La lingua che non si è persa (The language that survived)
QCER B2335 parole
For most of the twentieth century, the children of Miranda do Douro, in the north-east of Portugal, were taught that the language spoken at home was not a language. It was, they were told, a way of speaking badly. Teachers corrected it. Officials ignored it. Families who moved to the cities stopped using it within a generation, and many did so deliberately, because they wanted their children to be taken seriously.
The language is Mirandese, and it is not a dialect of Portuguese. It belongs to a different branch of the family, closer to the languages of the neighbouring Spanish region, and it has been spoken in that corner of the country for something like eight hundred years. In 1999 the Portuguese parliament finally recognised it: since then, Portugal has had two official languages, not one.
Recognition, however, is not the same as survival. A language does not live in a law; it lives in the number of people who use it to complain about the weather. Most fluent speakers of Mirandese today are old, and the young people who learn it at school do not always find anyone under sixty to practise with.
What has changed is the shame. A woman who is now seventy told a researcher that she had spent her whole working life in Lisbon hiding the way she spoke, and that her grandchildren now ask her to teach them words. She said this without any bitterness, but she also said something harder: that the words she remembers are the words of a farm, and that nobody has yet invented the Mirandese for the things her grandchildren do all day.
That is the real question for any small language, and it is not answered by parliaments. A language survives if it can name the present. Whether Mirandese will be used to argue about football, to fall in love or to write bad poetry in fifty years is not a matter of laws or of pride. It depends on whether anybody bothers.
Parole che forse non conosci
- deliberatelydi proposito
- branch (of a family)ramo
- to recognisericonoscere
- fluent speakerparlante fluente
- shamevergogna
- bitternessamarezza
- to botherprendersi la briga
Domande
Si risponde con il testo davanti. Non è memoria: è capire.
What were children in Miranda do Douro taught about their home language?
That it was not a real language, only bad speech — A way of speaking badly. Gli insegnanti lo correggevano e l'amministrazione lo ignorava.
The Portuguese parliament recognised Mirandese in ___.
1999 — In 1999. Da allora il Portogallo ha due lingue ufficiali, non una.
According to the text, Mirandese is a dialect of Portuguese.
False — Falso, e il testo lo nega apertamente: appartiene a un altro ramo della famiglia e si parla lì da circa ottocento anni.
What does the writer mean by 'a language lives in the number of people who use it to complain about the weather'?
That a language survives through ordinary daily use, not through official status — La frase viene subito dopo «una lingua non vive in una legge». Lamentarsi del tempo è l'esempio più banale possibile di uso quotidiano, ed è per questo che funziona.
What is the harder thing that the seventy-year-old woman says?
That her language has no words for her grandchildren's daily life — Lo dice senza amarezza e per questo pesa di più: le parole che ricorda sono quelle della campagna, e nessuno ha ancora inventato il mirandese di ciò che i nipoti fanno tutto il giorno.
What is the writer's conclusion about the future of small languages?
That it depends on whether people actually use them for everyday life — L'ultimo paragrafo scarta le due risposte facili: né leggi né orgoglio. Discutere di calcio, innamorarsi o scrivere brutta poesia è ciò che decide, e finisce con «se qualcuno si prende la briga».