Open Issues of Language Contestation in Italy
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The document discusses the contestation of regional and minority languages in Italy, emphasizing the complexities of language rights and recognition. It highlights the legal framework governing these languages and portrays the challenges posed by dominant languages and external perceptions. Through an examination of various linguistic and sociopolitical dynamics, the author argues for a more nuanced understanding of language identities and their status within society.
![The conceptual metaphors behind nativeness and ancestry
According to [Jan van] Gorp, Antwerp had been colonized by the descen-
dants of the sons of Japheth, the son of Noah, who were not present at
the Tower of Babel; thus Dutch was not confused by the dispersion of
tongues. The Swedish physician and alchemist Anders Kempe conjectured
that Swedish was the oldest language in the world. In 1638, he wrote
Die Sprachen des Paradises, in which God speaks Swedish, Adam and Eve
Danish (an imperfect copy of the original), and the serpent French.
Bonfiglio 2013: 38
37](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/qspa2023tiranafgobboinvitedtalk-230905144729-5dc614b5/85/Open-Issues-of-Language-Contestation-in-Italy-42-320.jpg)
Open Issues of Language Contestation in Italy
- 1. Open Issues of Language Contestation in Italy Regional and Minority Languages in Italy as Contested Languages Federico Gobbo F.Gobbo@uva.nl Kuvendi II i Studimeve Arbëreshe, 4 Shtator 2023, Tiranë 1
- 3. Anno Domini 2014, Anno Virus Coronati -6 Screenshot by the author 2
- 4. federicogobbo.name Design by the author 3
- 5. 1 Regional and Minority Languages
- 6. Council of Europe: 46 member states, 42 languages (web site) Source: https://edl.ecml.at/, 27 Sep 2022
- 7. The Council of Europe is the guardian of human rights Source: https://www.coe.int/en/web/about-us/do-not-get-confused, 27 Sep 2022
- 8. 27 member states, 24 official languages Source: https://europa.eu/!QRCCVP, 6 May 2020
- 9. The 24 official languages of the EU Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish. (source: europa.eu) Remark. Luxembourgian is not an official language of the European Union even if Luxembourg is one of the 6 countries that signed in 1951 the Treaty of Paris (along with Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands). 7
- 10. Not all Europe’s languages are official Source: https://www.eurominority.eu/index.php/langues-deurope/, 27 Sep 2022
- 11. Regional and Minority Languages (RMLs) of the EU after 1992 The EU is home to over 60 indigenous regional or minority languages, spoken by some 40 million people, approx 10% of EU population. They include Basque, Catalan, Frisian, Saami, Welsh and Yiddish. Remark. While it is national governments that determine these languages’ legal status and the extent to which they receive support, the European Commission maintains an open dialogue, encouraging linguistic diversity to the extent possible. (source: europa.eu) 9
- 12. The language regime of the EU in a nutshell The European Union recognizes 2 levels of official statuses: 1. official languages 2. regional and minority languages (RMLs) The 2012 Eurobarometer survey on Europeans and their languages revealed very positive attitudes to multilingualism: • 98% say mastering foreign languages will benefit their children. • 88% think that knowing languages other than their mother tongue is very useful. • 72% agree with the EU goal of at least 2 foreign languages for everyone. • 77% say improving language skills should be a policy priority. (source: europa.eu) 10
- 13. The excluded: “recent” migration languages No legal status. No general official surveys. Relevant examples: • Arabic (lot of variation across communities) • Chinese (not only Mandarin, also Chinese ‘dialects’) • Russian (especially in the Baltic states, but also diaspora for the war) • Ukranian (for the war) • Swahili • Turkish (some variation across communities) • … • Esperanto (but UNESCO Intangible Heritage in Poland and Croatia) 11
- 14. A case apart: Sign languages Some recognition, if any, at the state level. Peculiarities: • Deafhood (culture) vs deaf-as-handicap, tertium datur • Independent typology (e.g. VGT (Flemish) and NGT (Dutch) are very different, while VGT and LSFB (French Belgian) are closely related) • multi-modal communication, new ICT challenges 12
- 15. 2 RMLs in Italy in a glance
