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Contested Languages: The hidden multilingualism of Europe
Edited by Marco Tamburelli and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in World Language Problems 8] 2021
► pp. 125–142

Chapter 7
Surveying the ethnolinguistic vitality of two contested languages

The case of Kashubian and Piedmontese

| Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences
| Institute for Computational Linguistics “A. Zampolli”, National Research Council of Italy

In this chapter we present the results of a Polish-Italian research project aimed at evaluating and comparing the vitality of two contested languages: Kashubian in Poland and Piedmontese in Italy.

Despite their different institutional status (Kashubian is a language recognised under the Polish law while Piedmontese is a contested language that remains unrecognised under Italian law), they show similarities with regard to their range of uses and speakers’ attitudes. The ethnolinguistic vitality of both communities is low, and so are the status and prestige of both languages in their respective countries. Consciousness about the importance of their maintenance is weakening, both within the communities and in wider social contexts. As they belong to the same language family as their respective dominant languages, they were/are treated as dialects of the state languages and thus not worthy of preservation. However, current accounts of language vitality for Kashubian and Piedmontese are rather optimistic. We believe that this optimism is mainly due to an over-estimation of the importance of number of speakers as a parameter for assessing vitality over others that address the ideology surrounding the language, such as speakers’ attitudes, stigma, and the comparison between actual and perceived use of the language.

This chapter presents the preliminary results of a new survey addressing the vitality of these two languages. The survey makes use of a new combination of ethnolinguistic vitality parameters and is specifically focused on aspects related to language ideology.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Kashubian and Piedmontese: The sociolinguistic situation
    • 2.1Kashubian
    • 2.2Piedmontese
  • 3.Survey objectives and methodology
  • 4.Survey results and discussion
    • 4.1Self-assessment
    • 4.2Use
    • 4.3Transmission
    • 4.4Attitudes
    • 4.5Awareness
    • 4.6Stigma
    • 4.7General comments
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 January 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/wlp.8.07dol
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