Raimondo Strassoldo

The revival of ethnic/regional/language minorities within European national states, one of the components of the oppositional “identity movements” of the sixties and seventies, has attracted wide attention from several disciplinary quarters: political science ( e.g. A. Smith,) sociology (A. Touraine), sociology of language (J. Fishman) and others. More recently, it has been linked to the theory of globalization (“glocalism”). In Italy, for a number of reasons, regional/ethnic issues have long been neglected by “mainstream” sociology, and considered only as a peculiarity of some remote Alpine border areas. However, in 1999, a national bill (n. 482) was passed in the national parliament, recognizing the existence throughout Italy of 12 “historical language minorities” (Albanians, Catalans, Croats, Greeks, Occitans, Franco-Provençals, and others) beside the ones already constitutionally recognized (French, Germans, Slovenes) and granting them some rights, guarantees, and token financial support. By far the largest groups are the Sardinians ( pop. 1.650. and the Friulians (pop. 900.000). After a general-theoretical introduction, the paper briefly sketches the history of ethnic/regional/linguistic/ minority movements in Italy, the history and structure of Law 482/99, and finally focuses on the case of Friuli, where since the early seventies a tradition of sociological studies on these matters have been established, and many empirical surveys have been carried out, making this by far the best researched language minority in Italy. In the conclusion, the results of such research are put in the context of the “reversing language shift” theory advanced by Joshua Fishman, and questions are raised on the possibility to save Friulian, as many hundreds or perhaps thousands other threatened minor languages, by legal decrees, in the face of the powerful socio-economic and cultural forces (nationalisation, globalization “homologation”) pushing them toward extinction.