The project in depth

This proposal aims at contributing to the safeguard of minority languages (ML) by investigating the level of language endangerment from a new perspective: we provide an objective measure of the transmission (and therefore survival) of their morphosyntactic structure. While the vitality of MLs is often assessed with subjective measures gathered through sociolinguistic questionnaires, we will adopt an objective criterion by calculating the degree of resilience of various morphosyntactic constructions in the investigated MLs, in a context of huge pressure from the contact with more prestigious languages. The current demographic and social dynamics are characterised by increased mobility, ‘mixed’ marriages and the spread of standard languages that affect the traditional transmission process, both quantitatively and qualitatively: children receive less and less input in the ML, and this input is restricted to a decreasing number of domains. Our objective is to determine the use of a set of grammatical features present in the ML but not in the contact languages as an objective marker of the 'structural vitality' (i.e. the degree of resilience of the grammar) of MLs. This can then inform a new language preservation policy. The minority languages under investigation are, for Romance, the Ladin varieties spoken in the province of Belluno and Western Friulian. They all have in common that they compete not only with standard Italian, but also with Venetan, a more prestigious dialectal variety with which they are in contact. In addition, we investigate the German varieties spoken in the three linguistic islands of Sappada, Sauris and Timau (Friuli). Here the communities are not only under the pressure of Italian, but also of Friulian, which is spoken in the surroundings and considered more prestigious. We will test four age groups, in order to get a 'dynamic' picture of the ongoing changes in real time. The phenomena chosen are a) the syntax of the subject, b) subordination and c) nominal agreement. We selected them because they are known to display variable and intricate properties that are different in all the languages mentioned above. The crucial idea behind our proposal is that it is fundamental to understand not only if a regional language is alive, but also how alive it is. The qualitative aspect is fundamental in a minority setting, in which there are fewer and fewer speakers with a full competence. The results of our work can help the stakeholders, first of all cultural institutes and ML classes, by indicating what phenomena are less resilient in the ML, and thus need to be focused on during the transmission process (including at school). For this purpose, we will also develop three teaching units about the three grammatical domains we investigate. In addition, we intend to promote language awareness using both traditional (e.g., meetings and conferences) and more innovative means (e.g., social media).