre ritornano... Malta, Corsica, Nizza. De Agostini Editoriale. Novara, 1943 Holt, Edgar. The Making of Italy 1815–1870, Atheneum. New York, 1971 Ralph Schor, Henri Courrière (dir.), Le comté de Nice, la France et l'Italie. Regards sur le rattachement de 1860. Actes du colloque organisé à l'université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, 23 avril 2010, Nice, éditions Serre, 2011, 175 p. Stuart, J.