Telling stories of the local natural world: A path of reconnection with language and place in the Emilian context

2.1 Emilian: A language that doesn’t know it wants to be saved

It is a well-known fact that the territory occupied by Ancient Rome was vast and covered most of modern Europe, stretching to northern Africa and the Middle East. Latin was the official language of Rome and its occupied territories which co-existed to some degree with the local languages. Very simply and briefly put, this co-existence allowed for regional varieties of vulgar Latin to emerge in the Middle Ages which further developed into modern Romance languages (e.g. Ledgeway 2012). Five of these Romance languages have become some of the most researched and widely spoken tongues; these are French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. Others have either undergone or are currently undergoing a process of shift – and are consequently dying out – in part due to language policies both at the national and grassroot levels that have privileged the national standards at the expense of multilingualism.

This is also the case for Emilian, the language family chosen for purposes of both analysis and discussion in this paper. Emilian and its sisters are commonly referred to as dialects: a label that is also frequently used in academic literature (e.g. Maiden and Parry 1997). As explained, these so-called dialects of Italy are Italo-Romance varieties and languages in their own right. Due to the counterintuitive labeling of these languages, it is necessary to make a distinction between “primary Romance dialects” and “secondary dialects” (Loporcaro 2009: 5); in the Italian context, the former refers to its historical Italo-Romance languages, such as Emilian and Sicilian, and the latter to the regional varieties of Italian spoken throughout the country. Compare for example these translations of Are you taking out the rubbish? in Emilian, Regional Italian, and Standard Italian, respectively: Pórt-et fòra al røsc?, Porti fuori il rusco?, and Porti fuori l’immondizia? – where rusco is the local lexeme for waste equivalent to Standard Italian immondizia and thus an instance of diatopic variation (Berruto 1995).^[2]

In terms of its vitality, the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger (Moseley 2010) states that Emilian is “definitely endangered” due to the shift to Italian, the national language (for more on how this shift was initiated and its current effects, see Benincà et al. 2016; D’Agostino 2007; Foresti 2010). Not only is this language family endangered and therefore in urgent need of strategies for its maintenance and revitalization, but it is also under-researched and under-documented. Indeed, while other dialects of northern Italy, such as Friulian, Venetan, and Lombard are often used for analyses of various linguistic nature in textbooks and scientific articles, Emilian varieties appear less frequently.

This is further highlighted in Hajek (1997) who warns that a survey for Emilian does not yet exist; at the time of writing 25 years have passed but the situation is still the same. The socio-political history of Emilia Romagna together with its geography has meant that unlike other dialects of northern Italy, Emilian does not have a koine while its continuum is fairly fragmented (Foresti 2010).

The dialectal fragmentation of Emilian can be analyzed as both a symptom and a cause of its current vitality. It is a symptom because of an outcome of the sociohistorical and ideological processes just discussed. The fragmentation is a symptom of the recent idea of nation and how in western culture this should correspond to one language (see ‘nationalist model’ in Geeraerts 2003). It is also a cause, however. The fragmentation of Emilian as a language family is also historically reflected in terms of the sense of identity and belonging of its community members. Indeed, instead of identifying with an identity at the regional level (i.e. modern Emilia), the sense of belonging was and arguably still is at the micro-level (i.e. provinces, towns, and villages). I contend that this lack of macro identity has facilitated the process of language shift and – what I call – language erasure. Borrowing from Stibbe’s (2021) definition of erasure, I refer to language erasure as the socio-historical process of ideological nature which culminated in the current state of affairs of Emilian.

In a country where the act of colonialization occurred from the inside, at the hands of internal forces and of very closely related ethnicity, a process of standardization of language and administration can arguably take place with less resistance. This is in line with Toso (2008) who states that self-confidence in a speaker and their willingness to revendicate the language is central to changes in language policy for minoritized languages. For a speaker to feel confident and to want to reclaim a space for the language in society requires awareness: being aware that the idiom is indeed a language and that they are a speaker of said language. This is not the case for most speakers of Emilian. After decades of ideological propaganda pushing for the use of Italian over the ‘dialects’, many now believe that these regional languages are a bad version of Italian and therefore nothing worth revendicating. Paraphrasing Busch (2021: 101), this process is a clear example of how “language policy is a practical application of language ideology” – in other words, this is the result of the speakers’ internalized view of language consolidated through language ideology. Not only was the discursive move effective in convincing people to abandon the use of Emilian but it also removed the language from their consciousness thus inflicting the coup de grâce on the future of the language. After all, you cannot lose what you never had or what you never knew you had.

