Page 223 - Manj razširjeni evropski jeziki in jezikovne politike

Summary

peninsulainCroatia,isoneofthedisappearingEuropeanmicro-languages,
like its neighbour Istro-Romanian or for instance the Algherese variant
of Catalan in Sardinia, or else Slavomolisano, the variety of Croatian still
maintained in the Italian region of Molise.
A longer chapter in our work deals with the current issues of the linguis-
tic area of Serbo-Croatian, the language which is no longer officially called
inthismanner:wediscussthephenomenonofpolycentrism/pluricentrism
and how Serbo-Croatian has partly survived as a linguafranca, as well as the
problem of the status of Bosnian and Montenegrin in Bosnia and Herze-
govina and Montenegro, respectively.
Another particularity included in our study is the situation of Jersey
Legal French, the second official language, alongside English, of the Baili-
wick of Jersey, a British Crown Dependency. The uniqueness of this micro-
languageliesinkeepingitsarchaicimageandstructure,baseduponMiddle
French brought to the British Isles during the period of the Norman Con-
quest, i.e. in the 11th century. The use of this language is currently limited
to the domains of law and administration.
The process of dying out of Gottschee German/Gottscheerish, the Ger-
man dialect in the vicinity of Kočevje, i.e. in the Dolenjsko region of the Re-
public of Slovenia, is illustrated, but also the status of German oases in the
Carnia area and the Canal Valley, it. Val Canale, both in the Autonomous
Region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia in northern Italy.
Considering the low number of speakers and limited use in general, it
is justifiable to classify among European less commonly spoken languages
the so-called artificial or constructed international auxiliary languages, or
planned languages. The situations of Esperanto, Slovio and Interslavic are
depicted in this work as examples of such artificially created codes which
were meant to become connecting systems of communication between na-
tive speakers of different languages, while the main purpose of the ideo-
logical leaders of this type of linguistic experiment was especially that of
trying to equalise the mutual position of co-speakers in the interaction re-
gardless of their citizenship and mother tongue.
The struggle for the recognition of the official statuses of over 40 Eu-
ropean sign languages, a notoriously outstanding range of languages, not
merely within individual European countries, but also at the international
level, represents a new demanding challenge for today’s Europe. These
languagesmay,in their turn,be definedas a sub-groupof the European
less widely spoken languages. Certain countries, e.g. Finland, Portugal and
Austria, found immediate solutions, adding sign languages in their consti-

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