Minority-language socioeconomic policies and their impact on speakers’ choices, habits and attitudes

In this paper we will show how the social setup of the Slovenian minority in Italy, including those measures put in place within the community after the Second World War to prevent assimilation, thereby establishing a minority-language environment, influenced the speakers’ choices, communicative practices and attitudes towards the Slovenian language (both standard and local varieties). In particular, we will demonstrate how the community’s leadership established a minority-language-only environment with a social and economic model focused, among other purposes, on preserving the language and protecting it from assimilation. This strategy narrowed or restricted the network of speakers that became distinctly local, tight and impermeable. Thus, we can observe how the same protective mechanisms that enabled the preservation of the minority language also reduced its dynamism, variation and change.