La protecció de les minories lingüístiques al Tirol del Sud

Resum

South Tyrol, now the Italian province of Bolzano-Bozen, became an Italian territory in 1919 by virtue of the peace treaties signed after World War I. From 1919 to 1945, the use of German in public life was suppressed. Starting in 1945, international peace treaties obligated Italy to respect the language rights of the German minority. In 1948, the region's Special Statute, which only partially recognized the bilingual reality of South Tyrol, was passed. It wasn't until 1972 that a new Statute fully recognized the rights of the German-speaking minority. German was henceforth considered a language entitled to equal treatment in all spheres of public life. The Statute establishes a breakdown by ethnic groups based on the language affiliation of the citizenry. As of the 1991 census, 67.99 % were Germanspeakers, 27.65 % spoke Italian, and 4.36 % spoke Ladin (belonging to the Rhaeto-Roman subgroup of Romance languages). These percentages are the basis upon which quotas are stipulated for those jobs in the civil service that are subject to the proportionality system. They aid in determining the number of schools having one of the two languages as the language of general instruction. In the legal sphere, the German minority has been granted recognition of a broad spectrum of rights guaranteeing the use of German in every area of the justice system. Each citizen chooses the language he prefers and state government must adopt to this freely made choice. This system of language separation, which currently has been called into question, has, in effect, led to the existence of two separate life models (schools, newspapers, television), depending on the language.