Saturday, April 16, 2016
Assembly D (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Resilience, the capacity to survive in circumstances of stress or crises, is a suitable label for the struggle for political and social recognition of many of Europe’s unique local dialects throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In today’s global world where official state languages, together with English, the de facto vehicular language of all international communication, tend to dominate in all public domains, smaller language varieties historically tied to a given territory could have been expected to disappear a long time ago. In this presentation, I will argue that despite the unmistakable signs of diminishing linguistic diversity around the world, a large number of regional minority languages in Europe are far from sinking into oblivion. Through the analysis of four case studies, I will show that small communities in Western Europe have seized the opportunity provided by the European Union’s protective language regimes and policies favoring greater social cohesion between its member states to “rebrand” their local linguistic identities. From the Ladin-speaking regions in Italy and Austria to the Basque-speaking regions in France and Spain, local languages are regarded as cultural assets in Europe’s knowledge-based economies and increasingly diverse societies, enhancing the image and visibility of the communities that preserve and protect them nationally and internationally in traditional and new media.
