|
UKlinguist writes "Sono stato invitato a presentare un articolo ad una conferenza che si terra' in Finlandia sullo studio delle lingue nel contesto globale, e presentero' un po' la situazione
delle nostre maderlengue e di come l'internet le sta aiutando ad uscire dal loro guscio/ghetto. Riporto l'abstract dell'articolo (in inglese).
For most of the 20th century, Italy was a largely diglossic country.
For the majority of Italians, the Italian language represented a high variety (H) which co-existed alongside various local Romance languages (e.g. Piedmontese, Sicilian, and Venetian, among others) perceived to be low varieties (L). Virtually everyone was a native speaker of a local variety, and their level of proficiency in H differed widely depending on schooling and social background (Marcato, 2002). However, like in many other cases of diglossia, Italians have been gradually moving away from the Ls, with the number of H monolinguals increasing steadily over the years: from 18% in 1946 to 40% in 2000 (Marcato 2002:85).
What makes the Italian situation particularly interesting and – to some extent – different from the more-studied cases of diglossia (e.g. Ferguson 1959), is that some of the Ls have a significant written tradition, having once been the court language of relatively powerful states (for example Lombard, and most notably Venetian). Consequently, their demotion to L was only possible due to strong pressures from the Italian government, which systematically excluded local varieties from the education system and from bureaucratic life, thus preventing any use that might help maintain their relatively high social status (Dalmonte, 2001). The media was also central to this process, as the exclusion of local languages from the press and television reinforced social attitudes typically associated with L varieties, such as the belief that these were not "real" languages, or that they could not be written down (Ferguson, 1959).
However, with the advent of the internet, the L varieties began to remake their appearance in written contexts, mostly in the form of personal blogs. This has now given way to the development of larger projects, the culmination of which is perhaps the establishment of various versions of the online encyclopaedia wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) entirely written in local varieties.
In this paper I show that this rise of the L varieties has seen the natural (or bottom-up) development of standardisation processes that have traditionally been associated with official (or top-down) campaigns. In particular, I will show how internet forums have enabled speakers of L varieties to begin unification of the orthographic systems through an entirely self-directed process.
I then argue that within the global arena, as represented by the internet, L varieties have found a new linguistic context, which has two dimensions: an internal and an external one. In the internal dimension, the L varieties break the traditional boundaries by becoming the tool for written communication in areas that were previously the sole domain of H, such as the discussion of academic subjects. In the external dimension, L becomes the subject of socio-political debates which, although still carried out in H, were entirely absent from more traditional "L-phobic" media channels. I will then show how these developments challenge the accepted definitions of diglossia (Ferguson 1959, Fishman 1967) and thus call for a reconsideration of the phenomenon.
References.
Dalmonte, G (2006). Istituzioni scolastiche e culturali faentine dell'età napoleonica.
In Studi e ricerche del Liceo Torricelli, 2006.
Ferguson, C. F. (1959). "Diglossia". WORD 15: 2.325-40.
Fishman, J. (1967). "Bilingualism with and without diglossia; diglossia with and without bilingualism." Journal of Social Issues 23:
2.29-38.
Marcato, C. (2002). "Dialetto, dialetti, e italiano." Bologna: Il Mulino.
Dr. Marco Tamburelli
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom
www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/marco
"
Posted on Tuesday, July 29 @ 14:17:36 CEST by dragonot |