As an endangered language, Emilian would be an ideal candidate for language documentation. As argued by Jones and Ogilvie (2013: xiii), language documentation can serve a dual scope: one of pragmatic nature, that is, to provide practical support to the language and its community (i.e. materials, grammars, dictionaries – all part of a standardized approach to language), and one of symbolic nature. The tangible act of creating all these resources is also symbolic as it makes the language exist in the social world. This, in turn, can bolster the speaker’s sense of self-confidence mentioned by Toso (2008) while also “fostering a sense of unified identity […] [and] even a partial means of repackaging a hitherto stigmatized identity, as speakers see their ancestral language being used in modern domains” (Jones and Ogilvie 2013: xiii). Although this would be a very beneficial and even desired outcome for Emilian, I would argue that first a fundamental step must be taken to raise awareness in the speech community.

Before the identity of the community can be unified and reinforced through the means of language maintenance and revitalization efforts, the connection between language and identity must be reinstated (O’Rourke 2005). To revitalize Emilian, it is necessary that the act of speaking Emilian be restored in the identity-building strategies (e.g. Borland 2005) of community members as a resource to index their membership to the community. As emphasized by Toso (2008: 25), speaking the ancestral language and identifying at such a micro level is not in opposition to thinking of oneself as outward thinking, identifying as a global citizen, or speaking the national language and other major languages. Instead, they can coexist as different but connected layers of the same identity. It is therefore critical that when planning awareness strategies for Emilian these should use a language that fosters positive attitudes towards a multilingual, multifaceted, multicultural (cf. ‘superdiverse’ in Arnaut et al. 2015) identity of the community. As I will explain in more detail in Section 2.2, concepts of empathy and solidarity are paramount in the creation of a more inclusive society and local community, too.

Before I move on to discuss the specific strategy of language maintenance and revitalization that I argue in favor of in this paper, there is a further fundamental aspect of identity that I must address. So far, I have discussed identity about language and membership groups (i.e. the speech community) through the lens of belonging and indexicality. In this sense, belonging is conceptualized in its societal form but belonging can and arguably is at its core a relationship of physical nature. We are born in a physical world and live our lives permanently and inextricably immersed in a physical environment. We are not just part of that physical environment, but we are – as in our presence constitutes part of – the physical environment. Just like the wind, we too can be heard, seen in the same way as we notice droplets of dew resting on a strand of grass on a crisp morning, smelt, touched, and tasted like nectar to a honeybee. We can call the physical environment within which we live a space (Massey 1994) and the relationships that we build with space both at the individual and collective level can be referred to as places (Bachelard 1961).

Place and space are deeply rooted in our sense of belonging, for example as understood in the idea of the dweller in Heidegger (1977), and subsequently of our identity, too. When prompted about our origins and the place we call home, for example, we often think of it in terms of nations, cities, streets, and neighborhoods. Our identity can however be more deeply seated as one which has “a sense of connection to some part of the nonhuman natural environment that affects the way we perceive and acts toward the world; a belief that the environment is important to us and an important part of who we are” (Clayton 2003: 45–46). While this kind of connection is not necessarily true for everyone, it is arguably a desirable goal given the urgency of our times in slowing down the effects of climate change.

