Language Survival and Language Death in Multilingual Italy
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LANGUAGE SURVIVAL AND LANGUAGE DEATH IN MULTILINGUAL ITALY
INTRODUCTION
Although Italy’s widespread multilingualism is usually attributed to complex historical circumstances, it is largely rooted in its geography (Savoia, 1997). Once the great barrier of the Alps has been surmounted, there are then the massive Apennines which run from the northwest to the south of the peninsula for nearly 1000 km, being as wide as 50–100 km in some parts. Tortuous routes and severe weather often impede communication, increasing the isolation of many communities. The result today is a country with a rich linguistic mosaic and cosmopolitan spirit, but one where rival local identities still flourish (De Mauro, 1996). This paper provides an overview of the linguistic transformations in the Italian peninsula since political unification in 1861. It aims to present an account of language policies and their effects on language change, focusing on five dimensions: (1) the spread of Italian (Early Developments), (2) the impact of education (Major Contributions), (3) the debate on the language curriculum (Work in Progress), (4) the struggle for language maintenance (Problems and Difficulties) and (5) new sources of pressure for language change (Future Directions). E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
Modern Italian which emerged from Florentine has become a major European language despite originating from a country with widespread multilingualism. This unique situation results from the late unification of Italy (Devoto, 1978; Lepschy and Lepschy, 1977; Vincent, 1981), which also provides an explanation for some controversial decisions in the field of language policy and planning (Tosi, 2004). In the thirteenth century, when Florence failed to become the political leader of the Italian peninsula, Florentine, which had gained the status of a pan-Italian literary language, was kept alive for several centuries almost exclusively by poets and scholars (Migliorini and Griffith, 1984). Outside Tuscany, Florentine was rarely spoken: other states continued to speak their local vernaculars, with the exception of the Papal Court of Rome, where Florentine was used as a lingua franca by the A. Creese, P. Martin and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 9: Ecology of Language, 113–123. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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clergy in this cosmopolitan community. Language policy and language planning were first discussed in 1861, the year in which the peninsula was politically unified. Some scholars have estimated that, at that time, for 97.5% of the population Italian was a foreign language (De Mauro, 1963). More generous estimates (Castellani, 1982) indicate that, for some 10% of the population, Italian was neither a mother tongue nor a foreign language. Two major actors in this debate were the novelist Alessandro Manzoni and the scholar Graziadio Isaia Ascoli. Manzoni enthusiastically supported the use of spoken Florentine as the national language. Ascoli (1870), a linguist in the modern s
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