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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 1016

Part of Session 165: Language, Place and Identity (Other abstracts in this session)

Alto Adige è Italia! AND Südtirol ist nicht Italien! Language, Place & Identity in Bolzano-Bozen

Authors: Brannick, Peter James
Submitted by: Brannick, Peter James (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom)

Especially in this age of global capitalism, where the focus on identity and difference is often on those who migrate, there remain in Europe, especially central and eastern Europe, zones which have ‘migrated’ from one state to another.  In these zones, there are people who have or have had sociocultural, linguistic and political ties that are historically different, sometimes antagonistic, to the polities in which they find themselves. 

Bolzano-Bozen, a northern Italian city near Austria, is one such place. At the end of the First World War, this overwhelmingly German-speaking city ‘moved’ from the Habsburg Empire to the Kingdom of Italy.  Annexation saw aggressive Italianisation and proscription of the German language and culture from the public sphere.  Later, such overtly repressive language policies were replaced by more subtle means.  Accompanying these policies, large scale in-migration of Italian speakers, transformed Bozen-Bolzano- into a majority Italian-speaking city (ASTAT 2004).

Responses to such policies, particularly since the Second World War, have ranged from peaceful/political to acts of violence, leading to a thirty year process of UN conflict resolution.  Solutions included adopting a complex consociational model of democratic representation, which ensures that no ethnolinguistic minority may make important decisions without the consent of the others.

Yet today more than ever, issues of language and place are central to public and private ‘ethnic’ discourses; especially regarding language in public signage (i.e. place-names) and the monuments dating from the years of Italian Fascism. 

Place, ‘…the human or lived experience or sense of presence in a space…’ (Scollon & Scollon 214:2003), becomes a site in which identity is contested by those who align in various ways with the polarised histories of the city.  However a binary division of discourses along ethnolinguistic lines presents too simplistic an understanding, as individuals and institutions from both groups of language-speakers take the position of the apparent other, in their constant renegotiations of identity and place.

In this paper data is presented from a linguistic ethnography focusing on bilingualism in Bozen-Bolzano.  The principal data is from the Semiotic Landscape (Jaworski & Thurlow 2010), which illuminate how ‘…written discourse interacts with other discursive modalities…’ (ibid.), and are (re-)entextualised in the complex matrix of discourses on identity and power within ethno-nationalist frameworks, and the individual and institutional responses to them. 

Scollonian geosemiotics (2003), with its focus on human action, provides a route to unpacking the ‘discourses in place’ (ibid.), allowing analysis of the indexical nature of the discourses therein.

References

ASTAT (2004) Barometro Lingusitico dell’Alto Adige. Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano-Alto Adige.

Blommaert J (2005) Discourse. Cambridge University Press.  Cambridge. New York.

Jaworski A & Thurlow C (2010) Semiotic Landscapes. Continuum. London. New York.

Scollon R & Scollon SW (2003) Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World.  Routledge. London. New York

Scollon R & Scollon SW (2004) Nexus Analysis. Routledge. London. New York