The status, corpus planning and speakers' attitudes on Romagnol (ISO 639-3: rgn)

Even if recognized by Ethnologue with a clear ISO code, Romagnol is still underestimated and often considered an Italian dialect. One of the variants of Gallo-Italic languages, it has a strong linguistic identity and is well determined as Abstandsprache with regards to Veneto and Marchigiano; less clear the boundaries towards west, where there is a dialectal continuum with Emilian (egl). With respect to Emilian, Romagnol is developing as Ausbausprache, being strong and clear the perception the community has of a Romagnol history, territory, ethnicity, separated from that of Emilia. However, it lacks of a relevant factor for its status: a written standard. Institute "Friedrich Schürr" is one of the most active associations in the field of language support, but it has to do a crucial step: from a amateurish and folkloric activism to a real effort for a shared recognition of the language. The creation of a standard spelling is the path to follow for public presence, but there is still big tension between the old and the new vision. The fragmentation of oral varieties of Romagnol has never been a communication barrier, but nowadays it is perceived as a problem in terms of a written standardization. The Italian equation that "the language is written as it is spoken" causes the misleading belief that every difference in pronunciation must be registered in writing. It is actually the opposite: after six years of age we do not read letter by letter but we register the entire word "photo-graphing" it. Therefore, it is not obviously necessary that the phonetics matches the spelling. But minority speakers often get confused between speaking and writing, and fear that the standardization of the language may harm their local dialect. A standardized spelling only makes sense for a written language. If there were, for example, a talk show in Romagna, the titles and explanatory signs would be in standard Romagnol, but the presenter and the guests would talk in their own dialects (as it happens in German Switzerland or in Norway). At the same time, the speakers who fear standardization, also reject the use of tools such as electronic instruments for spellchecking (according to the belief that everyone writes in his or her own way) and do not accept the creation of neologisms because they are alien to the traditional language these speakers learned as children. These attitudes contribute to relegate minority languages such as Romagnol to the status of dialects and prevent them to evolve and flourish. In our presentation we will briefly sketch the dialectal situation of Romagnol, the main standardization problems and the issues arisen in the last years among activists. We will try to demonstrate that standardization is not only necessary but also fundamental if we want to give minority languages such as Romagnol the same status and dignity of national languages.