Abstract
This paper aims at developing a concept of linguistic landscape as a component of a community’s linguistic repertoire (the abstract structure that accounts for covert and overt norms of language use and for the reciprocal status of codes). Like other manifestations of language, linguistic landscape (the presence of one or more languages on signs, billboards, etc.) represents both the product of sociolinguistic norms, and the source of sociolinguistic structures. With its interplay of implicit and explicit strategies that underlie language choices, linguistic landscape can thus work as a promising clue to a better understanding of language patterning.
Specifically, the methodology developed within the framework of Linguistic Landscape can turn into an effective tool apt to disentangle apparently similar bilingual contexts. It is used here as a complement to a larger research aimed at modelling multilingual repertoires in the Alpine space. In this paper two tiny bilingual communities in the north of Italy will be compared, one belonging to the officially bilingual region of South Tyrol, the other to one Alemannic minority of Piedmont. Both present complex repertoires in which Italian and a German dialect (Alemannic or Bavarian) coexist: in one case, however, standard German is given equal status as Italian, though the local population currently uses Bavarian in a classical diglossic relationship; in the other, the Alemannic dialect is highly endangered (though now protected by law) and contacts with standard German are virtually absent. The different use of languages in public space reveals the basic difference between South Tyrol, where two communities coexist in the same territory, and other minority areas in which one single community is (partly) bilingual while language shift is well on its way. Besides, folkloric and reified uses of the local dialects in both contexts will be considered and contrasted.