The Slovene Community in Italy between the 20th and 21st Centuries. Rethinking Its Linguistic Landscape

Abstract

The Slovene community in Italy is an indigenous cross-border minority which has been present in the provinces of Trieste, Gorizia, and Udine since the Middle Ages. Following the political and territorial divisions between Italy and Yugoslavia in the first and second post-war periods, the community was incorporated into the territory of the Italian State and separated from its ‘kin State’ (in Slovene: matična država), the current Republic of Slovenia, by a border that has only been partially overcome by European integration policies. The vicissitudes of history, associated with complex social, economic, and political dynamics, have shaped not only the linguistic varieties used by the Slovene community in Italy, but also the linguistic landscape of the territory, which is today only partially multilingual and where multilingualism, if present, is largely skewed in favor of the majority language. In this article, we will first outline the general sociolinguistic framework, starting with some key considerations on language policies at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. Moving on from legislation protecting the Slovene community and language in Italy, we will then analyze the uses of its idioms in the public sphere and the role of the linguistic landscape in two key concepts: linguistic awareness and linguistic empowerment. In the central part of the article, we will summarize the main results of the research conducted so far (in two stages, in 2015 and 2021) on the linguistic landscape in bilingual and/or language-protected municipalities, which reveals a contrasting scenario, with important achievements on the one hand, but just as many challenges still to be addressed on the other. The article will then focus in particular on one of these: the limited use of the Slovene language by private businesses that work with the public (particularly in the agri-food and HoReCa sectors), with projects aimed at integrating the key principles of so-called ‘active’ language policies into everyday intra- and inter-community communication practices. Finally, we will broaden the concept of linguistic landscape by including not only the physical territory but also the virtual one in our research. While, until the end of the 20th century, language policies focused exclusively on bilingualism and multilingualism in the physical/geographical space (or excluded from it), the new technologies that have emerged in the 21st century make it imperative to also consider the presence (or absence) of minority languages in new digital contexts, in order to avoid the collapse of linguistic and cultural diversity in the coming decades.