- 16. LEGGE 15 dicembre 1999, n. 482 Norme in materia di tutela delle minoranze linguistiche storiche. note: Entrata in vigore della legge: 4-1-2000 (Ultimo aggiornamento all’atto pubblicato il 30/12/2019); (GU n.297 del 20-12-1999) Art. 1. 1. La lingua ufficiale della Repubblica e' l'italiano. 2. La Repubblica, che valorizza il patrimonio linguistico e culturale della lingua italiana, promuove altresi' la valorizzazione delle lingue e delle culture tutelate dalla presente legge. Art. 2. 1. In attuazione dell'articolo 6 della Costituzione e in armonia con i principi generali stabiliti dagli organismi europei e internazionali, la Repubblica tutela la lingua e la cultura delle popolazioni albanesi, catalane, germaniche, greche, slovene e croate e di quelle parlanti il francese, il franco-provenzale, il friulano, il ladino, l'occitano e il sardo. Source: normattiva.it, vigente al 01/09/2023 13
- 17. RMLs in Italy like the Drowned and Saved Source: primolevi.it 14
- 18. A map showing only the Saved by 482/99 15
- 19. Wikipedia: a mishmash of languages and dialectology 16
- 20. A strictly dialectological map (Pellegrini 1977) 17
- 21. Maps are not the territory: they always lie 1. if by the book (L. 482/99) most of the territory has no RMLs 2. no conceptual difference between Italian varieties (Tuscan) and RMLs (Wikipedia) 3. languages disappear in favour of ‘dialect groups’ (Pellegrini 1977) 18
- 22. Maps are not the territory: they always lie 1. if by the book (L. 482/99) most of the territory has no RMLs 2. no conceptual difference between Italian varieties (Tuscan) and RMLs (Wikipedia) 3. languages disappear in favour of ‘dialect groups’ (Pellegrini 1977) We need a new, complementary, perspective! 18
- 24. Beyond Shannon’s (1949) model of communication 19
- 25. Immediate consequences of going beyond Shannon 1. The message is not transformed during the communication in the channel. 2. The receiver is not passive in receiving the message. 3. The channel does not modify the message. 4. Finally, communication is more than transmission of messages. 20
- 26. The place of LPP and its siblings • Sociolinguistics investigates language behaviour in relation to society. • Ethnolinguistics investigates the relation between language and identity, particularly ethnic identity. • Language Policy deals with the policies concerning languages: what they are, and what they should be. It is found at the border of law, economics, and political science. • Language Planning is the set of tools to manipulate languages at any level (status, corpus, acquisition) to apply language policies. You need knowledge in many aspects of General, Socio- and Ethno-linguistics. • Language Policy + Language Planning = Language Policy Planning (LPP) 21
- 27. What LPP and its siblings have in common • Language as a social construction they do not take language as an abstract uniform entity, but as a real-world interaction between speakers (language-in-use) that produces cultural phenomena. • Engagement in society, as in the motto by Maks Vaynraykh: A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot. • Open boundaries cross-disciplinary fertilization is normal (and raise difficulties in establishing a canon) • Emic vs etic they have to pay attention to the perspective of who does (emic) and does not (etic) participate in the culture under scrutiny. 22
- 28. Minorities imply majorities A minority language is always so in relation to a majority language. In other words, in order to analyse the position of a minority language, we should always look at its relation with the majority language. In the literature, you can find different nomenclatures: majority level H-variety H acrolect A Yish Y minority level L-variety L basilect B Xish X The majority language (H/A/Y) is dominant, and it is recognized on the state level. On the contrary, the minority language (L/B/X) is threatened by the dominant one, and possibly it is recognized on a local/regional level. Both languages share the same territory (Sprachraum). 23
- 29. Variables of the typology by John Edwards, 2010 • Indigenous/Immigrant: This is the most important variable, based on the principle of territoriality: is the community linked with an ancestral myth of the original land, or is there a story of migration? • Unique/Non-unique: is the minority found in one place (Sprachraum) only? • Absolute/Local-only: is the language always a minority (absolute) or somewhere a majority (local-only, which implies Non-unique)? • Adjoining/Non-adjoining: Local-only minorities can have the majority counterpart just across the border (Adjoining) or far away (Non-adjoining) • Cohesive/Non-cohesive: is there spatial cohesion of the speech community or are they scattered in enclaves (language islands)? 24
- 30. The point in CLOW3, Amsterdam, 2018 25
- 31. Contested Languages are the Drowned (but not only) 26
- 32. Abstand-based notion, against Ausbau-centrism 27
