Regional and Minority Languages in Italy as Contested Languages Kuvendi II i Studimeve Arbëreshe, 4 Shtator 2023, Tiranë

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
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2. 0 Brief self-presentation

3. Anno Domini 2014, Anno Virus Coronati -6
Screenshot by the author
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4. federicogobbo.name
Design by the author
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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).
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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)
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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)
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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)
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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
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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
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18. A map showing only the Saved by 482/99
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19. Wikipedia: a mishmash of languages and dialectology
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20. A strictly dialectological map (Pellegrini 1977)
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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)
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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!
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23. 3 Contested languages

24. Beyond Shannon’s (1949) model of communication
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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).
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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)?
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30. The point in CLOW3, Amsterdam, 2018
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31. Contested Languages are the Drowned (but not only)
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32. Abstand-based notion, against Ausbau-centrism
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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?
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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
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35. The Book on Contested Languages, 2021
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36. Esperanto is a language only partially contested (Gobbo 2021)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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!
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46. Thank You for Your Kind Attention! Any Questions?
Ä Federico Gobbo ( he/him | lui | li(n) | hij/hem )
University of Amsterdam
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