Language Rights and Discrimination in Italian National History
The Italian language has been considered an important characteristic of Italian national identity since the time of unification. It was the overwhelming use of regional dialects and foreign languages that lead non-Italian speaking minorities to be considered a threat to the development of national consciousness. As a result of this the first eighty or ninety years of Italian history characterizes non-Italian speaking minorities as intruders in the national domain; who were to be given no official existence. This is significant once it is considered that the Italian state began its life in 1861 without a common language. Most of the population could speak, what is today considered, Italian. Out of a population of 35 million at least 31 million were not included in the, not-so, common language.
When the fascist regime came to power Italian still was the spoken language of very few Italian nationals. Fascists confronted this obstruction to national unity by discriminating and banning the use of foreign language forms. French and English were particularly singled out as polluting the Italian national language. As a result laws were created aimed at preventing the use of foreign words on shop signs and Italian alternatives were created to take the place of regularly used foreign words. This repression of foreign languages went so far as to prompt Fascist Party member Tommaso Tittoni, on 16 August 1926 to call upon Benito Mussolini to send government representatives around newspaper offices to catch out and sack linguistic offenders.
The direct result of this linguistic repression culminated in the development of a new constitutional law, included in the January 1 constitution of 1948, which carried a reference to linguistic equality. It stated that “all Italian citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinions, personal, or social condition” and also that “the republic will protect linguistic minorities with appropriate measures.”
Recently, and in complete contradiction to past trends, a multicultural approach to language rights has also developed as a proposed law on language was passed by Italian parliament on December 15, 1999. This law formally protected the use of thirteen minority languages for use in education, broadcasting and administration. The European Court of Justice has found Italian universities guilty of discrimination based on nationality - with regrad to its non-Italian teachers. The biggest case of mass discrimination in the history of the European Union, Wall Street Journal, BBC, Irish Times. illegal mass discrimination based on nationality
Read more about this topic: History Of Italian Citizenship
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