Jillian Cavanaugh's book offers a sensitive and detailed portrait of the discordant ideologies and sentiments surrounding an Italian minority language, Bergamasco, and the past and present politics and aesthetics of its use and representation. The book examines the effects on language use of recent social changes, such as the progressive widening of the domains where Italian (not the standard, but a mixed and polyphonous Italian) is spoken, the contemporaneous formation of Europe and of separatist currents in the Italian nation-state, and the arrival of recent waves of immigration. This changing political and social scene, Cavanaugh shows, influences spoken Bergamasco and people's perceptions of the importance and means of its preservation. The author deploys the concept of a social aesthetic of language to underline the co-presence of cultural and emotional dimensions to its use, and their intersection with socioeconomic power on one side, and ideologies on the other. Thus, she situates her work at the boundary between a linguistics of contact and the study of verbal art.
The book becomes progressively more interesting, the analysis more nuanced and complex, as one reads it. Ch. 1 provides the reader a description of the city of Bergamo, Cavanaugh's fieldwork, and theoretical framework. In the second chapter she portrays everyday language use, revealing multiple and interconnected varieties of Bergamasco and Italian languages in everyday conversations. Such use is so varied and the mixing so continuous that it does not lend itself to a description in terms of separate codes, but rather as a continua.
In the third chapter, the author adds complexity to her portrait of the speakers by addressing gender. The Bergamasco language has a gender, she writes, that is masculine. Women are seen as “less feminine” or less desirable partners if they speak it. Until recently, they were not considered capable of producing Bergamasco poetry, which is considered not only the highest form of the language, but also its means of preservation. Even inside local institutions dedicated to the maintenance of Bergamasco, such as the Ducato di Piazza Pontida, women are kept in a subaltern role: those few who are members have never been elected to prestigious positions. At the same time, linguistic ideologies stressing the role of mothers as caregivers in language learning create both an expectation that they will teach their children Italian—the high status language of the future, of education and social success—and be responsible for preserving Bergamasco. As a consequence, women's speaking behavior is scrutinized not only in public interactions, but also, through the social sanction of the speaking habits of their children, in the privacy of their family life. The ironic result, argues Cavanaugh, is that women, caught in the impossibility of satisfying such opposite requirements, are enticed to abandon the language and, as socializers of the future generation, this furthers the possibility of loss of the language itself.
In the fourth chapter, Cavanaugh tackles more directly the aesthetic side of her argument. She looks at two of the main ways in which the preservation of the Bergamasco language is thought to happen: poetry and theater. In effect, Italy has a long history of seeing poetry as fundamental in language preservation. It is connected, I believe, to the importance and authority that written Italian receives: after all, Italian was itself a written language that has been imagined into use over almost two hundred years of nation-state formation. To a higher degree than elsewhere, in Italy, language is equated with poetic language. On the other hand, amateur theater functions to both enact the language and center it in the Bergamasco sense of the self. This form of theater is a common pastime for Italians in general. In Tuscany, for example, where I have myself studied amateur theater in the past, it attracts a large audience, filling plazas and community centers with hundreds of people at every performance. Cavanaugh's insight into the way such theater is given meaning also resonates with the similar importance it receives in Tuscany. Theater performances seem to be a preferential locus for the enactment of local and other social identities, and for the reflection on their past and future, as well as for the performance of often nostalgic views of the past.
The important analysis of the connection between ideologies about language, poetry, the aesthetic sense, and the invention of folklore and of the past itself, started with Ch. 4, is furthered in Ch. 5. This is dedicated to an analysis of the reinvention of the city itself, through architectural changes and through changes in the way the city center is lived. The “high city,” or medieval part of Bergamo, has gone, Cavanaugh tells us, through different historical phases. Starting from the nineteenth century it saw a progressive abandonment, as inhabitants relocated to the periphery. By the 1950s and 60s it was perceived as a place for poor people to live. Its destiny changed starting at the end of the 70s. Restored and cleaned up thanks to the work of architects deeply engaged with the preservation of Bergamasco heritage and language, it became the preferred location for the wealthy. However, its commercialization and touristification, which the author connects to its progressive imagination as the core of Bergamasco identity, is transforming the city into a museum. The absence of common-living structures—such as groceries—replaced by public administration and university buildings and tourist- and entertainment-oriented shops, is making it harder for people to live there. Cavanaugh draws a parallel between the fate of the city and that of the language: Bergamasco too has been imagined as fundamental to local identity, and for this reason a constructed image of it, crystallized in the past, has been taken to represent this identity. This in turn has pushed to the side the actual language(s) that people speak: the Bergamasco that lives is seen as impure and problematic. Such language, Cavanaugh underlines, is not lost, but has evolved to include varieties of Italian as a resource for expression. Purist views of Bergamasco, in the measure in which they shape local attempts at maintenance and revitalization, may actually accelerate the loss they are so readily mourning.
The final chapter broadens the analysis, which to this point has remained relatively restricted to the language and the place itself, to examine the larger Italian and European context. It considers the role of politics, in particular that of the Northern League party, in the attempts at language preservation. She considers how the actions and rhetoric of the separatist and anti-immigrant Northern League may “tint” any effort at preserving a distinct language and identity. People who do not recognize themselves in such a party, in an attempt to differentiate themselves from it, have begun to embrace a folkloric multiculturalism that proposes the Bergamasco as one of many cultural groups in the nation-state. Finally, Cavanaugh considers recent immigration to Italy and what it may mean in terms of preservation of the language. This last chapter thus raises several important issues and, in part, leaves the reader wishing that it had been expanded into other chapters. I hope that the author will develop these themes in future publications.
In addition to offering an important contribution to the study and understanding of language change and the issue of the survival of minority languages, this book has many other merits. It provides a notable contribution to an understanding of how poetry and theater are imagined as part of folklore by both those creating them and studying them. Verbal art is connected to its larger context of use, rather than being studied in isolation, underlining its wider social importance. Laudable is also the way in which the author avoids depicting the audience to verbal art itself as a homogenous block. Instead, this audience is presented as having different interests, tastes, and thus different ways of appreciating the performances themselves. Lastly, the book reveals a little known part of Italy, itself an area understudied by linguistic anthropologists, possibly because of an enduring belief, amply sustained by the nation-state hegemonic ideologies, that Italians simply speak Italian.
The book's writing style is engaging and at times moving. The author's respect and affection for the place and people is evident in her prose and entices the readers to want to know more about them. The involving portrait, the story-like quality of the examples, and the engagement with the most cutting-edge aspects of the study of language, make the book perfect for teaching to undergraduates. It would be appropriate, for example, in introducing a classroom to a critical review of models of language and speech communities, and to new concepts in the study of communities of practice and contact linguistics. At the same time, the relative absence of jargon and the fundamentally ethnographic style, which creates a vivid portrait of a society and culture, make this book an interesting read for cultural anthropologists. The book should be a recommended reading for folklorists as well, and it is my hope that it will be eventually translated into Italian.
