Regional language

Regional language - a language whose official status is enshrined in the legislation of one or more administrative and territorial entities : federal districts , provinces , territories, states , municipalities , regions , villages, or other administratively established regions of the state, along with the official / official language that operates in the territory the whole state. An example is German as a regional language in the province of South Tyrol, Italy. The very concept of “regional language” presents certain difficulties for politicians and linguists, especially in the case of the distribution of closely related languages, when it is difficult to distinguish between the concept of language and dialect . A similar situation is observed in China, France, Romance countries, in the South Slavic and partly German regions.

Content

International law

European Charter for Regional Languages and National Minorities:

“Regional and small languages” must meet the following criteria:

traditionally used in a certain territory by citizens of a given state who are a national minority in the territory of that state; and
have significant differences from the official / state language

Regional language status: problems and contradictions

The recognition of regional languages often rests on demographic, linguistic and political-economic problems. For example, Catalan is the only official language in the small state of Andorra , where 30% of the 85,000th population is considered native. Moreover, in the autonomous region of Catalonia (Kingdom of Spain ), where the bulk of its population is 5 million, he first received a regional and now official status along with the Spanish language, with which the Catalan competes quite successfully due to the economic power of Catalonia compared to the rest of Spain. Moreover, in the neighboring regions of southern France, he is no longer able to compete with the French language, and in fact is on the verge of extinction, like the Provencal dialects close to him.

The situation in the Baltic region is no less complicated. So, in Sweden, the Finnish language (more precisely, its non-standard northern dialect) is recognized as regional in the far north of the country, while the majority of native speakers (mainly immigrants of the 20th century from Finland) live in the south of the country. Moreover, in Finland itself, Swedish tradition has long been considered one of the two official languages of the state, formally equalized in rights with Finnish - in memory of the times when it was the only official language of the country. Now, however, it is native to 290 thousand Finns (5.6% of the population) and has actually become a regional language a long time ago.

In neighboring Estonia, the Russian language is native to 33% of the population, including 97% of the population of Narva , but it does not have any status. Some regional languages, such as the Cantonese / South China language (including Hong Kong ), have over 60 million speakers in Guangdong alone, which roughly corresponds to the population of the Republic of France .

Linguistic kinship with the official language

In many cases, the status of a regional language is assigned in order to preserve peculiarities in regional dialects of the official language, to maintain linguistic diversity, at the insistence of the intelligentsia, in order to increase the tourist attractiveness or emphasize the cultural identity of the region. For example:

The Walloon language is the original, and now regional, Romance language on the territory of the states of France and Belgium ;
Gallo - the original, and now regional Romance language on the territory of the Brittany Peninsula, France; also typologically the oil language .
Provencal language of the south of France - typologically the language is approx .
Scottish - a regional language in the Kingdom of Scotland (part of the United Kingdom) belongs to the group of West Germanic languages, as well as English itself . At the same time, the Gaelic language , also having a regional status in Scotland, is the autochthonous Celtic dialect of the region, under the influence of which the Scottish language developed.
Miranda is the original, and now regional, Romance language in the Republic of Portugal ; evolved from the ancient Roman idiom of the kingdom of Leon .
Frisian language - a regional language in the Kingdom of the Netherlands and a number of islands of Germany
Võru dialect / language - regional language in the Republic of Estonia ; previously considered the most peculiar dialect of Estonian, 70 thousand speakers.
Cantonese is a regional language in Guangdong , China , which has practically lost its oral understanding with the Beijing dialect of putonghua .

In a number of other cases, the regional language is not closely related to the official one, for example:

The Basque language is a regional language in Spain and France does not belong not only that of the Romance, but does not even belong to the family of Indo-European languages .
Serboluzhitsky language is a regional Slavic language in Germany, the only surviving autochthonous area of Slavic speech, supplanted by the German language in the late Middle Ages.

Mixed Status

There are cases when the official language of one state is regional in the neighboring border regions of another state due to various historical reasons, for example:

German as a regional language in the province of South Tyrol , Italy ;
Hungarian as a regional language in the states of Romania and Slovakia , where it is recognized as regional in municipalities, where the proportion of Hungarians exceeds 20% of the population (the original bar of 10% has not been ratified in the parliament of the republic).
French in the officially English-speaking province of Ontario , Canada , where it is recognized as a regional language in municipalities with a concentration of French-Ontars in 10% or more (or 5,000 or more).
The Belarusian language is regional in a number of communes of the Podlaskie Voivodeship of Poland due to the large percentage of ethnic Belarusians (in the majority of those who are polished).