Symbolic ethnicity, cultural and linguistic landscape: remnants of ‘Little Europe’ in the Valcanale (Northeast Italy)

ABSTRACT

This study investigates ‘Little Europe’, the rural, mountainous Italian region of the quadrilingual Valcanale, bordering Austria and Slovenia. The combined analysis of cultural landscape, linguistic landscape (LL) and symbolic ethnicity provides a new concept to examine multilingual regions. In this once Austrian valley, where German was the official language before WWI, Italian now dominates over minority languages, as exemplified by official signs. However, elements of the area's cultural and linguistic landscape reveal unexpected linguistic practices and visible, locatable artefacts of the Valcanale's ethnolinguistic heritage, which we assume to play a key role in the preservation of symbolic ethnicity.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnolinguistic minority
• symbolic ethnicity
• cultural landscape
• linguistic landscape
• ethnolinguistic visibility
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Valcanale toponyms have several language variants. As a general rule, a Slovenian or German name, often in the local or regional dialect, exists alongside the official name. In the following article, however, only official Italian place names are used to avoid overly exerting the text.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant 32500.

Notes on contributors

Anna-Maria Plautz

Mag. Anna-Maria Plautz, * 10 February 1990. Graduated from the University of Innsbruck, degree in geography/economics and English; PhD candidate/research assistant; working on the FWF funded project ‘The Demise of “Little Europe”: Assimilation and Cultural Landscape in North-East Italy’. Research interests: ethnolinguistic minorities, cultural landscape, demographic change, emigration, (loss of) social capital.

Leonie Hasenauer

Mag. Leonie Hasenauer, * 8 September 1995. Graduated from the University of Innsbruck in January 2020, degree in geography/economics and English (teacher training). Doctoral candidate and currently working on the project ‘The Demise of “Little Europe”: Assimilation and Cultural Landscape in North-East Italy’ at the Department of Geography, University of Innsbruck.

Igor Jelen

Prof. Dr. Igor Jelen, Professor at the University of Trieste, Italy. Research in human and political geography; foci: remote areas, which have remained on the margins of modernist development, in particular mountain areas; geopolitics, tensions that characterize relations between states and other political actors. He spent a long time in Central Asia, where he studied the post-Soviet transition (recently published as a monography).

Peter Čede

Prof. Dr. Peter Čede, Study of geography and history at the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz. Conferral of the doctorate in 1984, habilitation in geography in 1993. Professor at the Department of Geography and Regional Science in Graz since 1998. Research foci: ethnic and linguistic minorities, border/peripheral regions, cultural landscape, regional development, landscape and environmental didactics.

Ernst Steinicke

Prof. Dr. Ernst Steinicke, * 24 December 1954. Department of Geography at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Foci in the field: social and population geography, minority research, amenity migration and counter-urbanization. Regional foci: high mountain areas, specifically European Alps; Rwenzori and Mt. Kenya, Western Caucasus, and Moroccan High Atlas.