The Language Policy of the Italian Army in the Occupied Slovenian Territories, 1915–17

Abstract

Language is one of the fundamental constitutive elements of a nation. However, in the case of the Slovenes, language is also a fundamental element of national consciousness, since the Slovenes primarily define themselves as a nation on the basis of language and culture. In the long decades of growing national awareness under the Habsburg Monarchy, a process most visibly marked by the struggle for the use of Slovene in public life, especially in education, any violation of hard-won rights was also a threat to the nation’ body politic. An even greater threat, however, came from the Italian state and its preconceptions about the intellectual and cultural situation of the Slovenes, which it clearly propagated throughout its occupation during the First World War and even more so during the Second World War. In both instances, the conduct of the Italian authorities may be described as patronizing, drawing on the two-thousand-year-old Roman tradition and assumed superiority of Italian culture and aimed at eventually bringing Slovenian culture and language under its sphere of influence. Hence, it is little wonder that before the First World War the course of action introduced by the Italian authorities in the Littoral had already become known as cultural policy. In the Slovenian territory, this cultural policy posed a direct threat to the very foundations of national existence during both the First and Second World Wars.KeywordsLanguage PolicyGeneral SecretariatItalian StateItalian LanguageOccupied TerritoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.