It's a bit like the cuisine of our country whose diversity and variety, which makes it one of the most popular in the world, reflects the lifestyles and traditions of a land with a wide and capillary articulation. In general, languages and dialects are never devoid of culture, far from it they are precisely the most evident expression. Their preservation is therefore an act that the community must recognize as one of its priorities.
Thus, while there is talk of inserting into the Constitution the otherwise unsuspected news according to which Italian is the official language of Italy, the law for the protection of linguistic minorities, provided for by the constitutional provisions, is applied little and badly.
Daniele Vitali, who is preparing a book on the subject for goWare who explains the reason in this speech dedicated to the attention reserved by the constituents to the issue of minorities up to the promulgation of the implementation law n. 482 of 1999, which came after more than half a century.
The reason for the constitutional protection of linguistic minorities
Among the Fundamental principles of our Constitution is theArticle 6, which reads: "The Republic protects linguistic minorities with special rules".
That disposition was envisaged by the constituents to avoid a repetition of the persecutions experienced by minorities under fascism, when languages other than Italian were prohibited in public and even private use, complete with castor or machine oil for those who secretly taught minority languages, while the regime carried out movements of populations aimed at putting the tedesco in South Tyrol and the French in Valle d'Aosta and forcibly Italianized names and surnames, including those of the dead, to whom the tombstones were translated. Meanwhile, in the Risiera di San Sabba near Trieste, the main victims of the crematory ovens were Slovenia e Croatia.
La protection of minorities it also had the aim of resolving the territorial disputes left open by the Second World War, and in this sense it had to interact with the establishment of regions with special status.
Delays in implementation
In reality, however, for decades the protection of linguistic minorities in Italy was not entrusted to one implementing law of article 6, but a other types of arrangements and geographically limited: the recognition of French in Valle d'Aosta (where it was historically the cultural language of the dialect-speaking population Franco-Provençal) is due to a 1945 decree issued to prevent France from annexing defeated Italy; the protection of tedesco in the province of Bolzano it is a development in several stages of the De Gasperi-Gruber agreement signed in 1946 with Austria to avert the loss of South Tyrol; in that complicated process the language was also recognized ladino, with a subordinate status; finally, the opening of language schools Slovenian in the provinces of Gorizia and Trieste it is due to international treaties, respectively the peace treaty of 1947 and the one for the assignment of Trieste to Italy in 1954.
As can be seen, these decisions for the protection of minorities concerned exclusively autonomous regions bordering with other states, and left out the remaining territories where the same languages are spoken (Franco-Provençal in some valleys of Piedmont as well as, due to historical emigration, in two municipalities in the province of Foggia, tedesco here and there in the province of Trento and in linguistic islands of Valle d'Aosta, Piedmont, Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Slovenian in the province of Udine, and finally the spruce outside South Tyrol).
They then remained completely out of the Friulian and Sardinian (despite the special status of the respective regions), theOccitan or Provençal in some Piedmontese valleys, theAlbanian language scattered throughout the regions of the South, the Greco in the heel and toe of the boot, the Croatian in Molise, the Catalan in Alghero.
A long process
Not that they never were proposals of law to finally give organic implementation to article 6 of the Constitution: such proposals, however, always existed run aground in the troubled events of our legislatures, considerably stormy and often short-lived.
To have the long-awaited legislation, we had to wait for the law n. 482 of the 15 December 1999, "Regulations on the protection of historical linguistic minorities", the text of which can be found , here.
The law was approved at the end of the first D'Alema government by a majority of centre-left to which was added the Lega North, and which was fiercely opposed by nationalist alignments such as the National Alliance and the Italian Republican Party.
To respond to the controversies according to which the state should not "grant privileges" to "dialects devoid of culture", a group of intellectual headed by Umberto Eco and Tullio De Mauro, who published a learned letter in the newspapers showing the inconsistency of the objections to the law.
The contents of the 482
Established in article 1 that "The official language of the Republic is Italian", article 2 of the law establishes that our country protects "the language and culture of the Albanian, Catalan, Germanic, Greek, Slovenian and Croatian populations and of those speaking French, Franco-Provençal, Friulian, Ladin, Occitan and Sardinian".
Article 3 provides that the delimitation of the territory to which the law applies is entrusted to the local autonomies: the matter is decided by the "provincial council, having consulted the municipalities concerned, at the request of at least fifteen per cent of the citizens" or "one third of the municipal councilors of the same municipalities". A point full of consequences, as we will see below.
Article 4 provides that, in the municipalities referred to in article 3, the minority language is also used alongside Italian in the schools nursery, elementary and middle school, but at the discretion of the parents. Article 6 contains lax provisions for university, the art. 9 states that in the municipalities concerned "the oral and written use of the language admitted to protection is allowed in public administration offices" (this rule according to which theoral use of a language other than Italian is allowed has a vaguely paradoxical flavour: perhaps it was never forbidden under the Republic?).
To the art. 10 we read that the minority municipalities “can decide on the adoption of toponym” in the minority language, “in addition to the official toponyms”. The art. 12 contains provisions on the subject of public service broadcasting, of reduced interest after all; the art. 18 safeguards the possibly more favorable treatment of minorities in regions with special statutes, and the last one, number 20, quantifies theburden financial for the application of the law, taking into account the provisions of articles 5, 9 and 15.
We deal with this provision in the second part of this article Next Sunday.
