La legge 482 sulle minoranze linguistiche storiche. Le lingue di minoranza e le varietà non standarrd in Italia

Abstract

The aim of this article is to illustrate law n°482 concerning the safeguard of Italian linguistic minorities and to present the debate surrounding this law and the previous one, i.e. law n°612. Law n°482, which puts into effect some universally acknowledged freedom principles, clashes with Italian cultural history, in that a nationalist trend intolerant towards local and minority languages characterizes Italian cultural tradition. In particular the alleged link between language and nation has turned out to be functional to the interests of economic power and the communication technology connected with the organization of national state. The antidialectal prejudice, deep-rooted from the eighteenth century within idealistic and historicist conceptions, has determined the idea that dialects correspond to narrow forms of knowledge and social organization. In this ideological framework the child is viewed as endowed with only a partial linguistic competence that the primary school has to develop by teaching the grammatical rules of his mother language. Now, this approach is called into question by a scientific consideration of language. In particular the Chomskyan model has shown that language coincides with a type of innate knowledge of man's mind/brain that determines the properties of every natural language. This fact discounts both the conception of languages on the basis of their efficiency in the communicative process. Thus, linguistic creativity, as a property of the mental faculty of language, characterizes every natural language. Indeed, recognizing that all types of linguistic expression have equal dignity encourages ideals of tolerance and freedom