The series of encounters entitled “The travelling Genius : Italians Art, humanities, science … in the world“, is a space for discussion and cultural dialogue that the Italian Cultural Institute has developed especially for young Italians in world. Italians who, beyond any orientation, are the bearers of knowledge accumulated in Italy and diffuse the following, even without their knowledge, a provision or a vocation of ancient origin: the generous exchange of culture, comforted by a keen sense of human comprehension.
March 15th, 2018, 6pm Free Admission
Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Montreal
1200, Ave. du Dr Penfield
Conference in Italian
This presentation is based on a new project of lexicography and provides important insights on the complex circumstances of a minority language, spoken in a particular context of language contact in Northern Lombardy – in Val Masino, a side valley located in Valtellina. Lombardy is a non-autonomous region in Italy and Italian is the only official language. There are no policies that help promoting other languages. This new VVV project (Vocabolär del Valoc’ de la Val Mäśen) was developed in order to defend an endangered language that « needs to be preserved ». For this reason, our group is developing the new official vocabulary based on anthropological and dialectological research among speakers of all ages living the territory. This methodological approach allowed us to observe the use of Valoc’ and to observe the process of transmission of this language from one generation to another. New generations’ speakers are fighting against negative discourses about the fact that Valoc’ is useless. Thanks to this project, it was possible to analyse the evolution of the language in this particular context of language contact. However, the influence of Italian, the dominant language in everyday practice, was also analysed. Our contribution leads to a reflection on how endangered languages suffer in our society, where languages need power, prestige and a status to survive, and where conservation is possible only by developing a standard norm, the official.
Fabio Scetti
On April 15th, 2014 he defends his PhD in Language Sciences at the Paris Descartes University – Paris V (Sorbonne – Paris – Cité). He is affiliated with the Laboratory CLESTHIA of the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University in Paris and wrote a thesis in Sociolinguistics under the direction of Christine Deprez, on the evolution of the Portuguese language spoken in “Portuguese community” of Montreal in Canada. From 2013 he taught in various Parisian universities. Since 2015 he is working on various minority languages projects spoken in the Italian Alps. Fabio is mainly interested in linguistic practices, “minority” languages or in situations of “minority” and the defense of linguistic heritage.
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