La guerra della e della a Luserna: il valore iconico dell’ortografia nel processo di standardizzazione di una varietà alloglotta germanica in Italia

In the last decades one of the most widespread language policies which are generally meant to halt the decline of regional languages and small minority varieties has been the development of a nor-mative orthography as well as the drawing up of descriptive grammars and dictionaries (see Iannac-caro/Dell’Aquila 2002 and Dell’Aquila/Iannaccaro 2004 among others). Such a process of standard-ization has been also implemented for the three minority languages spoken in the Province of Trento in Northern Italy; firstly for the Ladin variety of the Fassa Valley (see Chiocchetti 1992) and more recently for the two German(ic) languages spoken in this area: Mòcheno in the Fersina Valley (Rowley 2003) and Cimbrian in the small enclave of Lusérn (Panieri et al 2006). As is the case with many unwritten languages or varieties with a limited written tradition, the adoption of a normative orthography in 2006 has provoked a controversial debate in Lusérn. In my contribution, I expound first the orthography adopted for the Cimbrian of Lusérn discussing the “reasons of the experts”, i.e. the graphemic choices and their linguistic justification as well as some inconsistencies. Secondly, I seek to examine the orthographic rule from the perspective of the users, above all, pointing out their tacit orthography systems. As a matter of fact, three orthographic traditions have been coexisting in Lusérn: a German, an Italian and an autochthonous one. These traditions implicitly influence the writing of Cimbrian and clash with the reason of linguistics resulting in rejection of the standardiza-tion proposed by the experts.