Abstract
This paper aims at investigating the discursive representation of gender roles in Ladin journalistic texts. The analysis intends to reveal the gender disparities persisting, in this case, in the Ladin speech community, but which have a broader reach and can also be found outside of the Ladin context in patriarchal social practices and in the ways of representing them. These two sides of the same coin result in a vicious cycle, as the social practices foster and result at the same time from the discursive practices.
Building on these observations, a corpus of articles published in the Ladin weekly newspaper “La Usc di Ladins” was compiled for analysis. The corpus comprises articles written in the variety of Val Badia, from 2015 to 2022, and the methodology chosen for the survey combines corpus linguistics with Critical Discourse Analysis.
The analysed texts portray e.g. women as mothers, as responsible of care work or as personifications of beauty ideals: The structural nature of patriarchal dynamics, which perpetuate and normalise certain discriminatory mechanisms in the construction and distribution of gender roles, comes to light. To unmask these mechanisms and question them critically on a discursive level is part of a process that aims at a more inclusive and equal linguistic representation, which is even more important in a minority language like Ladin.