- 33. Gobbo @CLOW3: What is language contestation? 1/2 What does this notion imply? • language boundaries do exist (Tosco’s ‘against fuzziness’) • they are majority languages nowhere (i.e. in other territories) • their status of being full-fledged languages (i.e., “languageness”) is contested, i.e. they are downplayed in the public discourse • by whom? in which position? • what kind of arguments against the language under scrutiny? • for what purpose? 28
- 34. Gobbo @CLOW3: What is language contestation? 2/2 My main arguments: 1. language contestation is in the eye of the beholder; objectively, they are simply human languages (e.g. not plants, not houses…) 2. some languages are not entirely contested, so it’s important to consider contestation as a multi-layered property 29
- 35. The Book on Contested Languages, 2021 30
- 36. Esperanto is a language only partially contested (Gobbo 2021) 31
- 37. Dimensions of language contestation 1. locus • internal: originates from and is perpetuated by speakers. i.e., internal to the community whose language is contested • external: by outsiders (i.e., external to the community) 2. origin • the dynamics of Ausbau and Abstand relations • Westphalianism “a system of states or international society comprising sovereign state entities possessing the monopoly of force within their mutually recognized territories” (Oxford Reference) is the only way to have state relations Source: Gobbo and Tamburelli, in preparation 32
- 38. Ausbau and Abstand relations • Ausbau-centrism: linguistic discrimination concealed by depicting state-mandated languages as the languages • despite being languages by Abstand, contested languages usually show weak Ausbau, thus being classified as less-than-languages: e.g. “dialetti” or “patois”. Source: Gobbo and Tamburelli, in preparation 33
- 39. If the moon were nationalism... ©: Photo by Dean Hayton in Unsplash, modified
- 40. The meaning of the Peace of Westphalia (1648) Source: Wikipedia
- 41. Essentials of Westphalianism on RMLs In Lakoff’s terms: ONE PEOPLE is ONE LANGUAGE is ONE COUNTRY • States do not interfere in domestic affairs of each State; • foreign affairs are gentlemen’s agreements between governments. Consequences in terms of language ideologies: • RMLs are part of the domestic affairs, which downplays, for example, Adjoining Local-only minorities (e.g. German in South Tyrol) • Bilingualism is the exception, uniform monolingualism is the norm • RMLs are considered a threat to the unity of the state • state-mandated languages are ‘mother tongues’, and citizens speak them as ‘native speakers’, justifying the entanglement between nativeness and ancestry 36
- 42. The conceptual metaphors behind nativeness and ancestry According to [Jan van] Gorp, Antwerp had been colonized by the descen- dants of the sons of Japheth, the son of Noah, who were not present at the Tower of Babel; thus Dutch was not confused by the dispersion of tongues. The Swedish physician and alchemist Anders Kempe conjectured that Swedish was the oldest language in the world. In 1638, he wrote Die Sprachen des Paradises, in which God speaks Swedish, Adam and Eve Danish (an imperfect copy of the original), and the serpent French. Bonfiglio 2013: 38 37
- 43. Language contestation dimensions applied language locus origin internal external Ausbau - Westphalianism Abstand Lombard “fragmentation” “dialetto” yes no Esperanto no “artificial” no lack of ancestry late orality no territory sign fight weak lack of no speaking languages against recognition writing modality oralism visibility Source: Gobbo and Tamburelli, in preparation 38
- 44. Is the Arbëresh language contested? language locus origin internal external Ausbau - Westphalianism Abstand Arbëresh self-standing RML by research unique or variant of 482/99 on dialecto- absolute Albanian? (enough?) metry? cohesive? 39
- 45. Is the Arbëresh language contested? language locus origin internal external Ausbau - Westphalianism Abstand Arbëresh self-standing RML by research unique or variant of 482/99 on dialecto- absolute Albanian? (enough?) metry? cohesive? Let’s open the floor to discussion! 39
- 46. Thank You for Your Kind Attention! Any Questions? Ä Federico Gobbo ( he/him | lui | li(n) | hij/hem ) University of Amsterdam a f.gobbo@uva.nl Ŵ uva.nl/profile/f.gobbo Nj federicogobbo.name Social media profiles f linkedin.com/in/federicogobbo/ § slideshare.net/goberiko l youtube.com/federicogobbo q instagram.com/la.profesoro į facebook.com/federico.gobbo ƶ https://climatejustice.social/@goberiko Messaging apps À WhatsApp +39 345 5135665 ŵ Telegram goberiko ¦ WeChat goberiko Crowdfunding platforms cc en.liberapay.com/federico.gobbo/ (recurrent) K buymeacoffee.com/la.profesoro/ (one-time) cK ko-fi.com/federicogobbo/ (both) c b 4.0 Federico Gobbo