I would even go as far as speculating that it is no coincidence that the erasure of Emilian (a language historically spoken by farmers and less educated people) occurred at the same time as our distancing with the more-than-human world unfolded. An example of how language erasure can go hand in hand with the erasure of nature. Because of this urgency and the rootedness of local ecological knowledge in endangered languages (Stibbe 2021), I argue that planning for language maintenance and revitalization efforts should take into consideration aspects of the local natural environment to foster reconnection in the community with both language and place. Due to the state of Emilian as an endangered, understudied, and under-documented language with a fragmented identity, this language was selected to exemplify the proposition put forward in this paper. In line with this, in the following section, I describe how ecolinguistics can help inform better strategies for language maintenance and revitalization and later offer an analysis of some ecopoems in Emilian to illustrate its application.

2.2 Ecolinguistics as a practical tool for language revitalization

So far, I have presented the case of Emilian as an endangered language family that requires both academic and public attention to be revitalized. In previous sections, the issue of endangerment is discussed as one which is deeply entangled in the erasure of the language from the memory and consciousness of the community as well as the loss of a connection with the natural world. A collective effort to create a documentation of Emilian that not only satisfies linguistic and cultural aspects of the community but also accounts for its ecological knowledge is advocated. Documentation can however run the risk of laying in silence and collecting dust as artifacts in a museum. Instead, these archives should be used to create materials for language revitalization that consider the needs of the community as well as the kind of specific audience they are targeted for (see Hinton 2011 for examples of different ways languages can be revitalized). In this instance, I look at Emilian poems about the local natural world and analyze specific linguistic patterns using Stibbe’s (2021) ecolinguistics framework. This wishes to serve as an example of how to conduct ecolinguistics analyses on texts of minoritized and endangered languages so that both the language and its ecological knowledge are disseminated in academia. More importantly, however, is the exemplification of how the identification process for beneficial texts can be used for strategies of language revitalization – the outcome of which would hopefully be the creation of materials to be used in the community of the target language through acts of outreach.

As Stibbe (2021: 9) puts it, ecolinguistics is whatever branch of linguistics whose inquiry has to do with “the role of language in the life-sustaining interactions of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment”. Specifically, “[e]colinguistics […] is about critiquing forms of language that contribute to ecological destruction and aiding in the search for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world” (Stibbe 2021: 1). While the first half of the scope of ecolinguistics would be equally as beneficial to the cause of language revitalization, in this paper I focus on language uses that can inspire members of the Emilian speech community to reconnect with the local natural space.

As set out in previous sections, this analysis is not meant as an elaborated overview of the beneficial representations of the natural world in Emilian poems. Its purpose is purely demonstrative in providing an example of the practical application of the ideas proposed. For this reason, the analysis is not comprehensive but, if interested in exploring how a more detailed analysis can be achieved, the reader is invited to consult Stibbe (2021). Instead, in this paper, I deploy a reverse approach to the usual way of using analyses as it seeks to illustrate how my argument applies to the real world. Here then the analysis works in two ways by doing, in the traditional sense, as they show us the how (through language documentation and revitalization), as well as doing in a speech act theory way (Austin 1962) – through ecolinguistics. In this latter sense, they offer new ways of thinking about our local environment, and they allow us to reimagine our collective identity at the local level. This is where the two combined can serve as a path of reconnection to both the local language and the local more-than-human world – to save and care for both.

In referring to the idea of speaking Emilian as a practice that has to do with the collective identity of its speakers, I am pointing to a posthumanist conception of language. Instead of taking languages as a central component of communication, the focus is on our wider environment, which includes both material and abstract objects, as a source of “semiotic possibilities” (Pennycook 2018: 455). This allows us to truly account for the interconnection between all things living, and to look at human language as a part of the natural world and communication as a process emerging from it. Fundamentally this ecological shift is to do away with the exceptionalism of the human condition that separates us from our environment and instead embraces our togetherness in and with the natural world. In the field of sociolinguistics, Pennycook (2018: 450) describes repertoires as entities that should be “understood in terms of spatial distribution, social practices, and material embodiment rather than the individual competence of the sociolinguistic actor who has held center stage over the past few decades”. Again, this is to recognize the collectiveness of our human experience and that our learning also takes place in the physical world rather than solely in our mind (Pennycook 2018: 450). Our environment – whether it be digital or in the real world – dictates what we can and cannot do in our communicative experiences; it provides the tools necessary for our interactions to be meaningful. In this sense repertoires are spatial and our identity is an endeavor of collective (in its broadest sense) nature.

