Silvia Marchetti - South Tyrol identity crisis: to live in Italy, but feel Austrian

By Dilip -

They're Italian citizens but simply don't feel Italian. Bolzano's local authorities estimate that German is spoken by 75% of the 510,000 inhabitants of the Alto Adige region. Locals, however, call it by its original name – South Tyrol – and many wish it were independent. Eva Klotz is a co-founder of the separatist party Süd-Tiroler Freiheit (South Tyrolean Freedom). She carries a yellow card in her wallet that says "German is my mother tongue".


Photograph: Getty

Klotz says: "There are acts of racism each single day. Despite Italian and German both being official languages, I often bump into police officers who don't know German. They point at the Italian flag stitched on their uniform and require I speak Italian simply because we're in Italy. They don't even know that I have the right to speak in my mother tongue so I show them this card. It drives me mad. I call this linguistic imperialism."…

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/30/south-tyrol-live-in-italy-feel-austrian

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