this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
42 points (97.7% liked)
Asklemmy
44764 readers
894 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
adding to this very good answer: especially in Europe legal, cultural and language borders can differ quite a bit due to history and geography. I'm from South Tyrol, an italian province at the Austrian border. The majority of people there speak a german dialect, we have german schools, public administration and everything, but are a language minority in Italy. The historic explanation is that after WW1 this region became part of Italy, taken fron Austria-Hungary.
Further there is a third official language in South Tyrol, basically only spoken in two valleys anymore, the "Ladin". It's a very old language, related to similar language island in adjacent italian provinces and Switzerland. Those languages basically just preserved themselves for geographic reasons (hard accessible valleys and mountains). for this reason those languages tend to differ already between to neighbouring valleys. I was tought, that most of South Tyrol spoke Ladin at some point, but after the Swiss turned Calvinistic, the catholic (and austrian) bishop of the region forced the south-tyroleans to speak german to distance them from the heretic Swiss.^^
During WW2 the fascists in Italy forced South Tyrol to speak italian and forbade everything german, including local, personal and family names; one reson certainly was to enforce this ideology of "one nation, one culture, one people".
Returning to OPs question: In South Tyrol there are german schools, where you learn italian and english as mandatory second languages, analogously for italian schools. Both languages are valid for any official entity (in theory). In the valleys mentiined above, they also have ladin schools.