FollowIn Italy over the last couple of months the right-wing Lega Nord (“Northern League”), led by the indefatigable Umberto Bossi, who is also Minister for Institutional Reforms in Silvio Berlusconi’s government, has been engaged in a series of rather polemical discussions about Italy’s dialetti. Although this translates literally as “dialects”, many of the multitude of local speech forms covered by the term are in fact separate Romance languages, not mutually intelligible with each other or Italian. Over the past 50 years they have been retreating in the face of the expansion of standard Italian.
On 28th July, Lega Nord issued a proposal that all would-be school teachers should be tested on:
“la conoscenze della lingua, della tradizione e della storia delle regioni dove si intende insegnare” knowledge of the language, traditions and history of the regions where they plan to teach
and this test might include knowledge of the local “dialect”. The next day, the Minister for Public Instruction, Mariastella Gelmini, backed away from this position a little by saying that there would not be dialect exams (no doubt realising the impossibility of setting them up or carrying them out), but repeated that teachers, especially those from the “South” wanting to teach in the northern homeland of the Lega, should be tested on their knowledge of “padanian” language, culture and history. By mid-August, Umberto Bossi was claiming that a law to introduce these tests was ready.