This contribution aims to highlight the geofactors which determine the development and continuity of language islands and the territories of minority languages. The focus of this research is therefore primarily on the geomorphological conditions of a specific language area and the interaction of natural factors, such as landform configuration, quality of soil and climate, with sociological and political factors. This approach will offer a new perspective on the genesis of these specific speech areas by taking into consideration the geographical conditions from the beginning of the first settlements through the history of further language propagation and language contact. The case studies chosen to substantiate this theory are the Cimbrian community and the Ladin-speaking valleys in the Alps (Northern Italy) as well as different minority languages spoken in Sardinia, where hilly landscapes alternate with plains, both bordered by the sea. All these languages became minority languages in remote areas, though the determining factors, geographical as well as socio-linguistic, were quite different.
This article analyzes a bundle of tensions tied to the (self-)representations of the larger Mediterranean subnational islands: island-specific identities are often used in aspiring to political independence and in moving toward linguistic unification, even when they run counter to historically evolved complexity and contemporary cultural heterogeneity. Taking Sardinia as an example, this article questions the construction of sardità along two main axes: language policy and literary production. The authors begin by noting that Sardinian often serves as an umbrella term for several local linguistic varieties whose attribution to that language is in part contested. The authors next assert that the self-conception of the islanders, as reflected in Sardinian literature, is also partly stamped by outside perspectives. Focusing on the case of Sardinia, but with comparative outlooks on Corsica and Sicily, this article shows that the tensions between homogenization trends and cultural-linguistic complexity undermine and at the same time found claims of island exceptionalism.
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