The paper will analyse the attempt to construct a new national identity in Northern Italy by the Lega Nord political party in the years ’90 and 2000. It will be shown how the mechanisms of finding out and establishing a diverse national commitment for an imagined ‘Nothern Italian nationality’ through a perceived language diversity mirrors parallel attempts (somewhat successful) conducted in the Habsburg Empire throughout the XIX century by now established national communities in Central Europe.
Gabriele Iannàccaro is a full professor of Linguistics at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He is director of the Centre d’Études Linguistiques pour l’Europe and responsible for a series of large-scale sociolinguistic surveys in a number European minority communities, sponsored by regional institutions and by the European Union. He is also coordinator of the Italian section of fp.7 project MIME (Mobility and Intagration in a Multilingual Europe).
His research interests are: Dialectology, Perceptual Linguistics, Theory of Language Planning, Sociolinguistics, Historical Indo-European Linguistics, languages of Central Asia and Siberia, writing systems theory.