[At-Large] My comments on new gTLDs and the role of ICANN

[Vittorio Bertola]

Thompson, Darlene ha scritto:
> Hi Vittorio,
> 
> One thing in your e-mail below really stood out to me and I would
> like to ask you a question.  This is a question only and should not
> be taken as me disagreeing with you.  Rather that we, in Nunavut,
> Canada, are facing a similar problem with an ancient language
> disappearing and I would like to compare notes with you as an open
> discussion.
> 
> The language to which you refer - are only the elderly speaking it or
> are there any children that regularly use it at home and at play?

I think that the situation is similar to the one that you report, though
on a bigger scale. In cities, only people 50-year-old or above usually
know and talk the language; they already did not teach it to their
children born in the 70s and later. In the mountains and hillsides,
however, the language is still common and most young people know it,
though they rarely use it.

We are talking about a potential speaking base of about 3-4 million
people, plus a similar number emigrants in other parts of the world
(mainly Argentina) who kept it to a certain extent. But the number of
people actually using it in everyday activities is much much smaller.

And it's not a single case - there's dozens of similar situations
throughout Europe, only in Italy there's at least nine major endangered
languages and several minor ones (see
http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/europe_index.html if you like - and
that's a 15-year-old picture).

The problem is that these languages have been dismissed and abandoned
throughout the entire 20th century - first in the fascist era, when
minority languages different from Italian were considered a threat to
nationalism, then in the decades after the second world war, when
television unified attitudes and language throughout the country, and
when a cultural environment mostly dominated by left-wing thinkers saw
these ancient customs as a symbol of the agricultural past and of
inequalities.

For these reasons, while there is official recognition in certain
geographical areas of foreign minority languages (French, German,
Slovenian) that are taught at school, there is no recognition of the
ancient regional languages of Italy (from Piemonteis to Sicilian), which
are not taught at schools nor used in official documents.

The biggest problem is that these are mostly oral languages; even if
actual literature exists, including poetry and plays, there is no
attitude and often no real standard to write these languages down. They
are considered to be "a thing of the past", and often associated with
the miseries of pre-urban life, and with the ignorance of peasant
ancestors. The ones from Northern Italy were also frequently associated
with anti-immigration or plainly racist political movements, which
didn't help the recognition of their actual cultural value.

Now, why would a TLD help?

I think that the main issue is that these languages are dying because
people underestimate their importance. They do not bother to use them or
to teach them to children, because of this perception of something
useless, a relic from the past, and also something funny and worthless.

People do not feel attached to them, paradoxically because they do not
realize that they exist and are in danger: certain ways of saying and of
speaking have been always part of the local culture, so that people do
not even notice that they are using them (actually, most Italians can
easily tell that I am from Turin when I speak Italian, from certain
grammatical constructs, pronounciations or uses of verbs that are
literal translations of ones from Piemonteis, and that no proper Italian
speaker would use).

However, the more our world becomes global, the more our roots become
important - in a globalized culture, it is this kind of ancient roots
that gives you an identity amidst people with other roots living with you.

A TLD, in my opinion, could be an effective wake up call - a way to
boost the sense of identity and create interest around this cultural
heritage: "if they create a set of Internet addresses for this culture,
there must be some value in it". And it could be a call in the right
direction, that is, transform this culture from oral to written and from
analog to digital, and make material available for preservation online.

Then, I don't know - maybe it isn't. But it's always better than just
sit down and watch it die.

Ciao,
-- 
vb.                   Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu   <--------
-------->  finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/  <--------