It is in the very concept of collectiveness that a way forward in how to bring about tangible change in the current situation of Emilian and other similar speech communities can be found. Arguably the foundations of togetherness are empathy and solidarity. These values have been recently attracting attention in studies of second language acquisition whereby empathy was observed to enhance a learner’s pronunciation skills (Dewaele and Li 2012; Ożańska-Ponikwia and Dewaele 2012; Rota and Reiterer 2009). An elusive term that captures a complex interpersonal feeling, empathy can be defined as “the ability ‘imaginatively’ to enter into and participate in the world of the cultural Other cognitively, affectively, and behaviorally” (Calloway-Thomas 2010: 8). Crucially, Calloway-Thomas (2010: 7) argues that empathy has “the potential to alter what we do interculturally”.

This is in line with the notion of stories – “cognitive structures in the minds of individuals which influence how they think, talk and act” (Stibbe 2021: 6). When these models are prevalent in the collective mind of a culture, they become stories we live by (Stibbe 2021: 6). This, therefore, presents an opportunity to change attitudes around Emilian in a positive way by leveraging on feelings that are inherently valuable rather than approaching it from a negative angle. In practice, the scope is to foster values of empathy and solidarity towards Emilian by exposing the community to new ideas of what it means to be a speaker of Emilian with a focus on commonalities (Mercer 2016): a shared history, an ancestral ecological knowledge, a rediscovered appreciation of the local nature through a new tool in the spatial repertoire of the community. This, to me, seems to be both a practically and morally desirable path of reconnection for Emilian. It is practically beneficial because a more efficient way of changing language attitudes and language use compared to, for example, the targeting of pedagogies in schools (as discussed in Ferrer and Sankoff 2004). It is also morally favorable as it encourages the creation of communities centered around solidarity, empathy, and compassion for one another – humans and more-than-human alike.

3.1 Data selection

For my analyses, I selected five poems from two separate publications. The first is an edited volume titled Poesî long’-a Panêra (‘Poems along the Panaro’)^[3] which is dated 1968 and was compiled specifically for the 98th fair of San Giovanni in Spilamberto (Modena). The volume comprises forty-five poems in the local varieties of Emilian which were written by 18 men and one woman. Two poems were selected from this volume, and these are La Vanga (‘The Spade’) by Ugo Roli, and Meravii dla Natura (‘Wonders of Nature’) by Battista Rompianesi. Roli was born in Vignola where he lived until his death and where he worked as a lawyer. He was a well-known poet of dialectal poetry in the area whose main theme was nostalgia and melancholy. A former railway worker from Sassuolo, Rompianesi was of similar age to Roli and a fellow dialectal poet whose creative writing in Emilian earned him recognition and several awards. Both Roli’s and Rompianesi’s varieties are from the outskirts of Modena and can therefore be classified from a regional perspective both as eastern (based on Pellegrini’s classification in Loporcaro 2009: 105) and southern (Hajek 1997: 271). At a more local level, the two varieties can also be classified as urban (as opposed to the northern “Bassa” grouping and the Apennine set of varieties, south) for their proximity to the city of Modena (Cevolani 2011).

The second publication is titled Àqua de Mé Cantér (‘Water of My Cantiere’)^[4] and was written by Antonio Mazzieri in 1974. As stated in the preface, the book pays homage to Mazzieri’s Lama variety of Emilian as a gesture of love towards his land. Interestingly, Mazzieri’s preface also mentions the poems as a contribution towards the documentation of the variety spoken in Lama Mocogno. Lama is a town that sits high up in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines and is, therefore, an Apennine variety of Modenese. Three poems have been taken from Mazzieri’s publication and these are Àqua de Mé Cantér (‘Water of My Cantiere’), E A Vrée (‘And I Wish’), and Guardand al Mée Muntàgn (‘Looking at My Mountains’). For ease of reading, the analysis in Section 4 will be based on the paraphrasing of the English translation.^[5]

Modenese is a language group with no standardized writing system, and this is evidenced by the discrepancies and inconsistencies in the way authors (both among authors and within the same author) replicate their varieties in writing. Texts and authors’ choices are loyally reproduced in this paper as a way to lift the morale ban on writing ‘badly’ and to recognize the freedom speakers should be afforded when writing in a historically minoritized language whose fragmentation and lack of a standard can often inhibit the process of communication – whether creative or not.

