Realtà sociolinguistiche a confronto: Alto Adige e Tatarstan. Aspetti di politica linguistica e pianificazione educativa

The aim of this paper is to compare the two multilingual areas of Alto Adige in Italy and Tatarstan in the Russian Federation, which apparently show common bilingual features, but, according to the typological model of ‘linguistic situation’ (LS), proposed by M. A. Gorjačeva, present interesting elements of asymmetry. The analysis of these two case studies is based on such linguistic and extra linguistic parameters as the language repertoires of the population, the demographic and communicative potential (the number of speakers and communicative functions) of the involved languages and the possible variation of the LS, due to historical, political and economic changes in the area. The apparently common social bilingualism and official status of the titular languages, guaranteed de jure by local legislation, reveal different possibilities of implementation of the linguistic autonomy at the level of language policy and planning. People history, traditions and prestige of the involved languages can strongly affect the relations between the speakers. In both areas political and administrative measures were applied in order to introduce a balanced bilingualism in all spheres of public life, but these efforts have produced a kind of ‘separative’ bilingualism in Alto Adige and partial bilingualism in Tatarstan.