A Primer on the Autonomy of South Tyrol: History, Law, Politics

In 2021, the total resident population of Italy amounted to 59 million (ISTAT 2021). Standard Italian is the official language—though not mentioned in the Italian Constitution (IC)—and the mother tongue of more than 90% of the population. Minority languages (and local dialects) also play a key role in subnational community life. In some parts, they are the basis of language regimes at the regional and local level (as a response to Article 6 IC that prescribes the safeguarding of linguistic minorities by means of specific measures). The degree of protection ranges from a weak protection granted by ordinary legislation through a formal decision at the municipal level (by means of the ordinary national Law no. 482/1999) to a strong protection enshrined in some of the special regions’ statutes that, unlike those of ordinary regions, have constitutional rank. Strong protective regimes in part come in the form of a multilingual public sphere that is applied to an entire region or to parts of a region’s local government system. So are the special statute regions Valle d’Aosta/Vallée d’Aoste and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol home, respectively, to French- and German-speaking minorities, whose languages are, although based on different models, officially recognized as equivalent to Italian within the respective peculiar political systems. In contrast, the Slovene minority in the region of Friuli Venezia Giulia enjoys a more localized protection within the regional asymmetric system of protection of linguistic minorities (Vidau 2013). Whether or not regional and local governments are sensitive to the issue of linguistic minorities and, more generally, to the valorization of linguistic plurality mainly depends on subnational contextual factors (Alber 2022). South Tyrol borders Austria and Switzerland and as of December 2020 has a population of 533,715 (ASTAT 2021). Almost one third of South Tyroleans live in urban areas—with 107,760 persons inhabiting the predominantly Italian-speaking capital of Bolzano/Bozen (Ibid.). According to the linguistic declaration at the last census in 2011, 69.41% are German, 26.06% Italian and 4.53% Ladin speakers (out of 453,272 valid linguistic declarations of affiliation). It is important to highlight that the linguistic declaration (or affiliation with one of the three official language groups in case one decides to declare himself or herself in the category of Other) is an institutional tool, and that the actual demography of South Tyrol is different, as demonstrated by the comparison of data from the census and from the most recent Linguistic Barometer conducted by the province’s statistical institute (ASTAT 2015).

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