The process of selecting poems was one of conscious and purposeful nature. I wanted to find poems that touched upon the relationship between the author and their local natural environment and did so in a positive way. Positive stories of what it means to belong to the natural world in and around the area where Lama, Vignola, and Sassuolo sit. Stories that are unique to the special characteristics of each area – unique enough to allow for a sense of belonging to be recognizable to an insider and unrecognizable to others – but also universal and widely identifiable in their candid portrayal of the intrinsic value of nature. To use the term positive in describing this kind of story is to refer to a specific stance: my stance, my vision of what works to fix the issue at hand, or more precisely my ecosophy (Stibbe 2021: 10). In other words, my idea of what a good example of an alternative story to the hegemonic conceptualization of belonging (e.g. nationalistic, monolingual, competitive, individualistic) is what informed the selection process. I looked for examples of collectiveness, compassion, empathy, and simplicity.

These are the values that I wish to tap on through my analysis and that I would hope to see in materials for revitalization efforts so that local identity can be reshaped in unison with a reconnection with the local natural space. As these concepts are expressed at the lexical/phrasal level, in the analysis I show the Emilian original excerpts with their literal translation while omitting the glossing for reasons of space.

3.2 Theoretical framework and research questions

Following Stibbe’s (2021: 16) framework, the excerpts are analyzed and discussed according to the kind of story that they convey; these are ideology, framing, metaphor, evaluations, identity, conviction, erasure, and salience. These also form the linguistic theory employed as part of the analyses. I do not, however, analyze language patterns to reveal the underlying stories and judge them based on my ecosophy as described in Stibbe (2021: 11). Instead, I used my ecosophy to identify suitable poems at the level of perception, to then apply ecolinguistics to answer the following questions: (1) what kind of beneficial story do they convey? (2) what features in the language are at play? This is to show the practical application of ecolinguistics to real-world issues such as language revitalization in the hope that it may be used more widely and with intent when creating relevant materials. My ecosophy can be summarized in one word compassion. Anything that fosters a sense of compassion among all living beings is something that I cherish and see as necessary to change the stories we live by. Compassion to oneself, to our loved ones and those we like less: compassion for those we do not yet know, for the birds, the plants, the tress, and the rivers – compassion for all of those with whom we share a life on this beautiful planet.

I make no efforts to conceal the nature of my analysis as both political and involved in activities of social change: quite the opposite. While the act of analyzing texts to reveal ideological discursive practices which contribute to social inequality can sit within a critical discourse analysis framework, I intend to be proactive rather than deconstructive. In other words, my contribution responds directly to Martin’s (2007) call to use our academic voice as a form of intervention. In this sense, the ecolinguistic work presented in this paper is closer to positive discourse analysis (Martin 2004) in approach. As Bartlett (2018: 138) explains, “ecolinguistics and PDA are distinct from CDA not so much in their mode of analysis but in terms of their practical application: the raising of critical awareness of hidden ideologies in the case of CDA and, for PDA/ecolinguistics, the promotion of positive texts”.

Bartlett (2018) also argues in favor of an approach that goes beyond the promotion of benevolent stories by analyzing both hegemonic discourses and existing counter-discourses. He refers to this approach as a post-foundational stance that seeks to foster dialectical self-reflexivity in the analyst so that context and its vulnerability may be accounted for when exposing destructive discourse (see also Chen et al. 2021a). The scope of this paper is very practical insofar that it wishes to offer examples of language revitalization materials that serve the goal of encouraging more people to use the language and also inspire them to love and protect their local natural environment. It follows that although I agree in principle with Bartlett’s (2018) approach, my focus is on the practical application of ecolinguistics and therefore does not require an extension of the analysis on the grounding.