Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Have a seat in the overpriced, sweat-infused Razer™ gaming chair over there. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
We have our own Matrix homeserver at https://genzedong.org, and a Matrix space; see this thread for more information.
Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory (and other books), you can use z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
Lemmy keeps eating stuff I try to write for some reason… ffs.
Slovene is actually protected and taught in the Slavia Friulana, it’s co-official in FVG alongside Friulian, Italian and, I think German too? (there’s a couple municipalities with German exclaves)
The problem isn’t so much the languages that have neighbouring states to protect them, it’s the ones that don’t, like Sicilian, Neapolitan, Piemonteis, etc. Horrifyingly enough, the Valle d’Aosta, which is autonomous, has no protections to speak of for the native languages there (Arpitan, also known as Patois or Valdotain, and Walser German) but instead has co-official status for FRENCH! There is no native French speaking area in Italy, it’s insane.
Plus there’s a whole host of very small minority languages like Arbereshe, Griko, Molise Croat, Gallo-Sicilian, etc. that are either extinct or verging on it right now.
It still hope to one day learn and be able to read and write at least in Sicilian, and am kind of annoyed that I didn’t get the chance growing up as my dad only spoke English to us.
That’s the big problem 😓plus often people are shamed for speaking “dialect” in their province as “uneducated” and “uncivilised” this whole stigma against native languages is seen expecially in the North and expecially against southerners (there’s a big migration from the south to the north) Where there’s a big effort to speak the “one and true language” (that was chosen only in 1861 BTW)
Yeah, I know, it’s stupid. But I will point out that Italian was chosen in around the 14th century - that’s why you can still read Dante and Petrarch and so on. Long before unification, Italian was displacing the other languages in terms of prestige or legal status. Like I’ve looked through old Kingdom of Two Sicily documents from the early 1800s and it’s all in Italian already.
Personally, I would hope for a system like that in China - local languages are taught and protected, but everyone still has to learn Mandarin too. But I don’t see that happening now.
That would be perfect, another China w
It’s ironic that the Dalai Lama once mentioned Trentino-Alto Adige as a model for Tibetan autonomy, kinda sus ngl. Vabbu.
Also official status for a lot of these languages might help me, selfishly as I could finally get like a duolinguo course or whatever, in Sicilian :D
Honestly I think we should sell either valle d aosta (better, they have only skii resorts for rich people) or Trentino (they at least keep apple prices low) to repay or giant debt
I think you shouldn’t sell parts of the country to foreign vultures, I may be a bit biased or have a romanticized view being ‘not really Italian’, but the ‘debts’ that states run aren’t real in the same way as you or I if we borrow money from the bank. Also Italy should just get in the BRI and get some Chinese loans :)
In a sane world, Germany would never have been able to exploit the “PIGS” (nice racist term there) to keep their exports going, but then we don’t live in a sane world.
Yeah that’s true, the EU needs to burn