Second language acquisition in South Tyrol: Difficulties, motivations, expectations

Abstract

Numerous publications have dealt with the issue of bilingualism in South Tyrol. However, studies have often tended to focus on one particular point of view. This paper, on the contrary, examines the topic of bilingualism and language acquisition from several perspectives highlighting some basic contradictions and shortcomings which may explain the lack of real bilingualism in the population of South Tyrol: \hepolitical-institutional aspect, within which trends in language policy are analyzed; the socio-educational aspect, which looks at the question of language teaching in school and its attendant Problems; and the aspect of social relations, which considers the contacts between language groups, the use of language and the intercultural exchanges.

A set of semantic norms for German and Italian

“…3 A more detailed analysis about the reasons for the lack of a real bilingualism in South Tyrol, viewed from political-institutional, socioeducational, and social relations perspectives, was conducted by Cavagnoli and Nardin (1999).…”

Language Ideologies and Learning Historical Minority Languages

“…In the interviews, historical "metanarratives" and references to contemporary social/cultural contexts were frequent. This was fairly expected, since, for example, in the context of learning German in Poland (Mar-Molinero & Stevenson 2006) or South Tyrol (Cavagnoli & Nardin 1999), similar discourses are ubiquitous.…”

“…Parallel to such ventures (Pujolar & Gonzales 2013), my study concerns voluntary adult learners, which is a relatively under-researched area in general (but see Oh & Nash 2014). Studies on "new" Catalan-speakers have demonstrated that linguistic practices and language ideologies may change throughout life (Woolard 2013; for a similar case in South Tyrol, see Cavagnoli & Nardin 1999).…”

“…German also serves as a basis of comparison in respect to the language policy developments of a privileged historical minority language in the present day because we can draw a parallel between Swedish in Finland and German in South Tyrol, Italy, where it has a similar position on a regional level (see Cavagnoli & Nardin 1999;Wolff 2000).…”

Teaching the Romanian neighbors Hungarian: language ideologies and the Debrecen Summer School

“…MurphyLejeune 2002). However, in the general framework of learning historical languages, there have been a number of studies in the Western European context focusing on regional and autonomous settings (on learning Basque, see Azkue and Perales 2005; on learning German in South Tyrol, see Cavagnoli and Nardin 1999). So far, few attempts have been made to present the complexities of voluntary learning in East Central European contexts (but see Jaworska 2009) in general, and in the Romanian context where Hungarian is a major historical minority language in particular (but see Marton and Vincze 2011).…”