engleski

A Myth of a Regional Identity - Conflicting Ideologies and Language Attitudes in Istria, Croatia

This paper discusses the effects of ideologies and language attitudes in the construction of group identities and boundaries in the multilingual region of Istria in Croatia. It aims at explaining this association as contingent of transformations in the political and economic conditions of discursive production emerging within the power relations and ideologies in circulation at regional, national and supranational levels. The analysis is based on a comprehensive empirical survey of language attitudes including data on linguistic categorizations and linguistic practices of self–making and “othering” within the region from the respondents in Istria. It demonstrates that the emerging regional identity is characterized linguistically by persistence of the regional codes (Croatian and Italian varieties) and bilingual practices, and by resistance against hegemony and symbolic domination of the standard language. At the same time, this imagined regional identity based on shared economic concerns and rejection of elite nationalist politics is localized, personalized, and conceived in terms of the emotional appeal of autochthony. These claims of autochthony seek to establish a primordial right to belong to Istria and emphasize the paradoxical outcome that, while subverting the official nationalist ideology through vernacular understandings and multilingual practices, in doing so regional identities simultaneously create new borders shaped by the same exclusionary discourses.

anthropology; language attitudes; language ideologies; group identities; the Region of Istria

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