The State of Friulan Today and Tommorrow

Optimistic View

• There have never been so many authors writing in Friulan as there are now. There is a Friulan radio station, Onde Furlane, which broadcasts only in Friulan. We have monthly magazines such as Patrie dal Friûl that publish in Friulan. In the European Union approximately 50 million people speak a language other than their countries official language (Catalan, Gaelic, Sardinian, Friulan etc.). The EU is forcing national governments to give their minorities greater rights. A special organisation “The European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages” is set up to protect these rights. The names of towns are now posted in Friulan and Italian. There are many institutes set up to promote and study the language. Friulan is still spoken by most people in the countryside.

• Friuli is now a rich region. Together with wealth comes self confidence. It may come about that Friulans become proud of their language and culture. We can see in Italy that federalism is becoming a more viable option, thanks to the Lega Nord. Also we can see worldwide that the nation state is losing power and that the region is coming back into its own. In the European Union, where trade can cross over borders belonging to a nation of 60 million people or 1 million people is almost the same in terms of benefits. Compare this to 50 or 100 years ago when a large nation or empire was necessary to make an economy viable.

• After 130 years of unity, dialects and minority languages still exist in Italy. English is gaining strength as a medium for communication with the outside world. It could be that Italian will soon be under attack. From below will be the regional languages and dialects that people feel most comfortable expressing themselves in. From above will be English which will not only allow communication and commerce with other parts of Italy but with any other place in the world. Italian today is receiving the same treatment in the European Community that it has been giving Friulan for the past 130 years.

• Friuli’s trade ties to Eastern Europe are getting stronger which means its ties to Italy are getting weaker. We have seen in the past few years a shift from mass media to personal media. Look at this homepage. For me to communicate with you across the world I would have needed a newspaper and a lot of money in the past. Cable TV is bringing many channels not 2 or 3 state channels. Camcorders are bringing down the cost of video production. Desktop publishing is bringing down the cost of publishing. Friulan has endured for almost a thousand years. It will endure another century.

Pessimistic View

• We have gone from a situation where 95% of Friulans spoke Friulan to a situation where a large number of young people cannot speak Friulan or prefer to use Italian . Yes we have some writing in Friulan but this literature and poetry is only of interest to a small minority of Friulans. If you compared the number of pages of Italian writing someone reads versus the number of Friulan pages there would probably be a difference of 20 to 50 times. If you want to see the true health of Friulan don’t look in the neighborhood bars where the old men play cards. Look instead in the playgrounds, offices and discos. There you will see the future. Among Friulans there is a lot of apathy. Many of them don’t even know that Friulan is a language. They are a little ashamed of Friulan.

• The current generation is crucial. It is the first generation that has spent a large part of their lives in the Italian school system. It is the first generation to be immersed in the mass media. If half this generation speak only Italian then half of all Friulans are lost. I have no doubt that people will be speaking Friulan in 100 years. But will it be a few old people around the kitchen table or will it be hundreds of thousands using it every day in their work and leisure? If the number of Friulan speakers falls below a certain critical mass that is required to support mass media then Friulan is truly doomed. Look at Welsh and Gaelic. The Irish have their independence but their language is weaker than ours. Look at the successes : the Basques, the Catalans, the Quebecois. These groups have a certain population and a mission to preserve their language and their people. Until Friulans take pride in their language and distinctness the language will continue to be eroded.

• For thousands of years Friuli has been occupied by foreign powers. Mostly their scope was to use Friuli as a shield from eastern invasion or a gateway from Eastern Europe into Italy. They had no interest in promoting or destroying Friulan language and culture or in imposing their own. As long as the peasants did not rise up against them and paid their taxes they were happy.

• One hundred years ago in Friuli unless you lived in Trieste or Udine it was almost impossible to live life only in Italian. Most people in the countryside could not read or write and had difficulty speaking Italian. They went to school less than three years in those days. Everyone spoke Friulan.

• After Italy declared independence in 1866 a few things happened. Italy was composed of many different groups that had not been united since Roman times. They wanted to homogenize Italians so that they would all speak only Italian and would form one people. They Italianized all of the Friulan names of towns, rivers and mountains. Udîn became Udine, Rodean dal Bas became Rodeano Basso etc. Secondly people started going to school longer (5 years). School was, and still is, in Italian only. People learned to read and write in Italian. The mass media arrived: books, newspapers, radio, cinema. All in Italian. Friulan was losing its usefulness in this world of mass communication. During the time of Mussolini things became more difficult. Previous to this time the local priests (who along with the school teachers were the only ones who spoke Italian well) would do their homily in Friulan and the mass in Latin. This was eliminated and Italian became the official language of the church. Italian was viewed as the language of cultured and educated people and Friulan as the language of peasants, maids and farmers. After the Second World War ended the Friulan partisans pushed for greater rights for Friulan. Under the new constitution minority groups were protected but this was not put into place for Friulans or Sardinians. They lacked a foreign big brother (France, Austria, Yugoslavia) that would stand up for them. Other groups Slovenian, German and French speakers had support from their mother countries and so won de facto protection.

• Due to poverty, overpopulation and the lack of industry hundreds of thousands of people emigrated from Friuli. Friuli became the most militarized zone in Italy as the army was placed to block a Communist invasion from the east. Over sixty thousand soldiers were stationed there. Keep in mind there are only about 600,000 Friulans. In the sixties and seventies as Friuli became richer many southern Italians arrived to the region. They took jobs as teachers, policemen, soldiers and civil servants. School teachers began telling parents that speaking Friulan with their children would have a negative effect on their children’s ability to learn Italian, learn to read and would block their higher education. Unfortunately many students and parents believed this.

• So there you have the ingredients: mass emigration of the natives, immigration of outsiders, a severe loss of prestige by the language. There was no iron fist suppression by Italy the way there has been in England, France and Spain. But in many ways the Italian approach has been more successful. Had the government banned Friulan from being spoken there would have been resistance. By allowing Friulan to exist like a weed on the edge of a field it allows Friulan to disappear gradually. The main culprits for this state of affairs are Friulans themselves. They are generally apathetic about the fate of their language and possibly their existence as a distinct people. Friulan intellectuals have long ago abandon the donkey of Friulan culture for the racehorse of Italian culture. Many of the organizations that were founded to preserve and promote the language now satisfy themselves with studying it in an academic way. In Italian of course. They wish to document Friulan before its death the same way one might study pandas before their extinction.

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