Assessing the effect of official recognition on the vitality of minority and regional languages: a case study from Italy

In 1999, a rather controversial Italian law granted official recognition to twelve endangered regional and minority languages but denied it to others that were nevertheless also classed as endangered by UNESCO and the Ethnologue. This turn of events has produced a perfect scenario to assess the impact of language policies on protected languages and, at the same time, the effects of lack of official protection and recognition for languages that are denied such institutional support. This chapter presents the results of a survey carried out among speakers of these endangered languages. It assesses their vitality in terms of speaker numbers, domains of use, intergenerational transmission and speaker attitudes, arguing that a correlation can be established, on the one hand, between positive speaker attitudes and favourable language policies and, on the other, between lack of policy support and negative language attitudes. The chapter further argues language policy can actually alter linguistic behaviour.