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Languages & Creativity: Identity and multilingualism in South Tyrol

by Jamie Green, July 20th 2019

It’s hard to think of two people with more different backgrounds than Sebastiano Vassalli and Alexander Langer. The former was an Italian-speaking novelist from northern Italy who had yet to visit South Tyrol before he travelled to the province to research Sangue e suolo in the mid-1980s. The latter was a political campaigner who, although he spoke fluent Italian, grew up in a German-speaking household in South Tyrol.

Despite their differing backgrounds, both showed a dissatisfaction with the status quo in South Tyrol. It was for this reason that I used Langer and Vassalli as the foundation for my first thesis chapter, which focused on the debate around cultural identity in South Tyrol from 1972 (the year of the Second Autonomy Statute on which much of South Tyrolean society has been based) to the present day. Read more... >>>>